Rethinking Social Protection for the Platform Economy - Latin America, Asia and African policies
- Aditi Surie
- 2 days ago
- 1 min read
I moderated the FUTUREWORKS Collective webinar last week on social protection for platform workers, with researchers from Latin America, Africa, and across Asia. Social protection for platform workers sits at the centre of my research on platform labour and digital infrastructure in Indian cities — so a few hours with people doing serious fieldwork across very different regional contexts has a way of both clarifying and complicating things.
What struck me most:
The dominant policy mode everywhere is extending existing systems rather than designing new ones. Contributory schemes, welfare boards, self-employment acts. Reclassification is largely off the table.
But extending a floor is not the same as building redistributive protection. Most of what exists manages short-term risk. Long-term, transformative social protection — for income volatility, for health, for old age — remains out of reach for most platform workers.
And the financing question keeps surfacing the same tension: contributory models are hard to scale, state austerity is shrinking fiscal space, and platform workers are often competing with microcredit and family networks, not complementing them.
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