Trade union federation SAK launched plans of its own to reform the country’s unemployment security system. Over the last years there have been many changes to the unemployment benefit system. This made it difficult for the unemployed to keep up with all the new rules and all these changes made the system more bureaucratic. The SAK wants the new government to drastically modernise the unemployment scheme so that it will meet the needs of workers in a changing labour market. In this respect a special point of concern for the SAK is the livelihood of workers in the gig economy. Currently the income of many workers in the gig economy relies on adjusted unemployment benefit that is paid on the basis of hours worked, even though there may be no way to monitor the working time of such workers. The SAK proposes to put an end to the working time monitoring and instead of this, create an income register system that provides automatic access to the information that is needed for unemployment benefits. Furthermore, the SAK plans include milder sanctions and more services to adequately support the unemployed.
Read on: in English ... The unemployment scheme: in Finnish ...
For more information, please contact the editor Jan Cremers or Sanne van der Gaag, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) cbn-aias@uva.nl or the Head of communications at the ETUI, Willy De Backer wdebacker@etui.org © ETUI