Abstract
At present, the lack of protection for the rights and interests of practitioners in new formats has become a common challenge for the governance of the global digital economy. Compared with the stable employment of workers and flexible employment in general, the employment relationship, working methods, working hours, work contents, and payment methods of new type of practitioners have undergone fundamental changes, which go beyond the traditional "dichotomy" of labor relations and have obvious characteristics of "de contracting" and "de employer". The unclear responsibility of employers makes it impossible to implement the payment subject, payment mechanism and the relevant treatment that should be borne by employers, which has brought great impact and challenges to their identification of labor relations and the way of participation in social security.In order to balance economic vitality and fairness and justice, governments are exploring differentiated governance paths. Singapore's parliament passed the platform workers act to establish the legal status of "class employees" and build the world's first security framework specifically for platform economy practitioners; Germany launched the act on the modernization of social security for part-time workers, the Netherlands piloted the "independent contractor pension plan", and Japan established the "consulting platform for casual economic workers". These practices have shown the evolution trend of "stricter supervision", "clear responsibility subject" and "diversified security methods", which provides an important reference frame for China to improve the new type of labor security system.
China's new forms of employment are in the leading position in the world in terms of scale, industry and format. According to the National Bureau of statistics and other public data, China's new form of employment has reached 84million workers, accounting for 21% of the total employed population, including about 15.08 million network anchors, about 11million take away riders, about 6million network taxi drivers, and about 4.5 million couriers. This special national condition determines that China must independently explore a labor security system that meets the needs of local practice. From February 2025, jd.com, meituan, and hungry, China's Internet platform enterprises, have issued announcements one after another, announcing that they will gradually pay social security for platform riders by classification. Jd.com announced that it would pay five insurances and one fund for more than 10000 full-time riders from March 1; Meituan announced that based on the existing flexible employment insurance policies of the country, it will launch the pilot of rider pension insurance in Quanzhou, Fujian Province and Nantong, Jiangsu Province in the first batch, and give pension insurance subsidies to qualified riders. Hungry Yao said it would continue to fully and actively respond to the unified deployment of the human resources and social security department, promote the coverage of "new job injury" insurance in more cities, and continue to increase the special subsidies for stable riders and expand the scope of subsidies. The collective action of the three head platforms has aroused widespread concern from all walks of life, and provided a paradigm reference of "hierarchical and Classified Governance" for solving the problem of labor rights and interests protection in China's new business.
Although the leading enterprises have made some progress in the practice of workers' rights and interests protection, China's new business operators still face many institutional governance difficulties, which are not only caused by the structural contradiction between the traditional social security system and flexible employment characteristics, but also related to multiple factors such as policy design, implementation mechanism and social cognition. The specific performance is as follows: the mandatory security is weak. Due to the vague labor relations, some part-time and flexible practitioners are unable to pay social security through their employers, need to bear all costs by themselves and lack of legal constraints; The current social security system is based on the traditional employment relationship. Flexible employees often fall into the dilemma of "no access to insurance" due to household registration restrictions, transfer and continuity barriers and poor access to commercial insurance; The lack of incentives for insurance, the lack of awareness of the long-term benefits of social security among practitioners, and the low willingness to participate in insurance due to factors such as large income fluctuations and heavy payment burden. These difficulties not only reflect the complexity of digital economic governance, but also provide a new research field for theoretical innovation and institutional improvement, and provide a practical footnote for the construction of a new labor security governance framework with Chinese characteristics. In this context, the systematic research on the innovation of new business social security system has important theoretical value and practical significance.
For the first time, this paper integrates the regulatory pillar, normative pillar and cognitive pillar of institutional theory into a systematic framework, which is applied to the field of social security system design for new type of workers, breaking through the limitations of "single system analysis" in traditional social security research. Traditional studies have mostly focused on a single dimension, such as the identification of labor relations and the optimization of payment mechanism. Based on the system theory, this paper proposes a trinity system design framework of regulatory, normative and cognitive social security, in which the regulatory social security system is a formal system, and the normative and cognitive social security systems are informal systems. From the perspective of the synergy of formal and informal systems, the social security system of new type of workers is reconstructed.
Among them, regulated social security refers to a social system that, under the management of the government and in accordance with certain laws and regulations, provides material assistance and services to protect people's lives through the redistribution of national income and relying on social security funds; The normative social security refers to the informal social security for the new type of practitioners under the management of the government by all sectors of society through various legal mechanisms, which reflects the value recognition of the social subject for the new type of practitioners; The cognitive social security system refers to that under the influence of the government and all sectors of society, the behavior subject spontaneously seeks social security and tries to obtain social or government help through various ways, reflecting the behavior subject's own value recognition of the concept of social security.
According to the current institutional difficulties faced by the practitioners of new business types in China, this paper attempts to build three institutional design frameworks: regulatory system - weak security compulsion, normative system - poor security welfare, cognitive system - insufficient awareness of insurance, in order to put forward a reasonable path of institutional design. In addition, in order to better solve the mechanism of different social security systems, this paper attempts to analyze from the perspective of institutional legitimacy, and puts forward three paths: regulatory social security system - regulatory legitimacy - social security satisfaction, regulatory social security system - regulatory legitimacy - social security satisfaction, cognitive social security system - cognitive legitimacy - social security satisfaction, based on which empirical analysis is carried out. The empirical results of the regulated social security system show that the platform liability insurance and platform accident insurance in the main liability have a positive impact on the social security satisfaction of the new business operators; Industrial injury insurance in occupational injury insurance has a positive impact on social security satisfaction of new type of practitioners. The empirical results of the normative social security system show that social welfare and social responsibility have a positive impact on the social security satisfaction of new business practitioners. The empirical results of the cognitive social security system show that the level of education has a positive impact on the social security satisfaction of new business practitioners, which is not in line with expectations; Professional experience and risk perception have a negative impact on the social security satisfaction of new business practitioners.
To solve the institutional dilemma, we need not only the systematic reconstruction of institutional design, but also the gradual transformation of social cognition. Therefore, this paper analyzes from the policy individual level, and puts forward systematic solutions, such as improving the legal and regulatory system, building a multi-level social support network, innovating the insurance incentive mechanism, giving full play to the complementary advantages of the system, establishing an intelligent regulatory system, and optimizing regional collaborative governance. It is hoped that through the research of this paper, 84million new business workers can obtain "temperature protection" in the algorithm system, and provide a solution path with Chinese characteristics and universal value for solving the global new business social security problem.
| Date of Award | 26 May 2025 |
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| Original language | Chinese (Simplified) |
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| Supervisor | Lin Cheng (Supervisor) & 席酉民 (Supervisor) |