At the press conference on the operation of the national economy held in January 2022, the relevant person in charge of the National Bureau of Statistics said that by the end of 2021, China's flexible employment had reached 200 million, which attracted the attention of all sectors of society. Flexible employment has become one of the important ways for Chinese workers to achieve employment. This year, the number of new college graduates reached a new high, and the pressure to stabilize employment increased significantly. Under this situation, this paper explores the current situation, challenges and policy guarantee methods of flexible employment groups outside China.
Current situation: among the major economies, the proportion of flexible employment in employment in China may not be high. In terms of the proportion of temporary employment, China should be significantly lower than that of developed countries such as Japan, Spain and France, and further lower than that of developing countries such as Mexico, Chile and the Philippines. Globally, female workers and young groups are more employed through flexible employment, and flexible employees are more concentrated in construction, transportation, catering and other industries, as is the case in China. From the survey results, nearly 80% of Chinese flexible employees have a high school degree or above, and 21.73% of them have a bachelor's degree or above.
Trend: since 2000, the proportion of global flexible employment in total employment has been increasing. Whether in European countries, or in Japan and South Korea in Asia, the proportion of flexible employment has increased significantly in recent years. The steady increase in the number and proportion of urban individual employees in China also shows that flexible employment is developing in China. We believe that economic globalization and intensified competition, the transformation of economic structure, the increase of female labor participation rate and the rise of platform / sharing economy are all important factors leading to the continuous growth of flexible employment. After the covid-19 outbreak, flexible workers have been greatly impacted, but we tend to think that this may be a short-term disturbance.
Challenge: there is a significant gap between flexible employees and regular employees in terms of social security, salary and promotion space. According to the survey data of China Flexible Employment Development Report (2022), the proportion of flexible employees who do not pay any insurance reaches 35.4%, while that of regular employees is only 4.5%. The research of Zhang Xiaoxin (2019) also shows that in China, the hourly wage of informal employees is significantly lower than that of formal employees, and the gap between the two is 32.1%. Even excluding the influence of endowment gap such as human capital, the gap between the two is still 12.5%.
Policy guarantee: since the 1980s, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and other countries have successively issued relevant policies to protect the rights and interests of flexible employees. It mainly includes: subsidies and assistance for flexible employees, protecting the legitimate rights and interests of flexible employees, improving the social security level of flexible employees, etc. In recent years, the Chinese government has paid more and more attention to the protection of the rights and interests of flexible employees, and local governments have also issued corresponding policies and measures in combination with their own conditions. Based on international experience, we believe that we should introduce corresponding policies for the social security payment and rights protection faced by flexible employees: 1) build a more flexible social security system; 2) Improve the legal protection of flexible employees and clarify the responsibility for protecting their rights and interests, especially the responsibilities and obligations of all parties in new forms of flexible employment such as Internet platform; 3) Strengthen the service function of the government in flexible employment.
