The economic and social crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic clearly highlighted the weaknesses of the current social protection system, particularly unemployment and precarious employment protection. The high proportion of unemployed people who, as a whole, are not covered by unemployment benefits and the very limited access to unemployment benefits aimed at supporting self-employed workers attest to this. "Secondary employment protection" in Portugal had clear weaknesses before the pandemic. The pandemic has exacerbated them.
To address some of the limitations of social protection mechanisms, since the beginning of the pandemic, the Government has adopted, on the one hand, a set of measures to directly and indirectly support the maintenance of employment levels, and on the other hand, extended the duration of unemployment benefits and also approved extraordinary measures to compensate for the reduction in income from work. Regarding this second set of measures – those directly related to the policy analyzed in this text – the fundamental objective was to guarantee the expansion of the Social Security system's coverage to vulnerable groups or to mitigate the risk of vulnerability.
As mentioned, this objective was implemented in March 2020 through the automatic extension of unemployment benefits until the end of 2020 and the introduction of extraordinary income loss support benefits for self-employed workers and members of company statutory bodies. The employment protection system, primarily designed to address the risk of unemployment for employed workers with sufficient contributions, had to be expanded to also respond to the risk of total or partial income loss for other categories of workers. To encompass quite diverse socio-labor realities, in an extraordinarily demanding context in terms of economic support needs, several ad-hoc protection schemes against job and income loss were introduced, independent of each other. The introduction, from January 1, 2021, of extraordinary income support for workers aims precisely to provide a common framework for exceptional measures to support the unemployed and income loss, which were previously scattered.
This text will describe the system and rules of the new support, simulate the amount of this benefit taking into account the applicant's family and socio-labor profile, and also offer a series of reflections on the "new" support.
Authors: Luís Manso, Frederico Cantante, Pedro Adão e Silva, Catarina Mendes Cruz, Jena Santi, Carlos Simões, Renato Miguel do Carmo.
