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Employees of small and medium businesses, self-employed workers[112], students, job seekers, and startup founders are all out of reach for most institutions that used to be part of the Great Safety Net 1.0. The vast majority of workers are outsiders in a world where risks are covered only for those employed by large domestic corporations.

2. Impact on Labor: • Stagnant Wages: Despite increases in productivity, wage growth for average workers remained relatively stagnant, leading to a growing income inequality gap.

• Decline of Labor Unions: Union membership declined, reducing the collective bargaining power of workers to negotiate better wages and benefits.

• Offshoring and Outsourcing:

There’s also the misalignment between legacy mechanisms and the risks that dominate today. A key component of social insurance in the age of the automobile and mass production is that it was focused on salaried workers with steady jobs. Yet today steady jobs are increasingly the exception rather than the norm, at least for those who are newly hired

Collective bargaining ensured that wages grew at a healthy pace, and workers were increasingly bundled into manufacturing industries with relatively permanent jobs, high wages, and guaranteed pensions. Meanwhile the welfare state redistributed money to those left outside the labour market.

The intermittent nature of today’s careers creates an unprecedented set of problems for social insurance. Such mechanisms that were designed for linear career paths are ill-fitted to respond to the needs of individuals whose working lives have become increasingly diverse, discontinuous and multiform. Because traditional social insurance is often li