ILO Urges Strong Unemployment Protection to Secure Jobs and Incomes in Crises

The COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrated how vital unemployment protection is for workers who suddenly lost their jobs and sources of income.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) has released a new Social Protection Spotlight Brief highlighting the critical role of unemployment protection systems in safeguarding workers’ incomes and promoting stable, productive employment. Titled “Building rights-based unemployment protection schemes,” the brief provides practical, policy-focused guidance for governments as they confront increasingly frequent and complex economic, health, and climate-related crises.

The COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrated how vital unemployment protection is for workers who suddenly lost their jobs and sources of income. Well-designed unemployment benefits not only helped families avoid poverty, but also stabilized national economies by sustaining household consumption and speeding up post-crisis economic recovery. In countries with strong protection systems, social stability and labour market resilience were significantly higher.

The brief explains that international social security standards offer a proven framework for building effective, fair, and sustainable unemployment protection systems. These standards help countries balance income support with active labour market policies, ensuring that financial assistance is combined with services that support job search, skills development, and rapid reintegration into decent work.

Key ILO legal instruments are highlighted, including:

• The Social Security (Minimum Standards) Convention, 1952 (No. 102), which establishes minimum benefit levels, eligibility rules, and strong principles of governance and transparency.

• The Employment Promotion and Protection against Unemployment Convention, 1988 (No. 168), supported by Recommendation No. 176, which set more advanced standards, including stronger links between unemployment benefits, training systems, and employment services.

The brief stresses that unemployment protection cannot operate in isolation. It must be closely integrated with national employment strategies that promote decent work, fair wages, safe working conditions, and equal opportunities. This rights-based approach ensures that workers are treated as rights holders, rather than passive recipients of assistance.

In addition, the publication complements a recently released ILO brief entitled “Why are unemployment individual savings accounts not an adequate and equitable solution to unemployment protection?” Together, the two resources present strong evidence that social insurance–based unemployment systems are more equitable, more cost-effective, and better suited to addressing labour market shocks than individual savings-based models, which tend to leave low-income and informal workers unprotected.

Through these briefs, the ILO aims to support governments, employers, and workers’ organizations in designing modern unemployment protection systems that reduce inequality, strengthen social cohesion, and accelerate transitions back into quality employment in an increasingly uncertain global economy.