- What is social security?
- Social security systems
- Social security institutions
- Initial protection systems
We explain what social security is and what systems and institutions deal with it. In addition, the first protection systems.
What is social security?
The set of programs is called social security, social protection or social security, institutions and government measures designed to protect the economic, physical and social well-being of the population of a country, especially with regard to the Health, old age, unemployment and disability.
These benefits can be family or individual, consist of money accreditations or services subsidized, and administered in very different ways.
According to International Labor Organization (ILO), social security is “the protection that the society provides its members, through a series of public measures, against economic and social deprivation that, if not, would cause the disappearance or a sharp reduction in income due to illness, maternity, work accident or occupational disease, unemployment , disability, illness, old age and death”.
Thus, the role of social security is the improvement of the social, economic and human conditions of the population, through mechanisms of solidarity action in which the economically active population collaborates with those unable to work.
Social security systems
There are two essential forms of social security systems, the first of a public nature and the second private:
- Public Social Security. Known as Social Security in most countries, it focuses on the Condition the administration of the social security funds and grants it the power to manage medical care, social pensions, social benefits and other services to the needy population. For this, the State uses various public institutions dedicated to the matter, whose budget comes from the taxes collected.
- Complementary Social Security. It is a voluntary system financed by individual contributions, thus generating a capital managed by private entities that invest it in various stock and financial operations, obtaining a gain and growing the accumulated capital.
Social security institutions
Each country has its own social security institutions, such as:
- National Administration of Social Security (ANSES) in Argentina.
- Comprehensive Social Security System (SSSI) in Colombia.
- Costa Rican Social Security Fund in Costa Rica.
- Ecuadorian Institute of Social Security (IESS) in Ecuador.
- Guatemalan Institute of Social Security in Guatemala.
- Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS) in Mexico.
- Venezuelan Institute of Social Security (IVSS) in Venezuela.
- Social Security Bank in Uruguay.
- National Health Service in the UK.
Many of these institutions serve a specific audience: public employees, workers civilians, military employees, etc. It is not unusual for certain associations to have their own welfare service, apart from or in replacement of the state one.
Initial protection systems
The history of social security starts together with the capitalism and the appearance of the workforce proletariat, who in those days was totally helpless in the face of the risks labor typical of the long days of the time, poorly paid, in addition.
Strikes and professional associations were considered a crime, and nothing required employers to pay for work accidents, or even work-related illnesses. To deal with such a panorama of labor exploitation, the first protection systems emerged, which were fundamentally four:
- The saving private, under the figure of funds accumulated in a Bank so that the worker could pay himself his social security.
- The mutualism, which consisted of the grouping of workers or members of certain communities to assume, through financial contributions, the necessary help for old or sick members. Deprived of profit, mutual associations served as the basis for today's public Social Security.
- Private insurance, whose origins are as remote as the 15th century, and consisted of commercial contracts in which the insurer undertook to pay the insured or their relatives a capital or compensation, in the event of an event (death, disability, disease, etc.). In exchange, the insured had to hold the cost of a money premium. This system still exists today.
- Social assistance, which emerged during the Industrial Revolution, in order to tackle the growing problem of homelessness, it was also a prelude to what social security is today. It was in charge of feeding the poor and its financing could be public or private.