The portability of social security benefits is the ability of workers to preserve, maintain, and transfer acquired
social security
Welfare, or commonly social welfare, is a type of government support intended to ensure that members of a society can meet basic human needs such as food and shelter. Social security may either be synonymous with welfare, or refer specificall ...
rights and social security rights in the process of being acquired from one private, occupational, or public social security scheme to another. Social security rights refer to rights stemming from
pension schemes (old age, survivor,
disability
Disability is the experience of any condition that makes it more difficult for a person to do certain activities or have equitable access within a given society. Disabilities may be Cognitive disability, cognitive, Developmental disability, dev ...
),
unemployment insurance
Unemployment benefits, also called unemployment insurance, unemployment payment, unemployment compensation, or simply unemployment, are payments made by authorized bodies to unemployed people. In the United States, benefits are funded by a comp ...
,
health insurance
Health insurance or medical insurance (also known as medical aid in South Africa) is a type of insurance that covers the whole or a part of the risk of a person incurring medical expenses. As with other types of insurance, risk is shared among ma ...
, workers' compensation, and sickness benefits.
Hence, if social security benefits are portable, contributors to, for example, old-age pension schemes do not experience any disadvantage such as the loss of contributions and benefits associated with these contributions when moving from one job to another, from one occupation to another, or from the
public
In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichkei ...
to the
private sector
The private sector is the part of the economy, sometimes referred to as the citizen sector, which is owned by private groups, usually as a means of establishment for profit or non profit, rather than being owned by the government.
Employment
The ...
or vice versa.
International portability of social security rights allows international
migrants, who have contributed to a social security scheme for some time in a particular country, to maintain acquired benefits or benefits in the process of being acquired when moving to another country. International portability of social security benefits is therefore understood as the migrant's ability to preserve, maintain, and transfer acquired social security rights independent of nationality and country of residence.
International portability of social security benefits is achieved through
bilateral
Bilateral may refer to any concept including two sides, in particular:
* Bilateria, bilateral animals
*Bilateralism, the political and cultural relations between two states
*Bilateral, occurring on both sides of an organism ( Anatomical terms of ...
or
multilateral social security agreements between countries. These agreements guarantee the totalization of periods of contribution to the social security systems of both countries and the extraterritorial payment of benefits. Currently it is estimated that approximately 23 per cent of migrants worldwide are covered by bilateral social security agreements.
[Avato, J., J. Koettl and R. Sabates-Wheeler. 2010. Social Security Regimes, Global Estimates, and Good Practices: The Status of Social Protection for International Migrants, World Development Vol 38, No. 4: 455-466.]
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Portability (Social Security)
Social security in the United States