12
employment subject to the compulsory application of the scheme concerned, retirement or income test provisions) or if his income is reduced to a substantial extent.
19. The concept of income security has come to play a more and more preponderant role as new old-age pension schemes are formulated, with the result that the scope of the contingency now tends to include specifically the loss or reduction of income due to old age in addition to the attainment of a given age. The problem whether or not the contingency should cover this particular aspect of retirement from gainful activities (or loss or reduction of income) is important not only from the social point of view, but also in its relationship with such problem areas as employment, unemployment, wages and income distributions. The schemes which require the pensioners to withdraw from gainful employment for the entitlement to old-age pensions do not as a rule allow concurrent payment of wages and pensions, ΟΙ at least full pensions. Fear of the possible repercussions of such concurrent payment on the wage structure may be one of the factors leading to the introduction of provisions of this kind. Furthermore, when a country has an abundance of manpower and needs to provide more job opportunities for the younger generation, it may attempt to encourage older persons to withdraw from employment by providing them with old-age pensions to support them in retirement. In this connection it may be interesting to recall that a study carried out by the ILO in one of the Latin American countries revealed that pensioners remaining in the labour force and receiving remuneration represented more than a third of the total number of unemployed workers.1
20. The application of retirement or income test provisions gives rise to certain problems which need to be examined carefully. For example, where the level of benefit is not sufficiently high, the application of such provisions on an "all or nothing" basis (i.e. no benefit being payable if a qualified person is in receipt of an y amount of income from any kind of gainful activity) will often cause hardship, since it may place the older worker before the dilemma of accepting an inadequate pension without any possibility of supplementing it by his own efforts, or continuing to work beyond the a ge of retirement. In such cases, strict application of a retirement test even deprives an older person of the opportunity to continue some light employment in retirement. The purpose of such employment is nct so much to supplement the pension as to preserve his sense of social usefulness. On the other hand where the old-age pension is generous in amount, it may be feared that а retirement test will encourage early retirement even of workers who are capable of working and whom society may wish to retain in productive activity.
Employment injury
of
an
21.
The social security legislation covering the contingency of employment injury in many countries affords more favourable treatment to the victims employment injury than to those whose injuries Or diseases do not have occupational origin. In a great number of countries the employment injury benefit branch was the pace setter for the development of social security in respect of other benefit branches. There are a number of reasons for the special treatment of employment injury. Two groups of factors contributing towards the special treatment may be mentioned. One group derives from the historical evolution of legal concepts; the other, which is purely practical, is concerned with the real or fancied advantages of differences in treatment or simply with the capacity of social security at a given stage in its development.
22.
Doubt has, however, been expressed as to the validity of principles that give advantage to certain victims of social hazard, based on the origin of the contingency.2 Social security is a dynamic concept that has evolved not only with changes in the social, economic and political needs of a given society, but also
1 ILO:
Empleo desempleo y prestaciones por desempleo, Reunión de mesa redonda sobre relaciones entre políticas de empleo, desempleo y seguridad social, Ciudad México, 6-11 diciembe de 1971, Geneva 1971,
P. 69.
de
in
2 Lord (then Sir) William Beveridge said that: "If a workman loses his legs an accident, his needs are the same whether the accident occurred in a factory or in the street; if he is killed, the needs of his widow and other dependants are the same however the death occurred." (Social insurance and allied services, Report by Sir William Beveridge, Cand. 6404, London, 1942, p. 38, para. 80.)
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