Digital platform workers (used interchangeably with the term ‘gig workers’) fall under the gambit of nonstandard workers. Non-standard work encompasses all work that does not constitute a “standard employment relationship”, which is typically full-time, permanent, and is a part of a subordinate and bilateral employment relationship (ILO 2016). While the ILO (2016) distinguishes between informal employment and non-standard employment, both terms are used interchangeably in this paper, as our interest is in workers who are not covered by traditional arrangements for social insurance, which is a commonly used definition for informally employed workers (OECD/ILO 2019). In short, this paper defines digital platform workers (or gig workers) as a subset of the broader universe of informally employed workers, characterized by non-standard employment relationships.

While access to digital platform work has been important to support the livelihoods of those who were laid off during crises, including the recent COVID-19 pandemic – hence acting as an automatic stabilizer – the rapid growth of these jobs brings to the fore the issue of their protection. The protection of digital platform workers is made more complicated by the nature of their work which is often performed parttime or irregularly, and across multiple platforms. This may make the traditional social insurance model, based on regular contributions from employers and employees, untenable, both in terms of contributions and benefits.

Traditionally, social insurance programs in Malaysia, encompassing retirement savings (administered by the Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF)), workplace injury and disability insurance (administered by the Social Security Organisation (SOCSO)), and unemployment insurance (administered by the Employment Insurance Scheme (EIS, under SOCSO)), have only catered for employees, or formal workers with standard employment relationships. However, acknowledging the importance of protecting the sizable share of informally employed workers in Malaysia, the government introduced voluntary schemes for retirement savings in 2010, and for workplace injury and disability insurance in 2017. However, take-up for both schemes remains low. The voluntary retirement savings scheme, i-Saraan, covered 10.7% of all selfemployed workers (defined as own account workers and unpaid family workers) in 2022, while the SelfEmployment Social Security Scheme (SESSS) covered 16.4% of all sell-employed workers in 2021. The reasons behind the low take-up rates for these schemes are unclear.

The objective of this paper is to assess digital platform workers’ assessments of social insurance coverage (that is, retirement pensions, insurance for workplace injuries) and unemployment insurance, as well as their willingness to pay for such coverage. We deploy a novel vignette experiment in an online survey of digital workers. The experiment involves the randomized allocation of fictitious job descriptions that offer alternate combinations of social insurance coverage and earnings to elicit digital workers’ preferred job description.

Overall, we find that the majority of digital workers value social insurance highly, and also report that they do not have sufficient social insurance coverage in their current work. They are willing to trade off a part of their earnings to receive social insurance coverage. This willingness is particularly high in the case of unemployment insurance, followed by retirement income and insurance for workplace injuries. The low prevalence of social insurance coverage despite a high willingness to pay for it suggests that current policies are inadequate in ensuring adequate coverage, calling for better and potentially more customized design and implementation of social insurance policies for gig workers, and not an emphasis on the affordability of insurance contributions alone.

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