Using the Mutual Aid Model to Improve Protection for Mobile Workers Is Highly Feasible in Practice

Data show that China's mobile workforce now numbers close to 320 million, and this vast group still faces significant protection gaps. Covering them entirely through state inclusive protection would inevitably place a considerable burden on public finances, and the mutual aid model may be precisely the effective way to fill the gap.

Among mobile workers, those in sectors such as food delivery and ride-hailing are highly concentrated, and their homogeneous group characteristics make them naturally suited to the logic of mutual aid protection: for core needs such as accident protection and critical-illness assistance, it is entirely possible to supplement basic protection for workers and their families through a group cost-sharing model. With accurate risk assessment, the operating pressure of such mutual aid programs is fully controllable.

More importantly, most of these workers provide their services through large internet platforms such as Meituan and Didi, and the data those platforms accumulate — riders' mileage, drivers' hours of service and trip trajectories — can be directly translated into dynamic adjustment factors for mutual aid contributions. For example, the higher a rider's monthly mileage, the higher the corresponding risk tier can be set, with the contribution adjusted slightly upward in step. This model is both fair and able to leverage protection effectiveness at extremely low cost, reducing the risks borne by mobile workers themselves while greatly easing fiscal pressure.

Of course, many details of implementation remain to be clarified, but the idea itself is well worth pilot exploration.