Investigating Unemployment Protection Policies in Iran using Fuzzy Delphi and Fuzzy AHP Methods

Unemployment Protection Policies is considered as one of the important policies of the labor market and social security system, and this is also noted in the fundamental laws in Iran. Nevertheless, the implementation of these policies has been limited. Since these policies are multi-dimensional, the policy implementation needs to use the experts’ wisdom. But these experts have different interpretations for the policies, their impacts and their priority for execution. In this paper, the Delphi method is used for group decision making for analyzing the Unemployment Protection policies and the fuzzy theory notions are applied for modeling verbal variables in the experts’ ideas. Accordingly, the most important challenges and approaches in dealing with the Unemployment protection policies are extracted by running three steps of the Fuzzy Delphi method and are ranked by Fuzzy AHP. According to experts opinion, the most important prioritized policies for supporting the unemployed people are conditioning the benefit unemployment payment to the unemployed people go to employment and training centers, revision of the unemployment insurance law, Establishing an electronic and non-electronic mechanism for monitoring the unemployment issues and detecting the violations of the law, Employment Programming for newcomers to the job market, defining employment rights, and reforming the dichotomy between the two executive organizations. The experts believe that determining the amount of unemployment insurance benefit should be subject to reductions based on the rejection of proposed jobs, based on theories related to search for a job, the independence of the wage, and the number of collateral dependents. Reducing the period of benefit unemployment, reducing or eliminating the periods that the unemployment benefits are paid based on the insurances records, the implementation of Article 10 of the unemployment insurance law, and the production of a job identification card to determine the type of skill are the recommended policies that help to determine the period of unemployment benefits. According to the experts opinions, the optimal allocation of resources and costs for unemployment insurance can be available by implementing some policies such as modifying the financing of the unemployment insurance fund, "comprehensive coverage" of the unemployment insurance, financing from the public tax, designing of a comprehensive information system for the labor market, annual budget planning with regarding to training skills according to the day needs, systemic supervision on financial activities of the unemployment insurance fund.