The International Labour Organisation (ILO) recently warned there is an “urgent challenge” to create 600 million jobs over the world in the next decade as one in three workers worldwide are either unemployed or living in poverty.
According to the annual report on global employment by the ILO, the world faces the “urgent challenge” of creating 600 million productive jobs over the next decade in order to generate sustainable growth and maintain social cohesion.
“After three years of continuous crisis conditions in global labour markets and against the prospect of a further deterioration of economic activity, there is a backlog of global unemployment of 200 million,” the report, titled, ‘Global Employment Trends 2012: Preventing a Deeper Jobs Crisis’, said. Besides the global unemployment backlog of 200 million, 400 million new jobs will be needed over the next decade to absorb the estimated 40 million new job-seekers in the labour force each year, ILO said.
Commenting on the findings, ILO Director-General Juan Somavia said, “Despite strenuous government efforts, the jobs crisis continues unabated, with one in three workers worldwide — or an estimated 1.1 billion people — either unemployed or living in poverty.” The report also said the world faces additional challenge of creating decent jobs for the estimated 900 million workers living with their families below the US$2 a day poverty line, “mostly in developing countries”.
There are still 27 million more unemployed workers than at the start of the global financial crisis.
Nearly 30 per cent of all workers in the world — more than 900 million — were living with their families below the US$ 2 poverty line in 2011. Of these, 900 million working poor, about half were living below the US$1.25 extreme poverty line. “These latest figures reflect the increasing inequality and continuous exclusion that millions of workers and their families are facing,” Somavia said.
The report called for targeted measures to support job growth in the real economy and warned that additional public support measures alone will not be enough to foster a sustainable recovery.
“Policymakers must act decisively and in a coordinated fashion to reduce the fear and uncertainty that is hindering private investment so that the private sector can restart the main engine of global job creation,” said the report. The report refers to “discouraged workers” as those who have decided to stop looking for work because they feel they have no chance of finding a job and are considered economically inactive.
“If these discouraged workers were counted as unemployed, then global unemployment would swell from the current 197 million to 225 million and the unemployment rate would rise from 6 per cent to 6.9 per cent,” the report said.
Meanwhile, young people continue to be among the hardest hit by the jobs crisis. As per the report, 74.8 million youth aged 15-24 were unemployed in 2011, an increase of more than 4 million in comparison to 2007, the report said.
India to weather global slowdown
ILO believes India is likely to weather the latest global slowdown better than most countries, provided it ensures rising income levels for the working class and enough jobs for a growing working-age population.
According to the annual report on global employment by the ILO, “The main challenge is not unemployment, but rather the high degree of informality that persists despite strong growth.”
“The robust growth witnessed in the South Asian region was driven largely by India and was largely due to the rapid rise in labour productivity, rather than an expansion in employment,” the report, titled, ‘Global Employment Trends 2012: Preventing a Deeper Jobs Crisis’, said.
This situation is prominent in India, which accounts for 74 per cent of the South Asia region’s labour force.
In India, total employment grew by only 0.1 per cent over the five years to 2009-10 — from 457.9 million in 2004-05 to 458.4 million in 2009/10 — while labour productivity grew by more than 34 per cent over this period. Labour productivity is the amount of goods and services that a worker produces in a given amount of time.
A major reason for the slow growth in employment in recent years is the fall in female participation in the labour force. This has been most pronounced in India, where participation of women in labour activities fell from 49.4 per cent in 2004-05 to 37.8 per cent in 2009-10 for rural females and from 24.4 per cent to 19.4 per cent for urban females.
This drop in participation can only partly be explained by the strong increase in enrollment in education, because it has been evident across all age groups, the report added. The main labour market challenges in South Asia, including India, are two-fold and consist of achieving the twin goals of increasing labour productivity, to ensure incomes are rising and poverty is falling, and creation of enough jobs for a growing working-age population, which is expanding by around 2 per cent each year, the ILO said.
With almost 60 per cent of the population in South Asia under the age of 30, governments should take advantage of this demographic dividend, the report said.
The global uncertainty stemming from the euro area sovereign debt crisis and continuing weakness of the United States’ economy has negative implications for all countries, including those in the South Asia region.
“Overall, the worsening economic conditions will make it more challenging for the South Asia region to promote the creation of productive jobs in the non-farm sector and continue the battle against the persistence of informality, vulnerable employment and specific barriers for women and youth in the labour market,” the report said.
Source : Deccan Herald, February 3, 2012
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