World needs 600m jobs in next ten years – ILO
…900m workers live below $2 per day poverty line
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, says the International Labour Organization (ILO).
The Global Employment Trends Report also said the world faces the additional challenge of creating decent jobs for the estimated 900 million workers living with their families below the $2 a day poverty line, mostly in developing countries.
In its annual report titled “Global Employment Trends 2012: Preventing a deeper jobs crisis” and released today January 24, 2012, the UN agency said the world is facing an additional challenge of creating decent jobs for the estimated 900 million workers living with their families below the $2 a day poverty line, mostly in developing countries.
“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,” says the report and “more than 400 million new jobs will be needed over the next decade to absorb the estimated 40 million growth of the labour force each year.”
Despite strenuous government efforts, the ILO’s Director-General Juan Somavia said in a statement “the jobs crisis continues unabated, with one in three workers worldwide – or an estimated 1.1 billion people – either unemployed or living in poverty.”
“What is needed is that job creation in the real economy must become our number one priority,” Juan Somavia added.
According to the report, the recovery that started in 2009 has been “short-lived” and that there are still 27 million more unemployed workers than at the start of the crisis. “The fact that economies are not generating enough employment is reflected in the employment-to-population ratio (the proportion of the working-age population in employment), which suffered the largest decline on record between 2007 (61.2%) and 2010 (60.2%),” it added.
The report gave some scenarios for the employment situation in the future. It said the baseline projection shows an additional 3 million unemployed for 2012, rising to 206 million by 2016.
“If global growth rates fall below 2%, then unemployment would rise to 204 million in 2012. In a more benign scenario, assuming a quick resolution of the euro debt crisis, global unemployment would be around 1 million lower in 2012.”
Young people continue to be among the hardest hit by the jobs crisis as the report says judging by the present course, there is little hope for a substantial improvement in their near-term employment prospects.
It said “74.8 million youth aged 15-24 were unemployed in 2011, an increase of more than 4 million since 2007. It adds that globally, young people are nearly three times as likely as adults to be unemployed.”
The global youth unemployment rate, at 12.7%, remains a full percentage point above the pre-crisis level, ILO noted.
By Ekow Quandzie
Watch the ILO’s presentation of the report