No return to pre-pandemic job levels in 2020: ILO

GENEVA: International Labour Organisation on Tuesday, June 30, said that the outlook for global labour market in the second half of 2020 is highly uncertain and the forecast recovery won’t be sufficient for work to come back to pre-pandemic levels this year.

The UN agency, in its latest report, said the fall in worldwide working hours was “altogether more terrible than recently assessed” in the first half of the year. The Americas was the hardest-hit region, losing 18.3 per cent of working hours.

ILO said that globally there was an estimated loss of 14 per cent of working hours in the second quarter, proportionate to 400 million all day employments due to pandemic. It evaluated that working-hour losses were likely to be still in the order of 4.9 percent in the fourth quarter, equivalent to 140 million full time jobs, Under a pessimistic scenario in a so-called second wave of the pandemic, this figure could rise to 11.9% or 340 million jobs.

Guy Ryder, Director-general, ILO, during a Geneva news conference told that the estimates have revised upwards considerably the damage done to our labour markets by the pandemic, so there will not be a simple or quick recovery. He added that the pandemic has a worst effect on women workers, who were working in the hard-hit sectors such as food and accommodation, retail, and real estate.

According to ILO report, these figures include people who are working shorter hours, who are furloughed, have lost their jobs or being forced out from the labour work and represent the worsening conditions in the developing countries. Nearly 93 percent of workers still live in countries with some sort of workplace closures.

While addressing Brazil’s delay in imposing strict public health measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus, Ryder said that this undue delay in acting on the health side of pandemic is going to bring worse social and economic outcomes. He added that it is inevitable the world is going to begin to emerge from this pandemic with higher levels of unemployment, higher levels of poverty, higher levels of inequality, higher levels of frustration among citizens, but also higher levels of indebtedness.