The global labour market faces a patchy and uneven recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, according to new research by the International Labour Organization that warned the pace of job creation is unlikely to make up for lost employment until 2023.
About 100m jobs will be created around the world this year as businesses reopen after lockdowns to control the spread of Covid-19, the ILO projected. But that will leave 75m missing jobs this year compared with pre-pandemic levels, falling to 23m in 2022, in addition to the jobs that would have been created in the absence of the pandemic, the UN agency said.
Guy Ryder, ILO director-general, said: “While signs of economic recovery are appearing as vaccine campaigns are ramped up, the recovery is likely to be uneven and fragile.”
That will leave global employment growth “too weak” to provide sufficient opportunities for younger people entering the labour market, reducing their longer-term employment chances, wages and prospects for on-the-job skills development, the ILO warned.
Despite the unprecedented measures that many governments implemented to preserve jobs, all countries have suffered a sharp deterioration in employment which has aggravated existing inequalities and risks inflicting longer-term “scarring” effects on workers and enterprises, the ILO said.
There will be 205m unemployed people across the globe in 2022 according to the ILO, well above the pre-pandemic level of 187m in 2019 and corresponding to a rate of 5.7 per cent, the highest since 2013 other than during the pandemic last year.
The unemployment rate in high-income countries will shrink to 5 per cent in 2022 “thanks to unprecedented policy support and privileged access to vaccines”, the ILO said. That would leave it just above the 4.8 per cent it hit before the pandemic, and down from 6.8 per cent in 2020.
In contrast, lower income countries’ unemployment rate is expected to remain largely unchanged from its 2020 level at 5.2 per cent by 2022, limited by their greater constraints on fiscal stimulus. Many emerging and developing countries are burdened by high debt and deficits, while slower access to Covid-19 vaccines is expected to delay the reopening of their economies.
“This unequal recovery risks accentuating still further inequalities in the world of work between countries and within countries,” Ryder said. “Because of the unequal fiscal firepower and the unequal access to vaccines, it is higher income countries that are going to pull out from the crisis more quickly.”
North America will experience the strongest labour market recovery thanks to rapid vaccination campaigns and generous fiscal stimulus packages, the ILO said.
In contrast, in Latin America and the Caribbean the jobs recovery is expected to be “sluggish” because of the disappearance of many companies and the limited creation of new ones. The lack of job opportunities will result in rising poverty and inequality, particularly for informal workers who lack social protection, the ILO said.
That trend is already under way in Africa, where the pandemic has reversed some of the continent’s economic progress by driving up the share of workers living in extreme poverty.
Source: Economy - ft.com
