Post-pandemic employment growth not enough to cover the losses, especially for women
The labour market crisis created by the pandemic is far from over. Employment growth will be insufficient to make up for the losses suffered until at least 2023. The crisis has also hit women disproportionately. Women employment declined by 5 per cent in 2020 compared to 3.9 per cent for men, according to a trend report by the International Labour Organization (ILO).
“A greater proportion of women also fell out of the labour market, becoming inactive. Additional domestic responsibilities resulting from crisis lockdowns have also created the risk of a “re-traditionalization” of gender roles.”
The ‘jobs gap’ will reach 75 million in 2021, before falling to 23 million in 2022. The related gap in working-hours, which includes the jobs gap and those on reduced hours, amounts to the equivalent of 100 million full-time jobs in 2021 and 26 million full-time jobs in 2022, the report shows.
“This shortfall in employment and working hours comes on top of persistently high pre-crisis levels of unemployment, labour underutilization and poor working conditions.”
GLOBAL UNEMPLOYMENT
Global unemployment is expected to be 205 million people in 2022, up from 187 million in 2019. This corresponds to an unemployment rate of 5.7%. ILO says that this is the highest since 2013.
The worst affected regions in the first half of 2021 have been Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe and Central Asia. For these areas, working-hour losses exceeded eight per cent in the first quarter and six per cent in the second quarter, compared to global working-hour losses of 4.8 and 4.4 per cent in the first and second quarter, respectively.
ILO predicts that global employment recovery will accelerate in the second half of 2021, provided that there is no worsening in the overall pandemic situation.
“However this will be uneven, due to unequal vaccine access and the limited capacity of most developing and emerging economies to support strong fiscal stimulus measures. Furthermore, the quality of newly created jobs is likely to deteriorate in those countries.”
RISE IN POVERTY
The fall in employment and hours worked has translated into a sharp drop in labour income and a corresponding rise in poverty:
Compared to 2019, an additional 108 million workers worldwide are now categorized as poor or extremely poor (meaning they and their families live on the equivalent of less than USD 3.20 per person per day).
“Five years of progress towards the eradication of working poverty have been undone,” the report says, adding that this renders the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goal of eradicating poverty by 2030 even more elusive.
INFORMAL SECTOR
“The COVID-19 crisis has also made pre-existing inequalities worse by hitting vulnerable workers harder, the report shows. The widespread lack of social protection – for example among the world’s two billion informal sector workers – means that pandemic-related work disruptions have had catastrophic consequences for family incomes and livelihoods.”
Globally, youth employment fell 8.7 per cent in 2020, compared with 3.7 per cent for adults, with the most pronounced fall seen in middle-income countries. The consequences of this delay and disruption to the early labour market experience of young people could last for years.
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