ILO paints grim picture of global Q2 labor turmoil due to pandemic
Print Edition
Workplace disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are expected to wipe out labor equivalent to the effort of 195 million full-time workers, or 6.7 percent of hours clocked worldwide, in the second quarter of this year, the International Labor Organization said on Tuesday.
More than four out of five workers globally are affected by full or partial closures, it said in a report.
The United Nations agency welcomed fiscal and monetary measures applied so far but urged countries to take steps to keep people connected to jobs they are no longer able to do, so fewer will end up unemployed.
“What we do now in terms of maintaining that relationship between workers and their enterprises to keep them on the labor market, that will pay dividends when it comes to the trajectory and the gradient of recovery hopefully in the latter part of this year,” ILO director-general Guy Ryder told a news conference.
Workers in the informal sector — who account for 61 percent of the global workforce or 2 billion people — will need income support just to survive and feed their families, if their day jobs disappear, he said.
“These are people who generally do not have access to the normal social protections that might go with a formal employment status,” Ryder said.
He also said India’s lockdown has put millions of migrant workers in a quandary.
“If you require people to stop working, go home and stay at home but they have absolutely no other source of income, then the choice can become between that of protecting yourself against the virus and having no means of surviving, no means to feed yourself,” he said. “And these are impossible dilemmas.”
Ryder listed initiatives such as partial unemployment, technical unemployment and short working time measures that keep workers tied to their jobs. The Asia-Pacific region accounts for labor equivalent to 125 million workers lost in the second quarter, although Chinese companies have resumed work after a long lockdown, the report said.
The ILO did not project precisely how many workers would be made jobless by the crisis, though it said it would be “significantly higher” than the 25 million it forecast just last month. At the start of this year, 190 million workers were unemployed around the world.
Lee Sang-heon, director of ILO’s employment policy department and the report’s main author, said the crisis’ impact was immediate. “We started to see huge numbers in job loss claims, in the US, Canada and most of the European countries.”
“We expect that unless we have serious and immediate actions taken right now, the recovery is going to be rather long and painful,” Lee said.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
