Low growth and global crisis slow recovery of employment in Latin America

First modification: 09/03/2022 – 11:00

Low economic growth and the global crisis are slowing down the recovery of employment in Latin America and the Caribbean after the impact of the covid-19 pandemic, warned the International Labor Organization. “Low economic growth, high inflation and a global crisis aggravated by Russian aggression in Ukraine affect both the quantity and quality of jobs generated in the region and could prolong the strong employment impact of the pandemic crisis,” the International Labor Organization (ILO) said in a report. “In Latin America and the Caribbean there has been a significant recovery in employment after the covid-19 pandemic, but the region’s labor markets face a complex and uncertain future that could be characterized in 2022 by an increase in unemployment, informality and the number of poor workers,” he added. He highlighted that, with data from the first quarter of 2022, the average unemployment rate in the region amounts to 7.9%. , and employment at 57.2%, with a participation in the labor force of 62.1%.

The economist and author of the ILO report Roxana Mauricio has pointed out in the microphones of RFI: “In addition to the crisis associated with the war in Ukraine, they are labor markets that had not yet recovered the ground lost by the pandemic. So, what we are seeing, especially since the first quarter of this year, is a slowdown in the recovery of employment that the countries of the region had been having, to which is added an inflationary acceleration that has a direct impact on the wages and income of families”

The informality rate in the fourth quarter of 2021 was almost 50% in the region, close to the 2019 record. In February, the ILO had warned that the “employment crisis” generated by the pandemic threatened to last until 2023 or even 2024.

“What we see is that informal jobs are the ones that have been leading the full recovery of employment. However, the good news is that the contribution of informal jobs to the total recovery of employment has been decreasing. Nevertheless, the average informality in the region is still 50%data similar to that of 2019 or that of ten years ago as well,” says Roxana Mauricio to RFI.