The prospects for next year and beyond are not very promising. The International Labor Organization (ILO) warns that the current global economic slowdown will force millions of workers to accept lower-quality and low-paying jobs.
in his report ‘Social Outlook and Employment in the World: Trends 2023’the ILO predicts that global unemployment will rise by 3 million to a total of 208 million this year with similar projections for 2024.
The ILO’s director of job quality, Manuela Tomei, said both the quantity and quality of jobs will deteriorate and working conditions are expected to worsen as wages fall.
“Workers in low- and middle-income countries are expected to be the most affected,” Tomei explained. “And with the pandemic and economic slowdown around the worldthe prospects of seeing a reduction in informality and poverty have deteriorated and will continue to deteriorate”.
The report warns that the cost of living crisis will push more people into poverty, widening the gap between rich and poor. It also notes that around 2 billion people, mainly in developing countries, work in the informal economy.
According to the report, the slowdown in the global economy is likely to reverse the progress that has been made since 2004 in moving people out of the informal sector.
In addition to the millions of unemployed, the ILO says that 473 million people last year stopped actively looking for work. Explain that they were discouraged by the prospects of finding a job or had other obligations, such as caregiving responsibilities.
For the first time since the 1970s, Tomei said that stagflation conditionsthat is, high inflation and low growth combined, threaten productivity and the recovery of the labor market.
It added that “the Ukraine war, geopolitical tensions, disrupted supply chains, high inflation, tightening of monetary policies and overall high uncertainty are all contributing to depressing the outlook for labor markets.”
The ILO reports that young people between the ages of 15 and 24 facesevere difficulties finding employment and that they are three times more likely to be out of a job than adults. It adds that young women are faring much worse than young men, with only 47.4% of women participating in the global workforce last year, compared to 72.3% of men.
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