“The current global economic slowdown is likely to force more workers into accepting lower quality, poorly paid jobs that lack job security and social protection.”
International Labour Organization
January 16, 2023
Global employment is predicted by the International Labour Organization (ILO) to expand by just 1% in 2023, which is less than half of the rate from the previous year. More employees will likely be forced by the present global economic recession to take worse quality, lower paying employment with less job security and social safety, intensifying already aggravated inequality brought on by the COVID-19 problem.
According to the UN’s International Labour Organization, the cost-of-living problem runs the danger of putting more people into poverty as prices increase faster than wages, and unemployment rates are expected to climb globally.
Multiple, interconnected issues, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, rising geopolitical tensions, an unequal Covid-19 pandemic recovery, and ongoing supply chain bottlenecks, according to the ILO, have made the lack of decent work worse. With the anticipated slowdown, the ILO warned that the ongoing lack of better job opportunities, which began during the Covid crisis when lower-income workers were disproportionately disadvantaged, was likely to get worse, “pushing workers into jobs of worse quality and denying others adequate social protection.”
The ILO stated that, labour markets are much less favourable for women and young people. In comparison to males, who made up 72.3% of the labour force globally in 2022, women’s participation rate was 47.4%. Due to the discrepancy of 24.9 percentage points, there are two economically inactive women for every economically inactive male.
Finding and maintaining adequate job is extremely challenging for young people (ages 15 to 24). Their unemployment rate is three times higher than that of adults. Moreover, one in five young people (23.5%) are not in work, education, or training.
The ILO expressed alarm about a predicted slowdown in productivity, which it said was “important for tackling the interconnected crises we confront in buying power, ecological sustainability, and human welfare,” and stated that it does not anticipate the drop down in employment growth observed during the Covid crisis to be regained until at least 2025.
