The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has said that finding decent and well-paid jobs will likely be harder in 2023.
The UN labour agency revealed this in a statement on Monday.
According to it, getting such jobs could be harder due to
the continuing global economic downturn.
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It stated that global employment was set to grow by just one per cent in 2023, less than half of last year’s level.
The number of people unemployed around the world was also expected to rise slightly to 208 million.
According to ILO’s World Employment and Social Outlook Trends report published on Monday, this corresponds to a global unemployment rate of 5.8 per cent – or 16 million people.
The UN report warned that the present economic slowdown “means that many workers will have to accept lower quality jobs, often at very low pay, sometimes with insufficient hours.”
This is likely already the case in Europe and other developed countries, thanks to the Ukraine war and the continued disruption of global supply chains, both of which are counteracting the robust stimulus packages implemented to ride out the COVID-19 crisis.
Richard Samans, Director of ILO’s Research Department, said:
“Real wages we project for 2022 to have declined by 2.2 per cent in advanced countries and of course, Europe makes up a significant proportion of advanced countries, versus a rise in real wages in developing countries.”
An equally worrying development was the probability that efforts would be dashed to help the world’s two billion informal workers join the formal employment sector to benefit from social protection and training opportunities.
Manuela Tomei, ILO’s Assistant Director-General for Governance, Rights and Dialogue, said:
“While between 2004 and 2019 we observed decline in incidence of informality globally of five percentage points, it is very likely that this progress will be reversed in the coming years.”
Tomei told journalists in Geneva that this was due to employment recovery
“especially in developing countries, has been biased very much towards informal jobs.”
The ILO report also warned that as prices rise faster than wages, the cost-of-living crisis risks pushing more people into poverty.
This trend comes on top of significant declines in income seen during the COVID-19 crisis, which affected low-income groups most in many countries.
