Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
It may come as no surprise
that the number of unemployed in 2009
reached the highest level on record at 212 million.
An unprecedented 34 million people
have lost their jobs since the onset of the crisis.
(Lawrence Jeffrey Johnson) -The increase that we’ve seen
is the largest since we began tracking
these global and regional trends in 1991
and in some countries we actually know
this increase in unemployment is the largest they’ve seen since the Great Depression.-
Developed economies and EU countries make up a small part of the global workforce
but accounted for more than 40% of the increase in unemployment since 2007.
According to ILO projections,
an additional 3 million jobs could be lost in the region in 2010.
East Asia, led by a rapid improvement in the Chinese domestic market
saw only a slight increase in unemployment.
Central and southeastern Europe felt the most severe shock
with a two percentage point increase in its unemployment rate.
But the crisis goes well beyond the unemployment numbers.
In many parts of the world,
people who lose their jobs simply cannot afford to be unemployed,
doing any kind of work they can to survive.
(Lawrence Jeffrey Johnson) -With the economic crisis,
we know that vulnerable employment makes up more than half of the global unemployment.
If you look at it from a different dimension in terms of working poor,
we see that the crisis itself could push an additional 100 million people
into the ranks of the working poor in the most extreme levels.
If you look at the 2 dollar per working poor line,
that could be as much as 200 million.-
The number of unemployed young people increased by over 10 million
compared to pre-crisis levels,
the largest hike since 1991.
Many simply stay in school
rather than take a chance in a discouraging labour market.
And many older workers
having seen the value of their pension funds decline sharply
have no option to retire at this stage.
(Lawrence Jeffrey Johnson) - What we need to be looking at now
as the economy is recovering,
how do we stabilize the labour markets,
how do we basically get labour markets to grow?
So stimulus packages are going to be refocused in that direction,
more so to help create decent and productive jobs,
to try to even further reduce the levels of unemployment
that we’ve been seeing globally,
but more importantly to address the issues of vulnerable and working poor.
The ILO has been at the forefront putting up a Global Jobs Pact
to try to give advice and support to countries
to determine the best practices and the best ways forward.