Issue #1441      3 February 2010

ILO: Decisiveness needed to save and create jobs

A jobless recovery is the scenario that appears from the just released ILO “Global Employment Trends 2010 Report”. International Labour Organisation 2010 data on employment trends do not come as a surprise. Still they are frightening as they show that there is no hope that employment rates will return soon to pre-crisis levels.

Furthermore employment conditions are deteriorating constantly both in the North and in the South, with a shift everywhere to precarious employment arrangements.

In a statement issued last week the ILO stresses that “the share of workers in vulnerable employment worldwide is estimated to reach over 1.5 billion, equivalent to over half (50.6 percent) of the world’s labour force. The number of women and men in vulnerable employment is estimated to have increased in 2009, by as much as 110 million compared to 2008.” Not only the good jobs that have been lost will not come back any time soon, but they will move to the less protected, less regulated, often “grey” segments of the labour market.

The global crisis should and could be the opportunity to bring work back to the centre of economies. Trade unions are demanding that a new model of growth centred on quality employment be the exit strategy from the crisis. On the contrary, stimulus and emergency measures have addressed corporate and banking and financial sectors interests rather than objectives of recovery in the labour market. Stimulus plans must urgently address employment generation as the primary goal and the condition for economic recovery.

The international economic and financial institutions were unable – or perhaps didn’t want – to see the crisis coming. The ILO said that the “governments of their member countries are obviously responsible for this; they should stop now their empty talks on the need for regulations and take concrete measures to come out of the crisis avoiding the return to business as usual and to the blind belief in the self-regulatory role of the market”.

Next article – Debt conflict riles Argentina

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