The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has warned world leaders that there is an urgent challenge to create 600 million productive jobs over the next decade in order to generate sustainable growth and maintain social cohesion in 2012.
This was disclosed recently at its annual report, entitled ‘Global Employment Trends Report (GETR).
The ILO also warned that the world would face the additional challenge of creating decent jobs for the estimated 900 million workers living with their families below the $2 a day poverty line, mostly in developing countries.
According to ILO’s director-general, Juan Samovia,? “the GETR 2012 says 74.8 million youth aged 15-24 were unemployed in 2011, an increase of more than 4 million since 2007. It adds that, globally, young people are nearly three times as likely as adults to be unemployed. The global youth unemployment rate, at 12.7 per cent, remains a full percentage point above the pre-crisis level.”
According to the report, young people continue to be among the hardest hit by the jobs crisis. Judging by the present course, the report says, there is little hope for a substantial improvement in their near-term employment prospects.
He said: “After three years of continuous crisis conditions in global labour markets and against the prospect of a further deterioration of economic activity, there is a backlog of global unemployment of 200 million.
“Moreover, the report says more than 400 million new jobs will be needed over the next decade to absorb the estimated 40 million growth of the labour force each year.
“Despite strenuous government efforts, the jobs crisis continues unabated, with one in three workers worldwide – or an estimated 1.1 billion people – either unemployed or living in poverty. And what is needed is that job creation in the real economy must become our number one priority,” he further said.
The ILO director-general emphasized that the recovery that started in 2009 has been short-lived and that there are still 27 million more unemployed workers than at the start of the crisis.
“The fact that economies are not generating enough employment is reflected in the employment-to-population ratio (the proportion of the working-age population in employment), which suffered the largest decline on record between 2007 was 61.2 per cent and 2010 was 60.2 per cent”.
“At the same time, there are nearly 29 million fewer people in the labour force now and if these discouraged workers were counted as unemployed, then global unemployment would swell from the current 197 million to 225 million, and the unemployment rate would rise from 6 per cent to 6.9 per cent,” he stated.
The report paints three scenarios for the employment situation in the future as the baseline projection shows an additional three million unemployed for 2012, rising to 206 million by 2016. If global growth rates fall below 2 per cent, then unemployment would rise to 204 million in 2012.