Pandemic still taking heavy toll on jobs: UN

Pandemic still taking heavy toll on jobs: UN

GENEVA: The COVID-19 crisis is continuing to hit jobs hard around the world, the United Nations said yesterday, warning it could take years for employment levels to reach pre-pandemic levels. In a new study, the UN’s International Labor Organization revised its previous forecast that the global employment market will make a nearly full recovery from the virus this year.

Blaming the impacts of COVID variants like Delta and Omicron and uncertainty around how the pandemic will evolve, it now projects a significant deficit in working hours in 2022 compared to before COVID-19 emerged. “Global labor markets are recovering from the crisis much more slowly than we previously expected,” ILO chief Guy Ryder told reporters, warning that the outlook “remains fragile”. “We are already seeing potentially lasting damage to labor markets, along with concerning increases in poverty and inequality.”

Yesterday’s report predicted that global working hours would be two percent below the numbers seen in 2019, leaving the world short of the equivalent of some 52 million jobs. Last May, the ILO predicted the working hour shortage would be just half that this year. At the same time, the global official unemployment rate remains significantly higher than before the pandemic hit.

This year, 5.9