Global Labor Market to Recover by 2023: ILO

At least 220 million people are expected to remain unemployed worldwide this year, well above pre-pandemic levels, with a weak labor market recovery exacerbating existing inequalities, the International Labor Organization (ILO) warned on Wednesday. The UN agency forecasts that the outlook will improve to 205 million unemployed in 2022, a far cry from the 187 million recorded in 2019, according to the report 'Global Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2021.' According to the ILO, that equates to a global unemployment rate of 6.3 percent in 2021, falling to 5.7 percent next year, well above the pre-pandemic rate of 5.4 percent recorded in 2019.

“What our report shows essentially is that a recovery has begun, we are seeing it with increased economic growth, increased economic activity. But we will not by the end of next year, by the end of 2022, have recovered all of the damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,” ILO Director General Guy Ryder told Xinhua in an interview this week. “It is going to be a very uneven recovery because richer countries or higher-income countries are bouncing quickly. But unfortunately, lower-income countries have a very much tougher road to travel,” Ryder noted.

Women, young people and the 2 billion people working in the informal sector have been the hardest hit by the pandemic, with 108 million more workers worldwide now classified as poor or extremely poor compared to 2019, the report said. “As we recover, we need to develop policies that would help women come back into the labor market; we really cannot hope for our economies to prosper without the contribution of women,” Ryder added.

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