UN sees 'catastrophic' hit to jobs due to COVID-19

The coronavirus pandemic is hitting jobs worse than feared, the UN said on Wednesday, with hundreds of millions of jobs lost and workers suffering a massive drop in earnings.

The International Labour Organization’s latest study found that by mid-year, global working hours had declined 17.3 percent compared with last December — equivalent to nearly 500 million full-time jobs.

That is nearly 100 million more job-equivalents than the number forecast by the ILO back in June, when it expected 14 percent of working hours to be lost by the end of the second quarter period of the year.

“The impact has been catastrophic,” ILO chief Guy Ryder told reporters in a virtual briefing, pointing out that global labor income had shrunk 10.7 percent during the first nine months of the year compared with the same period in 2019.

That amounts to a drop of US$3.5 trillion, or 5.5 percent of global GDP, the ILO said.

The coronavirus has killed nearly 1 million people worldwide. And more than 31 million are infected with COVID-19.

In addition to the health challenges, lockdowns, travel restrictions and other measures taken to rein in the virus have had a devastating impact on jobs and income across the globe.

The ILO also warned that the outlook for the final three months of 2020 had “worsened significantly” since its last report in June.

The organization had previously forecast global working hours would be 4.9 percent lower in the fourth quarter than a year earlier, but said it now expected an 8.6 percent drop, which corresponds to 245 million full-time jobs.

It explained that workers in developing and emerging economies, especially those in informal jobs, had been much more affected than in previous crises.

The ILO also said that while many of the most stringent workplace closures have been relaxed, 94 percent of the world’s workers were in countries where some sort of workplace restrictions remain in place.

And Sangheon Lee, head of ILO’s employment policy division, warned the situation for workers could worsen.

If second waves of COVID-19 infections bring tighter restrictions and new lockdowns, he said, “the impact on the labor market could be comparable to the magnitude we saw in the second quarter of this year.”

Ryder cautioned against those pushing for policy makers to focus on economy over health.

“It is very clear ... that the capacity and the speed with which the global economy can get out of its labor market slump is intimately linked to our capacity to control the pandemic,” he said.

“These two things are very, very intimately intertwined, and we have to act on that understanding.”

The ILO’s report showed the labor market devastation could have been worse.

Without such stimulus efforts — amounting to around US$9.6 trillion globally — global working hours would have shrunk 28 percent in the second quarter.