World’s Workers Lost $3.5tr in Wages amid Pandemic: UN

With hundreds of millions of jobs lost and employees experiencing a "massive" drop in earnings, the coronavirus pandemic is taking a heavier toll on jobs than previously feared, the UN said Wednesday.

The International Labour Organization ( ILO) found in a new report that global working hours had decreased by 17.3 per cent by mid-year compared to last December, equivalent to almost 500 million full-time jobs, reports BBC.

That is almost 100 million more workers, equal to the amount projected by the ILO back in June when 14% of working hours were expected to be lost by the end of the second three-month stretch of the year.

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

That amounts to a decline of some 3.5 trillion dollars or 5.5% of the global gross domestic product ( GDP) as a whole, the ILO said.

After the introduction of the novel coronavirus in China late last year, nearly one million people worldwide have been killed out of more than 31 million infected.

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.

‘Worsened significantly’

The ILO also cautioned that the outlook for the final three months of 2020 had "significantly deteriorated" since its last June survey.

The organisation had previously projected that in the fourth quarter, global working hours would be 4.9 percent lower than a year ago, but said it now anticipated a decrease of 8.6 percent, equivalent to 245 million full-time jobs.

It explained that workers were much more affected than in past crises in developed and emerging economies, especially those in informal employment. The ILO also pointed out that while many of the most serious workplace closures have been eased, 94% of the world 's employees are in countries where there are still some form of workplace restrictions.

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

If second waves of infections bring tighter restrictions and new lockdowns, he said, “the impact on the labour 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 in their response to the pandemic.

“It is very clear … that the capacity and the speed with which the global economy can get out of its labour 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.”

Meanwhile, the ILO report showed that the destruction of the labor market could have been worse without the various fiscal stimulus packages offered by governments.

It said that global working hours would have decreased by a complete 28 percent in the second quarter without such stimulus efforts, amounting to about $9.6 trillion globally.

But it cautioned that fiscal stimulus was distributed very unevenly, with low- and middle-income countries receiving total funding of about $982 billion less than their wealthier counterparts.

Ryder urged international efforts to close the gap, maintaining that "no group, nation or region alone can resolve this crisis."