LABOUR: Unemployment Soars to One Billion

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Nov 26 1996 (IPS) - The global outlook on unemployment is grim. Roughly one billion people in the world, one third of the labourforce, are in need of work today, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) reported Tuesday.

The phenomenon affects industrialised countries as well as the developing world. The figures provided in the study “Employment in the World, 1996/97” presented by ILO General Director Michel Hansenne refer to both under- and unemployment.

At least 34 million people in the world’s wealthiest countries — grouped in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — fall into those two categories.

Unemployment in the European Union climbed to 11.3 percent of the economically active population last year. The countries that registered the greatest rise in unemployment were Germany, France, Italy and Sweden.

And although unemployment dropped to under five percent in the United States and a similar phenomenon was seen in Great Britain, the distribution of income became more skewed in both nations.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, unemployment rose from eight to 10 percent in Colombia, while urban unemployment grew in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Jamaica, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela.

The ILO report states that few statistics are available on direct employment in sub-Saharan Africa and many parts of Asia. But it added that there is no doubt that unemployment and poverty have continued to grow in low-income regions.

A study of the manufacturing sectors of 26 developing nations revealed that Chile, Jordan and Mauritius are the only developing countries outside of east and southeast Asia that have enjoyed significant growth in employment over the past 20 years.

Hansenne stated at a press conference that only an international commitment to working towards full employment would allow poverty and employment problems to be overcome in the world. “Not only is it cruel but also pernicious to assume that nothing can be done to reduce unemployment,” said Hansenne, who underlined that full employment is both a “desirable and achievable” goal.

The ILO study states that unemployment has risen due to low rates of economic growth in industrialised countries since 1973 and the incapability of developing nations to bounce back from the crisis of the 1980s. Other factors it mentions are the slow adjustment of wages to the drop in productivity of the workforce, and the appearance of wage inflation, which remained steady until the mid-1980s.

Other causes, the ILO report indicates, is the exclusion from the workforce of the long-term unemployed, and the shift of millions of employees to unstable forms of work in the informal sector.

The ILO rejects the idea that the globalisation of the economy has pushed unemployment up, although Hansenne acknowledged that the phenomenon has given rise to “anguish and anxiety.”

The report notes that fast-growing Asian economies have demonstrated that the application of appropriate national policies and the intensification of “global trade and investment flows create abundant possibilities for boosting rates of growth and the creation of jobs.”

The employment situation has been aggravated by a dramatic rise in the ranks of the working poor, a phenomenon related to the polarisation of wages and chiefly seen in the United States and Great Britain.

In the United States, a stagnation of real wages and a drop in the proportion of workers earning mid-level wages have given rise to the risk that the share of the workforce earning poverty-level wages will grow, the report warns.