Global Employment Rate to Grow by one percent – ILO

The International Labour Organisation has said that global employment will grow by one percent in 2023, less than half the growth recorded in 2022.

According to ILO, global unemployment is expected to rise by around three million in 2023 to 208 million.

The Assistant Director-General of Jobs and Social Protection Cluster, ILO, Mia Seppo, in a statement said, “the cost-of-living crisis is pushing more people into poverty, including working poverty. The most vulnerable workers include 200 million people living in absolute poverty and two billion in the informal economy, where they frequently lack legal rights or social protection.”

According to her, in low-income countries, employment is not expected to recover to pre-pandemic levels this year.

“In those regions where unemployment is now below pre-crisis levels, our analysis shows this is mainly because of a shift into the informal economy, which probably postpones rather than resolves workers’ problems,” she added.

Meanwhile, Seppo called on Nigeria and other countries to speed up their actions in achieving Sustainable Development Goal 8 on Decent Work for All.

ILO said SDG Goal 8, which brings together social, economic, and environmental targets, has an impact on all other Agenda 2030 goals.

She said, “Generative artificial intelligence that augments human creativity, overheating megacities, these things were once the stuff of science fiction, but today they are the technological, demographic, and climate-change-related forces reshaping the way we work.

“What we don’t know is whether these forces will change our world of work for better or worse. This uncertainty is increased because the changes are occurring at a time of enormous existing challenges.”

She urged countries to ensure that those changes lead the world to the more equitable, sustainable, prosperous, and peaceful future that UN member states committed to when they adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015.

“This will be among the key questions to be addressed at the SDG Summit in New York in September,” she added.

ILO/Punch/Hauwa Abu