30 April, 2012In the International Labour Organization's annual report on global labour conditions released March 30, the UN agency predicts that European social unrest will heighten this year as governments continue to forge ahead with ill-advised austerity policies. It also forecasts that over 202 million people worldwide will be unemployed in 2012.
GLOBAL: The World of Work Report 2012 states that 2012 global unemployment will increase to 202 million from 196 million in 2011. The report says this figure is likely to increase by another five million in 2013, and up to 210 million by 2016.
"Four years into the global crisis, labour market imbalances are becoming more structural, and therefore more difficult to eradicate," the report states. "Certain groups, such as the long-term unemployed, are at risk of exclusion from the labour market.
"For a growing proportion of workers who do have a job, employment has become more precarious. In advanced economies, involuntary part-time employment and temporary employment have increased in two-thirds and more than half of these economies."
The ILO report condemns the austerity policies in many industrialized countries, making the inevitable obvious: employers gaining greater latitude to sack workers, lower pay and corresponding social benefits, with an effect of reducing "job stability and exacerbate inequalities while failing to boost unemployment levels."
The result has been vast increases of long-term unemployed, with upwards of 40 per cent of job seekers in developed nations between the ages of 25 and 49 not having worked in more than a year.
The ILO said societies are "becoming increasingly anxious about the lack of decent jobs." It says that 106 countries surveyed that have available data, 57 of them indicate an increase in the Social Unrest Index for 2011 over 2010.
"The two regions of the world that show the most heightened risk of unrest are Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa but there are also important increases in advanced economies and also in Central and Eastern Europe."
The ILO report expressed grave concern at the way young people are being shut out of labour markets, as well as the rise of short-term contracts, which, it says, affect young adults and women the most. "Youth unemployment rates have increased in about 80 per cent of the advanced economies," the report says.
For a copy of the report go to: http://www.ilo.org/global/publications/books/world-of-work/lang--en/index.htm