(Newser)
– Four times more jobs were lost last year due to the coronavirus pandemic than in the worst part of the global financial crisis of 2009, a UN report said on Monday. The International Labor Organization has estimated that restrictions on businesses and public life destroyed 8.8% of all working hours worldwide last year. This is equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs – four times the impact of the financial crisis a decade ago, the AP reports. “This was the worst labor crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Its impact is far greater than that of the global financial crisis of 2009,” said IOM Director-General Guy Ryder. The results were almost equally divided between reduced working hours and “unprecedented” job losses, he said.
The United Nations agency noted that most people who have lost their jobs have stopped looking for a job, probably due to restrictions on businesses that employ large numbers of people, such as restaurants, bars, shops, hotels and other dependent services. of face-to-face interactions. The decline in work translates into a $ 3.7 trillion loss in global revenue – what Ryder called an “extraordinary figure” – with women and young people having the most success. The IOM report expects a return to employment in the second half of the year. But that depends on reducing coronavirus infections and launching vaccines. Currently, infections are still growing or remain high in many countries, and the distribution of the vaccine is generally slow. (The pandemic helped put China’s economy on the fastest track to overtake the US.)