Labour

2020 May Day: ILO highlights challenges amidst COVID-19 pandemic

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The Director-General, International Labour Organisation (ILO), Guy Ryder, has said the big challenge for all on the occasion  of 2020 May Day celebration amidst COVID-19 pandemic, is how to protect ourselves and families from the virus and how to hold on to our jobs.

In a statement released from Geneva, the ILO director general stated that the stakes have never been higher with the current number of COVID-19 cases globally, the number of deaths and the the expected loss of millions of jobs.

“In these times of COVID-19, the big challenge for most of us is how to protect ourselves and our families from the virus and how to hold on to our jobs.

For policy-makers, that translates into beating the pandemic without doing irreversible damage to the economy in the process.

“With over three million cases and some 217,000 victims of the virus to date globally, and the expected loss of the equivalent of 305 million jobs worldwide by mid-year, the stakes have never been higher.”

He stated that governments across the world should continue to ‘follow the science’ in the search for the best solutions while foregoing the obvious benefits of much greater international cooperation in building the needed global response to the global challenge.

According to him: “But with the war against COVID-19 still to be won, it has become commonplace that what awaits us after victory is a ‘new normal’ in the way society is organised and the way we will work.”

This, he said is hardly reassuring, adding,

“Because nobody seems able to say what the new normal will be, because the message is that it will be dictated by the constraints imposed by the pandemic rather than our choices and preferences.

“So May 1, the international day of labour is the right occasion to look more closely at this new normal, and start on the task of making it a better normal, not so much for those who already have much, but for those who so obviously have too little.

“This pandemic has laid bare in the cruellest way, the extraordinary precariousness and injustices of our world of work. It is the decimation of livelihoods in the informal economy where six out of ten workers make a living – which has ignited the warnings from our colleagues in the World Food Programme, of the coming pandemic of hunger.”

“It is the gaping holes in the social protection systems of even the richest countries, which have left millions in situations of deprivation. It is the failure to guarantee workplace safety that condemns nearly three million to die each year because of the work they do.

“And it is the unchecked dynamic of growing inequality which means that if, in medical terms, the virus does not discriminate between its victims in its social and economic impact, it discriminates brutally against the poorest and the powerless.”

“And in times of global emergencies such as this, it would be to any country’s detriment if the post is not fully-equipped to function optimally when there is a shutdown of economic activities.

“A country with the right postal infrastructure, provides government with good network for implementing of its programmes.

“They include:  social security, dissemination of public information, distribution of medical and humanitarian equipment,” he said.

He reiterated the need for an efficient and comprehensive postal system that will fill in the gap in the face of global emergency.

“This is a period when postal services in most countries are at the fore-front of activities to reach their populace in this time of lockdowns.

“We also need to be digitally equipped for times like this.

“Investing and adopting the digital address system, where every Nigerian can be digitally traced via an address will help NIPOST achieve its distribution targets,” he added.

He added that NIPOST was doing its best as much as possible to withstand nature, disasters, and help the country recover.

 

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