More ambitious actions needed to recover in 2021 — ILO

The International Labour Organization (ILO) has warned that ambitious actions are needed to recover in 2021.

In its 2021 Labour Overview Series, the ILO said the actions are needed for the regional labour market to recover in a year marked by new waves of contagion.

Specifically, the organization said 26 million jobs were lost in Latin America and the Caribbean during the pandemic, adding that the strong labour impact of COVID-19 was aggravated by pre-existing structural problems.

“Latin American and Caribbean region lost 26 million jobs as a result of the pandemic, and started 2021 with a complex employment landscape aggravated by new waves of contagion and slow vaccination processes that make the prospects for recovery in labour markets more uncertain,” a new technical note from the ILO said.

“The quest for better normality will require ambitious action to recover from setbacks in the world of work”, Vinícius Pinheiro, ILO Director for Latin America and the Caribbean said when commenting on the note, which presents the latest data on the impact of COVID-19 over the past year.

“It is now time to rebuild the jobs lost by the pandemic and create new decent work opportunities,” Pinheiro said, noting that despite adversity, action must be taken and consensus reached so that “2021 is the year of vaccination and economic recovery with more and better jobs”.

However, the ILO Regional Director highlighted that “in the pursuit of recovery, addressing pre-existing conditions in the region will be unavoidable and those conditions are key to understanding why the impact of the pandemic on employment was so strong. Many of the challenges we had before the pandemic remain in place, although they are now more urgent.

“High informality, small fiscal spaces, persistent inequality, low productivity and poor coverage of social protection, coupled with problems that still persist such as child labour and forced labour, are part of the ongoing challenges in the region”, he added.

The ILO regional technical note titled, ‘The employment crisis in the pandemic: Towards a human-centred job recovery’, emphasized that the labour impacts were devastating in the second quarter of 2020 when the employment and participation indicators plummeted, and then partially recovered.

However, by the end of 2020, the region’s average employment rate had fallen from 57.4 per cent to 51.7 per cent, a sharp drop equated to the loss of around 26 million jobs, of which 80 per cent, or more than 20 million people, left the workforce.

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