Covid-19 to Wipe Out Equivalent of 195m Jobs, Says UN Agency

Source: The Guardian

The disruption to the world’s economies caused by the Covid-19 pandemic is expected to wipe out 6.7% of working hours globally in the second quarter of this year – the equivalent of 195 million jobs worldwide, according to the UN’s labour body.

More than four fifths of workers globally live in countries affected by full or partial lockdown measures, the International Labour Organization (ILO) said in a report on Tuesday.

The agency welcomed fiscal and monetary measures applied so far but urged countries to take steps to keep people connected to jobs they are no longer able to do, so fewer will end up unemployed.

“What we do now in terms of maintaining that relationship between workers and their enterprises to keep them on the labour market, that will pay dividends when it comes to the trajectory and the gradient of recovery hopefully in the latter part of this year,” Briton Guy Ryder, the ILO’s director-general, told a news conference.