Labour market recovery from the pandemic shocks had stalled during 2021, with little progress being made since the fourth quarter of 2020, the eighth edition of the ‘ILO Monitor: COVID-19 and the World of Work’ said.

Bangladesh’s working hours in 2020 were 11.9 per cent below levels attained in the last quarter of 2019, which was equal to nearly eight million full-time jobs, it showed.

The report showed a stalled global recovery and significant disparities between advanced and developing economies in recovering labour market from the impacts of the pandemic.

The loss of working hours in 2021 because of the pandemic will be significantly higher than previously estimated, as a two-speed recovery between developed and developing nations threatens the global economy as a whole, the ILO report said.

“After some significant gains in the second half of 2020, the recovery in working hours has stalled during 2021. During the third quarter of 2021, it is estimated that global hours worked (adjusted for population aged 15-64) were still 4.7 per cent below the level of the fourth quarter of 2019 (the pre-crisis benchmark), equivalent to the loss of 137 million full-time jobs,’ it said.

According to the report, this global picture was of a ‘great divergence’ between richer and poorer economies, which reflected, to a large degree, the evolution of the pandemic, and the uneven availability of fiscal stimulus and vaccines.

The ILO Monitor report said that progress in vaccination had emerged as a critical factor for labour market recovery as higher vaccination rates were associated with less stringent workplace restrictions.

The report mentioned that the latest global estimates and country-level data confirmed the unequal employment impact of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, as well as the fragile, and often diverging, recovery trends over the first half of 2021.

“The number of people employed and participating in the labour force has not fully recovered and ‘labour market slack’ remains significant in many countries. Young people, especially young women, continue to face greater employment deficits, while the situation continues to be lagging in middle-income countries,” the report identified.

Globally, losses in hours worked—in the absence of any vaccines—would have stood at 6 per cent in the second quarter of 2021, rather than the 4.8 per cent actually recorded, the report said.

ILO estimated that if low-income countries had more equitable access to vaccines, working-hour recovery would catch up with richer economies in just over one quarter.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS)