January 17: The United Nations (UN) has warned that an impending global economic slowdown will force more workers into accepting lower quality, poorly-paid jobs which lack job security and social protection in 2023, while inflation gobbles up real-term wages.

The cost-of-living crisis due to sharp rise in prices compared to incomes will risk pushing more people into poverty, the UN's International Labour Organization (ILO) warned on Monday.

According to the ILO, unemployment around the world is set to rise this year accentuating inequalities exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis.

The ILO said deficits in decent work had been worsened by multiple overlapping crises, including Russia-Ukraine war, emerging geopolitical tensions, an uneven recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and continuing supply chain bottlenecks.

The ILO’s World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2023, also projects that global employment growth will be only 1.0 per cent in 2023, less than half the level in 2022. Global unemployment is slated to rise slightly in 2023, by around 3 million, to 208 million (corresponding to a global unemployment rate of 5.8 per cent). The moderate size of this projected increase is largely due to tight labour supply in high-income countries. This would mark a reversal of the decline in global unemployment seen between 2020-2022. It means that global unemployment will remain 16 million above the pre-crisis benchmark (set in 2019).

"Together, these have created the conditions for stagflation -- simultaneously high inflation and low growth -- for the first time since the 1970s," the agency said in its annual World Employment and Social Outlook report.

In addition to unemployment “job quality remains a key concern”, the report says, adding that “decent work is fundamental to social justice”. A decade of progress in poverty reduction faltered during the COVID-19 crisis. Despite a nascent recovery during 2021, the continuing shortage of better job opportunities is likely to worsen, the study says.

“The current slowdown means that many workers will have to accept lower quality jobs, often at very low pay, sometimes with insufficient hours. Furthermore, as prices rise faster than nominal labour incomes, the cost-of-living crisis risks pushing more people into poverty. This trend comes on top of significant declines in income seen during the COVID-19 crisis, which in many countries affected low-income groups worst,” states the report.

According to AFP, ILO director general Gilbert Houngbo said the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic was particularly patchy in low- and middle-income countries, and was further hampered by climate change and humanitarian challenges.

"Projections of a slowdown in economic and employment growth in 2023 imply that most countries will fall short of a full recovery to pre-pandemic levels in the foreseeable future," AFP quoted the former prime minister of Togo as saying in the report.

"Worse still, progress in labour markets is likely to be far too slow to reduce the enormous decent work deficits that existed prior to, and were exacerbated by, the pandemic."

The report also identifies a new, comprehensive measure of unmet need for employment – the global jobs gap. As well as those who are unemployed, this measure includes people who want employment but are not actively searching for a job, either because they are discouraged or because they have other obligations such as care responsibilities. The global jobs gap stood at 473 million in 2022, around 33 million above the level of 2019.