Create decent jobs, says ILO 

Fifty million people are currently unemployed worldwide as the global jobs crisis turned structural after the labor market failed to recover fully from the global financial meltdown of 2008, the International Labour Organization said Monday.   Plagued by growing number of poor people, countries like the Philippines must find a way to create decent jobs, ILO said in the paper “World of Work Report 2012.”   The Philippines, a lower middle-income country, is among those countries with an unchanged poverty rate since the 2008 crisis ushered in a global recession, according to the report.   The Philippines, it noted, shares similar woes with less developed economies such as Bangladesh and Cambodia in terms of lingering problems on lack of access to food, which ILO associates with poor people’s lack of access to land.   "Land has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few landowners and landlessness has been increasing over the past decades in a number of countries," according to the report by Raymond Torres, director of the ILO Institute for International Labour Studies.   The ILO report noted certain groups remain "trapped in poverty" due to low pay, saying, "... historically, poverty was associated with joblessness."   The phenomenon called “intergenerational transmission of poverty” from parents to children helps increase the long-term probability that the poor will remain in poverty.   With economies tied to austerity measures and have not been creating decent jobs for the poor, ILO is concerned about the slowdown in employment and sees no near-term recovery. 'Labor market imbalances'   "Four years into the global crisis, labor market imbalances are becoming more structural, and therefore more difficult to eradicate. Certain groups, such as the long-term unemployed, are at risk of exclusion from the labor market," the organization noted.   "This means that they would be unable to obtain new employment even if there were a strong recovery," it said.   The world economy will unlikely grow “at a sufficient pace” over the next two years and close the current jobs deficit and employ the more than 80 million people expected to enter the labor market in the near future, ILO noted.   It criticized the failure of large companies to invest in projects that generate jobs, saying un-invested cash in accounts of large firms has reached unprecedented levels, and urged government to adopt measures addressing the current problems in the labor market.   ILO said governments must pursue policy recommendations that would adopt a three-pronged approach that include strengthening labor market institutions to allow wages to grow in line with productivity, restore credit conditions and create a more favorable business environment for small enterprises, and promote employment while meeting fiscal goals.   The report called on countries to make job generation a priority over policy agenda, and to be coherent in terms of macroeconomic, employment and social policies.   Rich economies such as those in euro zone have been suffering from the devastating impact of fiscal austerity and tough labor market reforms that consequently failed to reduce fiscal deficits, according to the report.    "The narrow focus of many euro zone countries on fiscal austerity is deepening the jobs crisis and could even lead to another recession in Europe”, ILO said.   It noted countries, such as China and Indonesia, have chosen job-centered macroeconomic policies and achieved better economic and social outcomes.   “Many of them have also become more competitive and have weathered the crisis better than those that followed the austerity path. We can look carefully at the experience of those countries and draw lessons,” ILO said. —VS, GMA News