GENEVA - Taking a global view, the 4th edition of the KILM says that currently half the world's workers still do not earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the US$2 a day poverty line.
"The key message is that up to now better jobs and income for the world's workers has not been a priority in policy-making," said ILO Director-General Juan Somavia at the time of the release. "Globalization has so far not led to the creation of sufficient and sustainable decent work opportunities around the world. That has to change, and as many leaders have already said we must make decent work a central objective of all economic and social policies. This report can be a useful tool for promoting that objective."
The study found that while in some areas of Asia economic expansion is fostering solid growth in jobs and improvements in living conditions, other areas such as Africa and parts of Latin America are seeing increasing numbers of people working in less favourable conditions, especially in the agricultural sector. The KILM also said that for millions of workers, new jobs often provide barely enough income to lift them above the poverty line, or are far below any adequate measure of satisfying and productive work. The total number of working women and men living on less than US$2 a day has not fallen over the past decade, although at 1.38 billion it is a smaller share of global employment at just below 50 per cent, a decline from 57 per cent in 1994.
The report emphasized that in many developing economies the problem is mainly a lack of decent and productive work opportunities rather than outright unemployment. Women and men are working long and hard for very little because their only alternative is to have no income at all.
The new KILM painted an in-depth picture of both the quantity and quality of jobs around the world by examining 20 key indicators of the labour market. The KILM covers quantitative topics such as labour force participation; employment; inactivity; employment elasticities; sectoral employment; labour productivity and unemployment; and qualitative issues such as hours worked, wages, employment status, unemployment duration and others.
For additional information, please visit http://kilm.ilo.org/2005/press
Note 1 - Key Indicators of the Labour Market, 4th edition, CD-ROM version, ILO, Geneva, 2005: ISBN 92-2-017568-1. Print version: ISBN 92-1-113381-8.