'Half a billion people struggling to find adequate paid work': UN

A recent UN report published showed that nearly half a billion people in the world struggled to find work, especially work which paid them adequately. The UN study also highlighted that unemployment further fueled poverty as well as inequality amongst the population. The report also spoke about how in 2020, unemployment was on a rise for the first time in almost a decade, with the number of people out of work escalating from about 2.5 million to more than 190 million. 

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UN's agency, the International Labour Organization (ILO) reported that out of a working-age population of 5.7 billion people around the world, 165 million people were employed but unable to find work with an adequate amount of paid hours to meet their needs.

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Over 100 million have 'given up' 

ILO further reported that around 119 million had given up actively searching for work. This had brought up the entire number of people being affected by this unemployment phase to about 473 million. The report comes after the UN last week revealed that trade tensions risked dragging down the global growth in 2020.

The ILO stated that countries around the world were missing out on harnassing the potential economic and social benefits of the massive human resources that they had. The ILO director-general also addressed the situation saying that it had become extremely difficult for people to move up the class ladder because the low paying jobs that they did were not contributing towards bettering their lives. 

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“For millions of ordinary people, it’s increasingly difficult to build better lives through work. Persisting and substantial work-related inequalities and exclusion are preventing them from finding decent work and better futures. That’s an extremely serious finding that has profound and worrying implications for social cohesion,”  said Guy Ryder, the director-general of the ILO

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(With inputs from Agencies)