Global Employment Trends Report 2009

"The global financial crisis has triggered a serious slowdown in world economic growth including recession in the largest industrialized countries. Enterprises have stopped hiring and many are laying off workers in considerable numbers. This report examines what we know already about the impact of the crisis on jobs and what we could expect from several possible scenarios of the way it might evolve in the year ahead. In 2008, an estimated 6.0 per cent of the world?s workers were not working but looking for a job, up from 5.7 per cent in 2007. Experience shows that the longer people stay out of work the more their "employability? deteriorates, making it progressively harder to get back into work. This is especially worrying for young workers who may get trapped into a lifetime of weak attachment to the labour market alternating between low paid insecure work and outright unemployment. In many developing countries well over half of the workforce is employed in conditions that fall short of decent work, and breaking out of such situations is at the core of the global development challenge set out in the Millennium Declaration and its poverty-reducing goals. This report utilizes working poor and those in vulnerable employment (i.e. unpaid contributing family workers and own-account workers) which are workers most likely to be characterized by low and insecure employment, low earnings and productivity to help better understand labour market trends in developing economies. (...)"