Vulnerable employment peaks

GENEVA: Worldwide poverty among workers dropped drastically over a decade but progress stalled in 2013, the ILO said in its Global Employment Trends 2014 report.

In 2013, an estimated 375 million workers lived on less than US$1.25 a day, compared to 600 million in the early 2000s -- a 12 percent drop per year, on average. But progress has stalled, and in 2013 the number of workers in extreme poverty declined by only 2.7 percent globally.

This trend reflects a peak in vulnerable employment, which the ILO defines as the sum of own account workers and contributing family workers.

The number of people in vulnerable employment expanded by around one percent in 2013, well above the 0.2 percent growth rates during the years prior to the financial crisis.

For many people in the developing world, vulnerable and informal jobs remain the only work available. In most cases, those jobs entail low pay, limited job security, poor working conditions and little or no social protection.

"Bringing more workers out of informality remains crucial to improve working conditions and generate tax revenue that governments need to strengthen social welfare systems.

In this regard, further reductions in working poverty will be tightly linked to declining rates of informality," the report by the ILO's Research Department said.

Informal employment remains widespread in most developing countries even though regional variations are sizeable. Informality rates are particularly high in South and South-East Asia.

Even though progress in reducing poverty has been strongest in these regions, a high incidence of informal employment is likely to constitute a barrier to a sustainable reduction in poverty.

- ILO News