The transition from school to work, from childhood to adult life, can determine a person’s chances of escaping poverty. About 100 million young people enter the global workforce every year, mainly in developing countries.
With more than 1 billion of the world’s population today between 15 and 25 years of age, this trend is set to continue through to 2015 and beyond.
If, as they reach adulthood and themselves become parents, they are able to find decent and productive employment, a huge step can be made towards reducing and eliminating extreme poverty.
Current trends are not encouraging. In most developing countries, young women and men face the choice of informal work or no work. The ILO estimates that around 74 million young women and men are unemployed throughout the world, accounting for 41 per cent of all the 180 million unemployed persons globally,and many more young people are working long hours for low pay, struggling to eke out a living in the informal economy.
An estimated 59 million young people between 15 and 17 years of age are engaged in hazardous work.
Young people actively seeking to participate in the world of work are two to three times more likely than older generations to find themselves unemployed. In many countries, young women are more likely to be unable to find work than young men.
Those with less than 12 years’ schooling and a low level of educational attainment are also particularly disadvantaged.
Young workers, especially those seeking their first job, are acutely affected by the overall state of demand for labour. When the business cycle turns down, employers first stop hiring, then lay off those most recently taken on. Youth unemployment is about 30 per cent in Panama, Uruguay and Venezuela and about 40 per cent in Argentina and Colombia. The worst affected are the poor. In 1997, before the onset of the current crisis, open youth unemployment in Argentina from poor urban households was 55 per cent, compared with a national average for all young people of 24 per cent.
With seven out of ten new jobs in Latin America created in the informal economy over the decade of the 1990s, income earned by young people aged 20 to 24 is half that of adults and, for those under 19, only 30 per cent. In Africa, where up to 55 per cent of the population is under 18 years old in some countries, youth unemployment is 56 per cent in South Africa and between 30 and 40 per cent in Algeria, Egypt and Morocco. In Asia and the Pacific, the ILO estimates that about 30 per cent of the region’s 650 million young people are not in regular work.
The cost of youth unemployment to economic and social development is extremely high. It perpetuates the inter-generational cycle of poverty and is associated with high levels of crime, violence, substance abuse and the rise of political extremism. In some countries virtually the only paid occupation open to many young men is to join the various armed groups involved in civil conflict. For young women, the dangers of entrapment in the sex industry are widespread.
Yet the current generation of young workers are the most educated in human history. Their expectations are high, fuelled by the images spread by the international entertainment industry. In September 2000, the Millennium Summit resolved to “develop and implement strategies that give young people everywhere a real chance to find decent and productive work”.
This is a pledge that the world cannot afford not to honour.
To learn more about this author, visit International Labour Organization's Website.
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International Labour Organization
(Visit International's Website)
As the world's only tripartite
multilateral agency, the ILO is dedicated
to bringing decent work and livelihoods,
job-related security and better living
standards to the people of both poor and
rich countries. It helps to attain those
goals by promoting rights at work,
encouraging opportunities for decent
employment, enhancing social protection
and strengthening dialogue on work-related
issues.
The ILO is the international meeting place
for the world of work. We are the experts
on work and employment and particularly on
the critical role that these issues play
in bringing about economic development and
progress. At the heart of our mission is
helping countries build the institutions
that are the bulwarks of democracy and to
help them become accountable to the
people.
The ILO formulates international labour
standards in the form of Conventions and
Recommendations setting minimum standards
of basic labour rights: freedom of
association, the right to organize,
collective bargaining, abolition of forced
labour, equality of opportunity and
treatment and other standards addressing
conditions across the entire spectrum of
work-related issues.
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