Full at http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org. This was on countrpunch, too,
but I have added links in the blog post.
Economists never say much about work. They talk about the supply of and the
demand for labor, but they have very little to say about the nature of the work
we do. Like most commentators, they seem to believe that modern economies will
require ever more skilled work, which will be done in clean and quiet
workplaces, by educated workers, who will share in decision-making with
managerial facilitators. We should disabuse ourselves of such notions. In the
world today, the overwhelming majority of workers do hard and dangerous labor,
risking the health of their bodies and minds every minute they toil.
The International Labor Organization (ILO), an agency of the United Nations,
issued its Global Employment Trends this past January. The report examines
unemployment, poverty employment, and vulnerable employment. The unemployed
are those not working but actively searching for employment. The working poor
are those with jobs that do not provide above a threshold amount of money. Two
thresholds are used: $1.25 per day (in 2005 prices), which is “extreme
poverty,” and $2.00 per day, which is just “poverty.” People in vulnerable
employment are the self-employed (called in the report “own-account” workers)
and unpaid but working family members in the household of the self-employed.
In most of the world, vulnerable employment is what is known as casual work;
the workers who do this do not have formal arrangements with an employer, such
as a labor contract with stipulated wages. A man selling lottery tickets on a
street corner, a woman hawking tamales in a parking lot, or a teenager offering
rickshaw rides are examples of vulnerable employment. A child helping her
mother sell the tamales is an example of an unpaid family member doing
vulnerable work. In all countries, and especially in rich ones, not all
self-employment is vulnerable. However, in all countries, but mostly in poor
ones, the vast majority of the self-employed are poor and vulnerable.
The ILO estimates the number of people in each of the three categories
(unemployed, working poor, vulnerably employed) in 2009 under three scenarios.
The deep economic downturn now afflicting most of the world has befuddled most
economists, who neither saw it coming nor have been able to say how much worse
it will get. To compensate for the uncertainty enveloping the global economy,
the ILO economists have made three estimates of the three labor market
categories. The details of the three “scenarios” are not important for our
purposes. But, given the severity of the “great recession” we are now
experiencing, the deepest since the 1930s, the third or pessimistic scenario
seems the most realistic. Relief is nowhere in sight, especially for the
world’s workers.
Here are the numbers for 2009, under the pessimistic scenario, for world
unemployment, working poor, and vulnerable employment:
Unemployment: 230 million (7.1 percent of a world labor force of
about 3.24 billion)
Worki Working Poor (using $2 per day as poverty threshold): 1.377
billion (about 46 percent of total world employment of about three billion)
Vulnerable employment: 1.606 billion
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