UN Says More Than 5M Will Lose Jobs

[flashl]

Source: Washington Post

GENEVA -- More than 5 million people will lose their jobs this year as the world economy slows, an official at the U.N. labor agency said Thursday.

Most job losses will occur in rich countries, but millions of "working poor" in the developing world who won't be counted also will suffer, said Dorothea Schmidt, an economist at the International Labor Organization.

Schmidt said the latest global growth figures from the International Monetary Fund prompted the labor agency to review its jobs forecast for 2008. The Washington-based IMF cut its growth projection from 4.4 percent to 4.1 percent Tuesday.

But with the IMF's revised growth rate, "there will be a larger impact than the 5 million we estimated," Schmidt said. She added it was too soon to give precise figures as job losses would depend on growth rates in individual countries.

Unemployment figures are drawn largely from industrialized countries that can afford to support workers who have lost their jobs, she said. Tens of millions of people in poorer countries would also be affected by a global downturn but would not appear in the unemployment figures.

"The 1.2 billion people at the working poverty level of $2 a day, and the additional almost 500 million working poor at the $1 a day level _ this number will increase dramatically," Schmidt said.

Washington Post

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/31/AR2008013102724_pf.html

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"The 1.2 billion people at the working poverty level of $2 a day, and the additional almost 500 million working poor at the $1 a day level."

This is indeed a prison planet. The daily wage suggests to me, sweatshops around the globe will be shutting down. In a sense thats a good thing, OTOH, will the workers be left to eat dirt too?

[SpiralHawk]

1. "Yeah, but they are just proles, so it don't matter" - Commander AWOL & republicon cronies

"We've got our oil & munitions profits, so those noisy proles can just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Smirk. The wealth of nations will eventually trickle down upon them. Smirk."

- Commander AWOL & republicon homelander fatcat cronies

[Doctor Cynic]

2. "500 million working poor at the $1 a day level"

While it's still unjust to see anyone making that much, this figure is vastly smaller than numbers 10 or 20 years ago. It's been said that 50,000 people leave extreme poverty every day, so I can only hope they can accelerate the current process.