Women had a higher likelihood than men to lose their jobs because of the pandemic.
The same goes for the youth compared to adults, a new International Labor Organization (ILO) report showed.
“Increasing COVID cases and slow vaccine rollout will likely prolong the labor market crisis and hamper recovery,” said the report’s lead author, Christian Viegelahn of the Regional Economic and Social Analysis Unit of the ILO’s Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific.
“The impact of the pandemic on employment is unprecedented,”
he said in a press briefing.
Even during previous economic crises such as the Asian financial crisis in 1997 or the Great Recession in 2008-2009, employment had always been on the rise in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), he said.
It’s different this time. The largest working-hour losses in the region in 2020 were seen in the Philippines, reaching 13.6 percent. In contrast, working hours in countries like Thailand, Brunei and Laos dropped by only 4.3 to 4.5 percent.
The differences were driven, among other things, by the ability to control the pandemic and the long duration of strict lockdowns.
Agriculture has been less vulnerable compared to tourism. More affected are those in the global supply chains.
In Asean, 83 million jobs in global supply chains for manufacturing experienced a high adverse impact.
This year, 9.3 million fewer workers in Southeast Asia will be employed than expected in the absence of the pandemic.
Already 10.6 million were out of work and 7.8 percent of labor income was lost in 2020. Based on the year-on-year comparison to 2019, employment in Asean last year declined by what the report called a “staggering” 6.7 million jobs.
While 1.9 million were available for work and actively looked for a job, most of the 6.7 million who lost their job went idle in 2020. Some were discouraged searching for new jobs, others — in many cases women — simply gave up.
Worldwide, women workers had a higher likelihood of losing employment than males, the ILO report said.
Compared to employment levels in the Asean expected in the absence of the pandemic, employment in 2020 was 3.9 percent lower for women and 2.7 percent for men.
Young workers in the region were hard hit, their employment losses down by 6.2 percent, compared with 2.8 percent for adults. Many young workers remain jobless or idle.
The region is projected to see working hour losses of 7.4 percent in 2021 in Asean, equivalent to the working time of about 21 million full-time workers in Asean, assuming a 48-hour week. There were working hour losses of 8.4 percent in 2020, equivalent to the working time of about 24 million fulltime workers.
Labor income went down by $100 billion in 2020. That’s 7.8 percent of labor income (using 2019 market exchange rates) or 3.3 percent of the region’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2019.
This drop was slightly smaller than global income losses, but higher than regional Asia-Pacific income losses.
As of May 31, Asean collectively allocated nearly 16 percent of GDP on the fiscal stimulus response.
At the upper tier, Malaysia and Singapore invested around 30 percent of their respective economies to counter COVID-19. Conversely, it’s less than 1 percent of GDP in Myanmar and Laos.
Sizeable investments were made to assist the most vulnerable and hard hit, including small enterprises in Brunei and the Philippines, garment manufacturing and tourism in Cambodia which predominantly employ women, and low-paid workers in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.
“The crisis has laid bare the vulnerabilities of the economies and labor markets in the region,” said Chihoko Asada-Miyakawa, ILO’s assistant director-general and regional director for Asia and the Pacific.
“With the situation likely to persist for some time, the urgency grows for Aseancountries to accelerate the policies and programs that will boost the resilience of enterprises, workers and households and set stronger foundations for decent work for all,” she added.
