UN warns global jobs crisis may last eight years

The jobs crisis presently sweeping the globe may last for eight years, according to a report issued Wednesday by the International Labor Organization (ILO). The United Nations agency, meeting in Geneva, warned that sustained high levels of unemployment will imperil “social and political stability” internationally.

In his report to the Geneva conference, ILO Director-General Juan Somavia reported that “the global economic downturn has unleashed a deep and broad jobs crisis leading to a growing social recession worldwide.” He warned that “unemployment is expected to continue rising until the end of 2010, probably 2011.”

“Prolonged employment crises carry major risks for social and political stability,” the document states, adding, “The consequences for personal and family well-being, the welfare of societies, the stability of nations, and the credibility of national and multilateral governance are incalculable.”

Moreover, it quotes the recent testimony of the US director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, who told Congress: “The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications.” The report continues, noting that Blair “further explained that economic crises persisting over one to two years increased the risk of regime-threatening instability.”

The ILO’s answer to this desperate crisis is as empty as its warnings are stark. It has proposed a “Global Jobs Pact,” which consists of little more than a pious appeal to the world’s governments “to place employment and labor market issues, together with social protection and respect for workers’ rights, at the heart of stimulus packages and other relevant national policies to confront the crisis.” It likewise advocates “social dialogue”—by which it means tripartite collaboration between big business, the government and the trade union bureaucracies—as a “consensus-building tool.”

The reality, however, is that in country after country, the capitalist solution to the crisis is the destruction of jobs and living standards of working people. Within this process, the unions, in the US, Britain, Germany and elsewhere, have collaborated in cutting wages and giving up jobs, while seeking to divert the anger of workers along nationalist and protectionist lines in order to protect the real source of rising unemployment and inequality, the profit system.


http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/ilo-j04.shtml