Posted on 01/23/2004 2:14:13 AM PST by sarcasm
GENEVA — The number of jobless people worldwide has reached a record of almost 186 million, while hundreds of millions more are employed but make so little money they can barely survive, the United Nations labor agency said Thursday.
The SARS outbreak in Asia and Canada, the war in Iraq and the continuing slump in global tourism due to terrorism fears combined last year to add an extra 500,000 to the worldwide unemployment totals, the International Labor Organization said.
The slight economic recovery in many regions late in 2003 had little effect on the number of jobless, the agency said in its annual Global Employment Trends report.
The number of people out of work in 2003 reached 185.9 million, or 6.2 percent of the total labor force. In 2002 the figure was 185.4 million, although this represented 6.3 percent because the world's population was smaller. In 2001 the number was 160 million, or 5.9 percent.
The 2003 figure, based on government statistics, is the highest since the ILO began recording global unemployment in 1990, said Dorothea Schmidt, an employment analyst at the U.N. agency.
Overall, the agency believes that the jobless percentage of the labor force has fluctuated between 5.8 and 6.4 percent in the past two decades, Schmidt added.
Although the United States saw some recovery from the economic slowdown of the past two years in the second half of 2003, job creation remained sluggish and unemployment rates held at around 6 percent.
In Western Europe, unemployment remained at 7.9 percent. In Europe's former communist countries the jobless level dipped to 9.2 percent, from 9.4 percent in 2002.
Most of the global increase was caused by a rise in unemployment in Asia. In the East Asian region — which includes China — the jobless total rose to 3.3 percent, up from 3.1 percent the previous year. The Middle East also was hard hit, rising from 11.9 to 12.2 percent.
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