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Paradoxical situation

South Asia’s paradoxical 2007 record for the world’s highest creation of jobs and the most vulnerable employment conditions means that the moral and developmental imperatives of the current impressive economic growth rates have largely gone unheeded. The biggest proportion (28 per cent) of the world’s jobs last year was generated in this region, according to the International Labour Organisation’s Global Employment Trends (GET) report. The rise in unorganised sector employment in recent years may have to some extent contributed to the fastest reduction in extreme poverty, which refers to the proportion of the population living on less than US$1 per person per day. Despite this progress, 77.2 per cent of those employed lack minimum social protection, fair wages, conditions for social dialogue, and the right to work, which puts this region at the bottom of the scale in these qualitative indicators. This scenario can be attributed to the fact that the agriculture sector, notorious for some of the worst forms of exploitation and deprivation of labour, accounts for about 48 per cent of employment. But then, the fastest global shift in employment from agriculture to manufacturing witnessed in this region over the past decade has not been accompanied by improvements in working conditions. This is evident in the widespread phenomenon of working poverty — the proportion living below US$2 per person per day. Moreover, that the biggest increases of jobs are in the manufacturing rather than the services sector perhaps also reflects the greater availability of only certain types of skilled manpower, not others.

The GET report has struck a cautious note, that the overall strength of the world economy has not made any dent in global unemployment for some years now and that the expected slowdown in the industrialised countries could undermine the small gains achieved in the developing regions. Against such a diagnosis, the extremely low levels of investment in human capital in South Asia call for immediate and well-coordinated correctives across different sectors. Strict compliance with the ILO’s core labour standards could be a useful first step. Under the intensely competitive conditions of the current phase of globalisation, the enhancement of labour productivity, which in South Asia stands at just one-eighth of the levels in the advanced economies, will be vital to sustaining the economic momentum of recent years.

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