Davos, Switzerland — The world labor market is nearing the pre-Covid levels but gender gap and other concerns remain, International Labor Organisation (ILO) Director-General Gilbert F Houngbo told Trends in an interview.
“In terms of the job trends, the ILO has issued its world economic and social outlook two weeks ago, where we see that the world labor market is finally nearing the pre-COVID levels. However, we see that concerns around gender gap remain,” said Houngbo, the first African to hold the position of ILO Director-General.
“I see the unemployment gap between young women and young men to the disadvantage of women. And above all, I’m very much concerned about the 240 million workers that remain below the poverty line. And the staggering number of the people looking for job.”
Asked how conversations regarding labor trends were shaping up at Davos, he said, “What is very much interesting and for me quite very useful is the the impact of AI in the labor market. How do we see the moves where we know very well that AI is not too much of a worry that we should be worrying about job losses. Rather, we should be thinking of it as augmentation. And we should be focusing on the importance of the skills, reskilling and upskilling and have the right education.”
At Davos, Houngbo took part in a panel, “Closing the Jobs Gap”, which focused on how despite a recent fall in global unemployment, 402 million people were still lacking jobs.
The panel discussed how can we have high quality employment at the heart of future economic policy, especially at a time when nearly a quarter of jobs are exposed to disruption.
“I’m very optimistic. Yeah. I’m very, very much optimistic. The most important thing for us, we believe is that the private and public sectors need to step up investment in reskilling. However, we are worried the governments are not doing enough in terms of reskilling,” Houngbo said.