The COVID-19 emergency is proceeding to hit jobs hard all over the world, the United Nations said cautioning it could require a long time for business levels to arrive at pre-pandemic levels.
a new study, the UN's International Labour Organization revised its previous forecast that the global employment market will make a nearly full recovery from the virus this year.
Blaming the impacts of COVID-19 variants like Delta and Omicron and uncertainty around how the pandemic will evolve, it now projects a significant deficit in working hours in 2022 compared to before COVID-19 emerged.
"Global labour markets are recovering from the crisis much more slowly than we previously expected," ILO chief Guy Ryder told reporters, warning that the outlook "remains fragile."
"We are already seeing potentially lasting damage to labour markets, along with concerning increases in poverty and inequality."
Monday's report predicted that global working hours would be two percent below the numbers seen in 2019, leaving the world short of the equivalent of some 52 million jobs.
Last May, the ILO predicted the working hour shortage would be just half that this year.
At the same time, the global official unemployment rate remains significantly higher than before the pandemic hit.
