According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), younger workers struggling to find jobs after the financial crisis risk a lifetime trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder unless governments move swiftly to improve their skills and boost investment.
The Paris-based organisation said the global jobs recovery was slowly gathering pace, but long-term unemployment remained a headache for many countries, especially in Europe. More than one in three jobseekers in the 34 OECD countries have been out of work for 12 months or more, equivalent to 15.7m people.
The OECD secretary general, Angel Gurría, said the figure represented an increase of 77% in long-term unemployment since the end of 2007. More than half of of the people in that category had been out of work for two years or more.
“Time is running out to prevent the scars of the crisis becoming permanent, with millions of workers trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder,” said Gurría in Paris at the launch of the organisation’s 2015 employment outlook.
“If that happens, the legacy of the crisis would be to ratchet inequality up yet another notch from levels that were already far too high. Governments need to act now to avoid a permanent increase in the number of workers stuck in chronic joblessness or moving between unemployment and low-paid precarious jobs.” Read more
