The International Labour Organisation on Wednesday said that Global labour income, including wages for employees and part of income for the self-employed, is estimated to have declined by 10.7 percent or USD 3.5 trillion during the first nine months of 2020.

Coronavirus pandemic has been the cause of the devastating loss, bringing a massive drop in labour incomes for workers around the world.

Lower middle-income countries were estimated to be hit hardest, with 15.1% fall. This is equivalent to 5.5 percent of the global GDP for the first nine months of 2019. The loss excludes income support provided through government measures, the report added.

For upper-middle-income countries, the labour income loss is estimated to be 11.4 per cent, and 10.1 per cent in low-income countries. Workers in high-income countries are estimated to have lost labour income up to 9.0 per cent.

Global working-hour losses are now projected to be 8.6 per cent in the October-December quarter, which corresponds to 245 million full-time equivalent jobs. This is 75 per cent higher than the ILO’s previous estimate of 4.9 per cent or 140 million full-time equivalent jobs, the report read.

‘On top of this, these are the places where there are the weakest social protection systems, so there are very few resources or protections for working people to fall back upon,’ ILO Director-General Guy Ryder told journalists in Geneva.

The ILO said that among countries with sufficient data, a clear correlation can be seen: the larger the fiscal stimulus (as a percentage of GDP), the lower the working-hour losses in the April-June quarter of 2020.

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