Labour in figure

Infrastructure development

Meeting Asia’s Infrastructure Needs, a report by Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) shows an infrastructure study which cover 45 of its developing member countries (DMCs) and four sectors of development: transport, power, telecommunications, and water supply and sanitation. Two sets of estimates are presented. The first includes the costs of climate mitigation and adaptation (climate-adjusted estimate). Using this set of estimates, developing Asia will need to invest $26 trillion over the 15-years from 2016 to 2030, or $1.7 trillion per year. The second set of estimates does not include climate-adjusted costs (baseline estimate), and amounts to $22.6 trillion, or $1.5 trillion per year. Despite the lack of comprehensive data on actual infrastructure across countries, developing Asia has seen dramatic improvements in its infrastructure. Better access to infrastructure has driven growth, reduced poverty, and improved people’s lives. Yet over 400 millions Asians still lack of electricity; roughly 300 million have no access to safe drinking water and 1.5 billion lack basic sanitation.

These planning estimates accord to the sustainable development goal (SDG) #9, building resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialization and foster innovation, goal #6 (water), #7 (energy), #8 (work and economic growth), and #11 (cities); also known as global goals to end poverty as well as ensure all people to enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030. However, these ambitions are facing challenges related to labour market and quality of work. Assessing this level are inevitable to have unemployment and gender inequality. In low income countries, employment relationships all too often do no even enable people to escape uneconomical poverty such as formality, social security systems, job security, and equality rights at work, which are still elusive. Securing these gains is therefore a major challenge that policy makers must face up to.

Labour right now

SDG #8 calls upon the international community to promote sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all. Surely, attaining this goal will require far increased effort, given how far current trends are from the targets in 2030. The least developed countries experienced annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth of less than 5% over the past a half decade, which means they have fallen short of the SDG 8 target of at least 7% growth per annum. Therefore the labour productivity are below the levels reported in previous decades in most parts of the world. The target of “full and productive employment and decent work for all … and equal pay for work of equal value” keeps on to be elusive. Even though the global employment rate has gone down, but as noted above, more than 170 million people are still unemployed. Also today, a number of upper-middle-low countries are in the wake of an economic slowdown and putting a large share of the labour force at heightened risk of poverty. Furthermore women, young people (17-24), and person with disabilities continue to be much unlikely to be employed especially in the Arab States, Northern Africa, and Southern Asia subregions. Most countries have “factor-weighted” gender pay gaps ranging from 10-25%, which suggests that the world is still a long way from realizing the principle that work of equal value should be remunerated equally.

Generally, the global NEET (not in employment, education, or training) rate has decreased by a mere 2 percentage points between 2005 and 2019, which means that the SDG target to substancially reduce NEET rate in 2020 will almost certainly be missed. Taking Indonesia for an instance, the eradication plan to the high rate of NEET is too often capitalized by conflict of interest. Since these individuals are not gaining skills that are valued in the labour market, this reduces their future chances of employment. Indonesia seems to hold a shortcut way for these youth by providing skill certification within a month in an online course and gaining the money back to their pocket as a pre-work card. A number of intellectual often questioned the policy makers why the government hold a school and university instead of online courses if skills provided by school are far useless.

Gender gaps in the labour market arise from a multitude of inter-related factors, incuding social norms, gender roles, and socio-economic constraints that are often deeply rooted in societies. The global gap in labour force participation rates between women and men stood at 27% in 2018. This gap has been narrowing over the past 25 years. This is mainly due to the awareness of a consequence of the economic necessity for women to contribute to the family income by engaging in market activities.

The next line target of SDG #8 is to deal with fundamental rights and protections of workers. There were still 114 million children aged 5 to 14 years in employment in 2016. Even though this number is decreasing, it is happening at too slow rate to meet the target of ending child labour in all its forms by 2025. In Asia and Pacific, one of 13 children engaged in child labour. In spite of this fact is relatively low, it is still striking that almost all of the child labourers were employed in hazardous work.

Natural disasters

In 2015, Asia-Pacific continued to be the world’s most disaster prone region, accounting for 47% of the world;s 344 disasters. The range of disasters that affected the region includes earthquake in Nepal, Afganistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan; Tropical cyclones that struck South East Asia and the Pacific; Floods in China, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka; Droughts that affected many countries of this region. Out of 90 stroms reported across the glove, 43 hit Asia Pacific countries, of which 33 were high-intensity cyclones. 2015 was also the hottest year on record and saw several intense heat waves striking India and Pakistan between May and June that resulted in 2,248 and 1,229 deaths respectively. The El Nino phenomenon triggered droughts in several parts of the region, while producing severe rainfall in other places. Many disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and storms had considerable impacts on urban centres which were not adequately prepared to handle those disasters.

Even though there has been such endeavours to combat the effect of climate change since The 2015 Paris Climate Conference, each country has its unique problem regarding to policies in addressing this crisis. Severe strom surges which hit the coastal slums of metropolitan cities of northern Java, Indonesia had brought the low class to the highest vulnerabiliy. Their incapable of fulfilling the basic need of food added by home lost surely will lead to illness and even deaths. However in spite of this evidence, Indonesia needs to stabilize the nation economy by importing palm oil and reducing the rainforest which is not appropriate to the aforementioned Paris agreement. Surely the policy makers have to mitigate such a drawbacks in order to reach the sustainable development goals.

Bibliography :

ADB. 2017. Meeting Asia's Infrastructure Needs. Manila. © ADB. https://elearning-adbi.org/courses/introduction-sustainable-development-asia-pacific/.

ILO. 2019. World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2019. International Labour Offce – Geneva

UN ESCAP. 2015. Disasters in Asia and the Pacific: 2015 Year in Review

All this above sources can be found in https://elearning-adbi.org/courses/introduction-sustainable-development-asia-pacific/