By MICHAEL D. YATES
Economists never say much about work. They talk about the supply of and the demand for labor, but they have very little to say about the nature of the work we do. Like most commentators, they seem to believe that modern economies will require ever more skilled work, which will be done in clean and quiet workplaces, by educated workers, who will share in decision-making with managerial facilitators. We should disabuse ourselves of such notions. In the world today, the overwhelming majority of workers do hard and dangerous labor, risking the health of their bodies and minds every minute they toil.
The International Labor Organization (ILO), an agency of the United Nations, issued its Global Employment Trends this past January. The report examines unemployment, poverty employment, and vulnerable employment. The unemployed are those not working but actively searching for employment. The working poor are those with jobs that do not provide above a threshold amount of money. Two thresholds are used: $1.25 per day (in 2005 prices), which is “extreme poverty,” and $2.00 per day, which is just “poverty.” People in vulnerable employment are the self-employed (called in the report “own-account” workers) and unpaid but working family members in the household of the self-employed. In most of the world, vulnerable employment is what is known as casual work; the workers who do this do not have formal arrangements with an employer, such as a labor contract with stipulated wages. A man selling lottery tickets on a street corner, a woman hawking tamales in a parking lot, or a teenager offering rickshaw rides are examples of vulnerable employment. A child helping her mother sell the tamales is an example of an unpaid family member doing vulnerable work. In all countries, and especially in rich ones, not all self-employment is vulnerable. However, in all countries, but mostly in poor ones, the vast majority of the self-employed are poor and vulnerable.
The ILO estimates the number of people in each of the three categories (unemployed, working poor, vulnerably employed) in 2009 under three scenarios. The deep economic downturn now afflicting most of the world has befuddled most economists, who neither saw it coming nor have been able to say how much worse it will get. To compensate for the uncertainty enveloping the global economy, the ILO economists have made three estimates of the three labor market categories. The details of the three “scenarios” are not important for our purposes. But, given the severity of the “great recession” we are now experiencing, the deepest since the 1930s, the third or pessimistic scenario seems the most realistic. Relief is nowhere in sight, especially for the world’s workers.
Here are the numbers for 2009, under the pessimistic scenario, for world unemployment, working poor, and vulnerable employment:
Unemployment: 230 million (7.1 percent of a world labor force of about 3.24 billion)
Working Poor (using $2 per day as poverty threshold): 1.377 billion (about 46 percent of total world employment of about three billion)
Vulnerable employment: 1.606 billion
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http://www.counterpunch.org/yates05202009.html 
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