Drastic Changes to India’s Air Pollution During the Pandemic

While the world faced unprecedented lockdowns amidst the coronavirus outbreak in early 2020, many environmental scientists observed significant beneficial impacts the lack of human activities caused on Earth’s natural systems. Urban areas were inhabited by local wildlife species that had not been seen in decades, water resources began to purify and significantly reduce air pollution. India’s large cities are well known for their environmental pollution, and the lockdowns created the opportunity for numerous improvements for India’s atmospheric status. 

Air pollution is rampant across India because of its enormous population size and concentrated city infrastructure. Air pollution results from too many greenhouse gases like aerosols, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide collecting in the atmosphere. These gases lead to increased temperatures as they capture and hold solar radiation. They also increase cloud retention of particulate matter that can be detrimental to surface resources and human health. 

The World Health Organization’s study of global air pollution indicates it poses a significant health risk, responsible for killing 7 million people a year and impacting many more. The COVID-19 outbreak is only responsible for 2.5 million deaths per year to place that statistic into context. In India, contributing sources of atmospheric pollution include vehicle byproducts, industrial power generation, material kilns, and suspended particulate dust contaminants. A report by IQAir identified the top 10 most polluted cities globally, and 9 of them were in India. 

India’s urban areas previously blanketed in smog and pollution experienced substantial reductions, extending views to the horizon in many places. Indians in Punjab could see the Himalayas more than 100 miles away! India’s Central Pollution Control Board found more than 85 cities across India with significantly reduced air pollution in only the first week of the pandemic. The report also measured New Delhi, the capital of India, with a more than a 44% reduction in only the first day of restrictions! It is estimated that more than 90 percent of road and transportation activities across the country were halted at the start of the pandemic.

Restrictions were lifted as the early pandemic lockdowns concluded, and life in India seemed to go back to the levels of pollution it created before. This is incredibly worrying because high levels of pollution in the air can highly damage a person’s health. If pollution levels do not rescind, ailments like headaches, respiratory issues, and virus susceptibility will become rampant. Toxic pollution also increases susceptibility to contracting COVID-19 because of its involvement in damaging respiratory cells, severely impacting at-risk demographics. 
Parents are forced to keep children home from school many days throughout the year because the overlying smog is too dangerous to breathe in. This saw many schools respond with waning attendance rates even after restrictions were lifted.

COVID-19’s Negative Impact on Tourism Employment in Asia and the Pacific Countries

According to a brief from the ILO, tourism in the Asia-Pacific countries has been suffering from job losses, deterioration in work quality, and shifts toward increased informality. Evidence from five countries - Brunei Darussalam, Mongolia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam - demonstrates that job losses in tourism-related sectors in 2020 were four times greater than in non-tourism sectors. 

About ⅓ of the total job losses were linked to the tourism sector, with an estimated 1.6 million tourism-related jobs lost in these five countries alone. The ILO also estimates that pandemic-induced job losses will continue to drag down the region’s economies well into 2022. Even as borders reopen, international tourist arrivals are predicted to be slow in the near term. Given this, governments in tourism-rich countries are likely to seek broader economic diversification with the ultimate aim to create new employment opportunities in non-tourism sectors.

The pandemic did not affect all workers to the same extent. Women workers appear to have been particularly hit with an increased concentration of women carrying out food and beverage serving activities, the lowest-paid jobs in the sector.

A heavy impact on enterprises and workers in tourism at the country level:

• In the Philippines, employment losses and decreases in average working hours in 2020 were among the largest. Employment in the sector contracted by 28% (compared to an 8% loss in non-tourism-related sectors) and average hours worked by 38%. Workers in the tourism-related sector working zero hours per week rose two thousand-fold (affecting 775,000 workers).

• In Vietnam, the dire consequences of the crisis on the tourism sector were reflected primarily in decreasing wages and increased informality. Average tourism wages fell by nearly 18%, with the decline for women employees even higher at almost 23%. While the number of informal employees in tourism increased by 3% in 2020, the number of formal employees decreased by 11%.

• The impact of the crisis on tourism employment in Thailand was more muted, yet contractions in wages and working hours were stark, and jobs in the sector contracted. In contrast, jobs in non-tourism-related sectors experienced a slight gain. Average wages in the tourism sector decreased by 9.5% as tourism workers moved into lower-paid jobs like food and beverage serving activities. Average hours worked declined by 10 percent. In the first quarter of 2021, employment was below pre-crisis numbers in all tourism-related sub-sectors other than food and beverage serving activities.

• The tourism sector in Brunei Darussalam was hard hit in terms of both lower employment and fewer average hours worked, which contracted by more than 40% and nearly 21%, respectively. It was also the country that saw the largest difference between employment losses in tourism and non-tourism-related sectors.

• Likewise, in Mongolia, tourism employment and average working hours suffered considerably from the pandemic and contracted correspondingly by almost 17% and more than 13%. The impact on employment among male tourism workers was particularly sizable, falling by around 29%.

Heavy Job Losses Causes Employment Crisis in the First Half of 2021 in Myanmar

Estimates released by the International Labour Organization (ILO) suggest that Myanmar is experiencing significant deterioration in its labor market conditions since the military took power in February this year. The economy is already weakened by the COVID-19 pandemic, with over 60,000 workers across the country losing their jobs due to factory shutdowns caused by canceled orders and the COVID-19 pandemic's disruption of raw material supplies.

The United Nations estimates that employment contracted 6% in the second quarter of 2021 compared to the fourth quarter of 2020, reflecting 1.2 million job losses. In the first half of 2021, an estimated 14% of working hours were lost, which is equivalent to the working time of at least 2.2 million full-time workers. In terms of both working-hour and employment losses, women are estimated to have been impacted more than men.

Many sectors have been hard hit following the military takeover. In the first half of 2021, employment in construction, garments, and tourism, and hospitality decreased by an estimated 35%, 31%, and 25%, respectively, with even higher relative losses in working hours. 

Tourism and hospitality, still impacted by the slowdown in 2020 caused by COVID-19, have been unable to recover and took a further hit since the military takeover. Most international flights and visa issues have remained suspended due to COVID-19 and security concerns, and domestic travel has largely ceased. 

Circumstances since February 2021 might have forced or incentivized a large number of workers to reduce their working hours, with associated income losses, adding to the adverse impacts on a labor market that had already come under severe strain as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Factors that might have played a role include curfews and other restrictions imposed by the military regime, fear of exposure to violence when going to and being at the workplace, electricity and internet cuts, greater security risks for businesses, a decrease in consumer demand, as well as large-scale worker strikes. 

23 Million People in Latin America and the Caribbean Have Transitioned to Teleworking

During the pandemic, teleworking has allowed continuous businesses and job opportunities as a way to cope with the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. While many sectors experienced a devastating drop in economic activity in employment, falling income, and business closures, teleworking allowed many to have jobs. 

Before the pandemic, less than 3% of wage earners worked from home, but after isolation measures went into effect, 20-30% had to transition to working remotely from home. Especially in less developed countries, teleworking helped cushion the negative impacts of the crisis on labor markets and contributed to the preservation of millions of jobs. Vinicius Pinheiro, the International Labour Organization (ILO) director for Latin America and the Caribbean, said that teleworking would continue to be an option and generate new opportunities in the future.

A report from the ILO advises that while it is too early to predict the extent of the effectiveness of teleworking, countries and societies must be prepared to assume that this modality is here to stay, either as a convenient solution for some people and companies or through the proliferation of hybrid forms that combine work at establishments with work from home.

The report also says that "informal workers, self-employed, young, with lower qualifications and with low earnings, who experienced the greatest job losses and hours worked, especially in the first half of 2020, had much less access to teleworking”. This could be because these countries are characterized by a labor structure with an overall low level of information and communication technology use and high technological gaps. 

The analysis by ILO highlights some relevant aspects that must be addressed to face the challenges of teleworking:

• Voluntariness and agreement between the parties

• Organization and working time

• Health and safety at work

• Equipment and work items

• Protection of the right to privacy of workers

• Gender dimension and telework

• The role of social actors

• Labor relationship and compliance with legislation

The International Labour Conference No. 109, held in June 2021, urges to utilize and adapt teleworking and other new work arrangements to retain jobs and expand decent work opportunities through regulation, social dialogue, collective bargaining, and workplace cooperation.

ILO’s Global Campaign for Ratification of Violence and Harassment

The International Labour Organization Convention 190 on violence and harassment in the world of work held a convention on June 25th, 2021. Many global unions will be launching a toolkit to support the Convention 190 (C190) and its Recommendation 206 (R206). This manual will provide many unions worldwide with tools to eradicate violence and harassment in the world of work. Millions of workers are affected by physical assault, bullying, sexual harassment, online abuse, economic violence, and abusive work practices globally. These are some of the most widespread forms of violence in the workforce. 

The COVID-19 pandemic deepened pre-existing inequalities and exposed vulnerabilities in social, political, and economic systems. A report by the UN shows that violence against women has intensified in the past year. Many women and girls felt economic impacts, and the global gender pay gap is stuck at 16%, with women paid up to 35% less than men in some countries. 

The toolkit will aim to provide unions with tools to develop workplace solutions that tackle violence and harassment with a special focus on gender-based violence and harassment and ensure that violence is not considered “part of the job.” 

Christy Hoffman, UNI Global Union General Secretary, said:

“Unions fought relentlessly to win this Convention. Now that it has come into force, we must make sure more countries ratify it and that it is properly implemented. There is still a long road ahead and this toolkit is another step for unions to gain the necessary knowhow that will enable them to put the ILO Convention 190 and Recommendation 206 into practice so that workers live in a world free from violence and harassment.”

The toolkit consists of a facilitators’ guide and an activities workbook. It aims to:

• Encourage discussion about violence and harassment and gender-based violence in the world of work.

• Raise awareness about Convention 190, its accompanying Recommendation R206, and its significance for workers – particularly women workers.

• Encourage unions across the world to campaign for the ratification of Convention 190 and its effective implementation in line with Recommendation 206.

• Encourage unions to use these instruments to integrate Convention 190 into the union bargaining agenda.

• Build stronger unions to enable workers to assert their rights to a world of work free from violence and harassment.