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%.

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.

New ILO-EU-UNESCO Collaboration Focuses on Jobs and Cultural Heritage in Iraq

The International Labour Organization (ILO), United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the European Union (EU) have launched a new program that will use employment-intensive approaches to create jobs for internally displaced persons, Syrian refugees, and host community members. The program will also try to preserve and rehabilitate cultural heritage sites at the same time. 

The collaboration will help generate around one thousand job opportunities for skilled and unskilled workers who will be employed to safeguard and rehabilitate cultural heritage sites, including the Erbil Citadel – a World Heritage site. Some of the jobs include cleaning and maintaining sites, including clearing away vegetation and rubble, installing shaded areas, and rehabilitating access roads and parking areas. 

The program will help provide short-term jobs that are associated with labor rights according to the international and local standards but also create jobs that contribute to tourism and promote local culture. 

The ILO in Iraq has also joined forces with local authorities in the Governorate of Dohuk to implement integrated employment-intensive investment program (EIIP) interventions aimed at creating more than 180 decent jobs. 

Some of the targets of the program with EIIP include: 

• Creating 184 short-term jobs equivalent to around 10,000 worker days.

• About 50% of those employed will be women.

• EIIP interventions will help improve 50 KM of irrigation channels and support the sorting of 240 tons of solid waste per day for 6 months.

• The projects will engage the local community in different areas, such as recruitment processes, prioritizing needs, and adopting sustainable practices (such as sorting from source).

• The EIIP team is working on other sectors as well to create decent jobs for forcibly displaced persons and host community members. Sectors include transportation, municipal services, and public maintenance, linking these works with skills development opportunities and empowering private sector contractors.