Md. Imranur Rahman, Director of BGMEA and Managing Director of Laila Group, has participated in the 112th International Labour Conference in Geneva, Switzerland (03 June to 14 June). He has attended the conference as an employer delegate of the Bangladesh delegation and actively engaged in the plenary and committee meetings of the ILO throughout the event.
The International Labour Conference is the ILO’s highest decision-making body. It meets annually in June, bringing together the tripartite delegations from the Organization’s 187 member States.
The Conference is composed of a plenary and of technical committees. The Conference opens and closes in plenary sitting; during intermediate plenary sittings, all delegates may participate in the discussion of the Reports of the Chairperson of the Governing Body and of the Director-General. The plenary also performs administrative and formal tasks for the Conference and may hold sittings to receive distinguished guests, including Heads of State or Government.
Global macroeconomic prospects are stable. As you are aware, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is forecasting growth in global gross domestic product (GDP) of 3.2 per cent in 2024 and 2025, which is quite stable compared to 2023.
To varying degrees, all regions have recovered the pre-pandemic level of economic activity. The effective action taken by central banks to bring inflation under control has also made a positive contribution. In this sense, the surges in inflation should abate, with inflation decreasing from 5.8 per cent in 2024 to 4.4 per cent in 2025. I sincerely hope that this could relieve the purchasing power of workers, which has been badly affected.
At the same time, there has been no respite in geopolitical tensions. The hotspots have intensified. The appalling situation in the Middle East has been added to the already existing crises. The absolutely awful conflicts in Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Haiti, Ukraine and the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to name but a few, continue to be major problems for humanity and, more especially, for multilateralism. Is it really necessary to lament the failure to conclude a treaty on pandemics at the World Health Organization (WHO) last week.
As regards the labour market, the ILO is forecasting a global unemployment rate of 4.9 per cent in 2024 and 2025, which is a slight fall – but a fall nevertheless – in relation to 2023, when it stood at 5 per cent. It is also a downward revision of the previous forecast of 5.2 per cent, which we made in November 2023. All in all, these encouraging prospects prevent us from “seeing the wood for the trees”. The unemployment rate of 4.9 per cent translates as a total of 183 million unemployed persons throughout the world.
As we know, the unemployment rate measurement does not include those workers who, for various reasons, have left the labour market and no longer have a job, although their profound desire to have one remains intact.
As a result, ILO specialists have devised a new index, the job gap, to make up for this failing. The job gap remains high, according to our forecasts – 402 million in 2024, although we should note that it has fallen in comparison to 2022, when it was 473 million.
