Bettina Schaller, President, World Employment Confederation discusses how 2024 elections are shaping the employment industry.
As 2024 draws to a close, the World Employment Confederation...
Q: What are the main challenges and opportunities currently facing your labour market?
A: America is facing a labour shortage of historic proportions as our economy continues to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. Even as extended unemployment benefits have ended, millions of workers are choosing to stay on the sidelines instead of going back to work and Covid-19 continues to play a significant role in people’s decisions about when and how they would like to return to work. With more than 10 million current job openings that employers just cannot fill, the staffing industry in the US finds itself at the intersection of challenge and opportunity.
The global pandemic has changed the world we live and work in for the foreseeable future.
It’s now been more than eight months since professionals around the world hastily packed up their office workstations and transferred them into their homes. Organisations were tasked with nimbly adapting business continuity plans with little notice, as Governments introduced varying levels of social, work and movement restrictions around the world.
Chile, with the Pacific Ocean to the west, the Andes to the east and the Atacama Desert to the north, is often regarded as something of an island, with characteristics that differ from its Latin American neighbours. We caught up with Alfred Budschitz, general manager, of Agest, the Chilean association of Human Resource companies, to discuss what is driving labour markets in his country.
It has been more than a decade since the global financial and economic crisis disrupted economies and labour markets around the world and led to a surge in the number of unemployed workers. Since then, global and regional unemployment rates had returned to pre-crisis levels. This trend, among others, is now being disrupted by a new crisis that is likely to prove more damaging than the one 10 years earlier.
It’s been an extraordinary first six months in my role as CEO of Harvey Nash Group. Little did I know, as I happily stepped up at the London HQ in early February on day one, that in just a few weeks’ time the whole world was going to be turned upside down by Covid-19…
The Covid-19 crisis has wrought disruption on economies and labour markets around the world and left millions of people out of work or with their livelihoods severely threatened. It has also laid bare the inadequacies of social protection systems in many countries and exposed gaping differences between the protections afforded to workers with an employment contract and those who are self-employed.
The Coronavirus pandemic has compelled businesses across all sectors to transform the way they are operating, in a very short period of time. For many organisations, this has meant adapting traditional processes to be suitable for those working from home, and in line with little to no face-to-face engagement or contact with other team members.
The labour market crisis prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic has not only created wide-scale unemployment and threatened business continuity, it has also exposed the gaps in safety nets for workers around the world.Â
The global pandemic has had a massive impact on every aspect of life, one of the most prominent being its impact on the workplace. Our co-founder, Nicole Alvino, recently discussed how amongst all the things that have changed, employees are finally being recognised as the most critical element to business success and survival.
At the end of February I went to Abu Dhabi for the BSME conference, a great event which was supposed to be the highlight of our Q1 international business develop strategy. The conference never happened due to COVID-19 and I ended up in a lockdown situation at the hotel for 5 days. It was a rather surreal experience and one I hoped would never repeat.