OECD employment levels recovering, but 'job quality is low'

Tokyo

THE good news is that levels of employment in the 35 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) will finally return next year to where they were 10 years earlier, before the global financial crisis, said the OECD in its latest annual Employment Outlook.

The bad news, however, is that the recovery remains "uneven", and unemployment is still very high in some European countries; many newly-created jobs are of low quality, while labour-market inequalities are high, "job stresses" are common and wage growth is sluggish, the Paris-based organisation said.

OECD secretary-general Angel Gurria, launching the report on Thursday, ahead of next week's meeting of the Group of 20 (G20) labour and employment ministers in Beijing, summarised the situation this wa…