The ILO’s Trends report is the reference scorecard for SDG 8, decent work and economic growth. The 2025 edition opens on a paradox: global unemployment is at a historic low of 5 per cent, yet employment growth is too weak to close the decent work gaps that matter most, and progress against the 2030 targets has essentially stalled since 2015.
The headline
Global employment kept pace with a growing labour force in 2024, holding the unemployment rate steady at 5 per cent. The report is blunt that this benign headline hides structural weakness. Young people still face unemployment near 12.6 per cent, informality and working poverty have returned to pre-pandemic levels, and real wages have not recovered the ground lost to inflation. With economic growth slowing to 3.2 per cent, the ILO frames 2025 as a test of whether labour markets are resilient or merely quiet.
The numbers
- Unemployment. The global unemployment rate held at 5 per cent in 2024, similar to 2023 and below historic averages.
- Jobs gap. The global jobs gap, the ILO’s summary of jobs missing, stood around 402.4 million in 2024, including about 186 million unemployed, 137 million in the potential labour force and roughly 79 million kept from work by other obligations.
- Youth. Young people faced an unemployment rate of around 12.6 per cent, with few signs of improvement.
- Informality. Informal employment affected about three in five workers; the world share was 58.2 per cent in 2024, down from 62.7 per cent in 2004, with 23 million informal workers added between 2023 and 2024.
- Working poverty. Extreme working poverty affected around 7 per cent of the global workforce, more than 240 million workers living on less than $2.15 a day.
- Wages and productivity. On an index set to 100 in 2020, real wages reached 105.5 by 2024 while labour productivity reached 106.4; real wages have yet to catch up.
- Green jobs. Renewable energy employment rose to 16.2 million, more than half of all energy-sector jobs, but nearly half of new roles were in Eastern Asia, and China alone accounts for 46 per cent of all renewable energy jobs.
The counting angle
The report is, at heart, an argument about which number you watch. A 5 per cent unemployment rate counts only those actively searching for work, so it misses the discouraged, the underemployed and the informally employed who are working but not decently. The ILO’s broader jobs-gap measure, 402.4 million, and its informality and working-poverty shares are attempts to count what the headline leaves out. The gaps it flags are worst exactly where measurement is weakest: low-income countries, rural workers and young men drifting out of the labour force, groups that are hard to survey and easy to lose from the data.
Watch & read
- World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2025, the full report (ILO).
- Future of Jobs Report 2025, the WEF companion on skills, automation and how jobs are being reshaped.
Figures are as reported by the ILO from its modelled estimates (November 2024). Shares such as informality and working poverty are the report’s own estimates and are rounded here.