ILO emphasizes role of tourism in employment

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ILO emphasizes role of tourism in employment

(Xinhua) 20:47, September 25, 2013

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Tourism had boosted global employment and been a key driver of poverty reduction in past decades, and this trend should accelerate during the next decade, the International Labor Organization (ILO) said Wednesday.

Ahead of World Tourism Day on Sept. 27, the U.N. agency called for an agenda promoting decent work across the industry to guarantee its future sustainability, competitiveness and productivity.

The ILO's latest data, released in April, showed travel and tourism in 2012 were estimated to have created more than 260 million jobs worldwide and generated about 9 percent of global GDP. It forecast that, by 2022, total tourism employment worldwide would reach 328 million jobs, or nearly one in 10 jobs in the global workforce.

In its working paper, ILO highlighted the industry allowed for quick entry into the workforce for youth, women and migrant workers.

Tourism had an inter-sectoral link with other areas of the economy, it said. And being a labour-intensive service industry, tourism had the potential to contribute to poverty alleviation through localization, by developing value chains and integrated approaches to sustainable tourism development and with a wide range of micro-enterprises that dominate the sector in many countries.

ILO further called for more efforts to strengthen social dialogue mechanisms that would favor respect of labour rights, improvement of working conditions and the ability of companies to better respond to the needs and demands of the labour market.

（Editor：GaoYinan、Wang Jinxue）