World Real Unemployment (2019)
Total Population = 7,711 million
Total Labor Force = 3,482 million
Official Unemployment = 188 million
Total Employment = 3,294 million
Total Informal Employment = 2,023 million
Non-Agro Informal Employment = 1,664 million
De Facto Unemployment = 1,397 million†
Total Real Unemployment = 1,585 million
Total Real Unemployment Rate = 46% million

†De Facto Unemployment = Non-Agro Informal Employment – Informal Employment in the Formal Sector

Total real unemployment for the planet can thus be estimated at about 46% of the labor force. That is 1.585 billion people who do not produce any physical economic value because, over the last half-century and more, they have been dumped on the human scrapheap by the British Imperial system of the City of London and Wall Street, and who barely survive from day to day. In the case of Africa, the real unemployment rate is 65%. In the case of Ibero-America (often referred to as Latin America and the Caribbean), it is 42%.

The regional breakdown of percentage of total employment coming from informal activities is also highly revealing. The world average is 61%; in Africa it is a staggering 86%; in underdeveloped Arab countries 69%; in Ibero-America 54%.

Youth are also particularly victimized by the disease of informality. In the 15-24 age cohort, 77% of all employment is informal, worldwide.

Now that the coronavirus pandemic is striking the underdeveloped sector with a vengeance, even the meager daily incomes and food supply of the gigantic informal sector is going up in smoke. The ILO estimates that people in the informal sector already had a 60% drop in income in the first month of the coronavirus crisis. In Africa and Ibero-America, the drop was much greater: 81%. As ILO Director Guy Ryder succinctly put it on April 29: “These are the real faces of the world of work. If we don’t help them now, they will simply perish.”