Hundreds of millions of the world’s most vulnerable workers will be hit by the aftermath of the coronavirus lockdown, says the UN labour agency.

Half of the world’s working population, or 1.6 billion people, are at risk of losing their income as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the International Labor Organization (ILO) has warned.

The economic fallout will result in “livelihoods destroyed” with the most vulnerable bearing the brunt.

Out of a total workforce of 3.3 billion people globally, two billion people work in the informal economy where positions are not secure.

“The first month of the crisis is estimated to have resulted in a drop of 60 per cent in the income of informal workers globally,” the ILO said.

For the hardest-hit regions, this translates into an 81 percent drop in the income of informal workers in Africa and the Americas, 21.6 percent in Asia and the Pacific, and 70 per cent in Europe and Central Asia.

“Without alternative income sources, these workers and their families will have no means to survive,” the ILO went on to say.

The organisation said that informal workers were more likely to work in high-risk sectors such as retail, tourism, and food, all of which have been strongly impacted by the coronavirus outbreak.

“For millions of workers, no income means no food, no security and no future. Millions of businesses around the world are barely breathing. They have no savings or access to credit. These are the real faces of the world of work. If we don’t help them now, these enterprises will simply perish,” ILO Director-General Guy Ryder said.

The ILO warned that working hours are set to drop by 10.5 percent as companies wind down production or furlough staff.

Nevertheless, there are signs that global lockdown measures initially implemented to contain the spread of the coronavirus could be easing.  

Latest figures show the coronavirus has now infected more than three million people globally and killed almost 230,000.

A recent paper by Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management at Bristol University, has tentatively suggested that businesses around the world will be disrupted for the next 18 months.

Thomas said that a partial shutdown in the UK could cause a “significantly greater loss of life than would be gained by the lockdown measure, especially if the partial shutdown of the economy were to last more than two months in total”.

With unemployment soaring across the developed world, most economists are forecasting an economic downturn worse than the 2007-2009 financial crash, the effects of which still reverberate.

Thomas argues that the financial crisis more than a decade ago resulted in a loss of living standards in the UK that did not recover to pre-2007 levels until 2015.

The current and swift economic fallout could be much more painful, added Thomas, and the IMF seems to back that up.

On April 14, the IMF published a grim forecast, which said that the world was entering its most significant crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, which financially decimated much of the world.

In the US, the world’s largest economy, unemployment has skyrocketed and with little in the way of workers’ protection and a social safety net, unemployment could reach 20 percent.

The ILO has therefore called for urgent and flexible measures that governments can start taking now to support small businesses and those who are vulnerable.

“Measures for economic reactivation should follow a job-rich approach,” said the ILO chief Guy Ryder, adding: “International coordination on stimulus packages and debt relief measures will also be critical to making recovery effective and sustainable.”