Youth employment
The first job is still the hardest qualification
An October ILO brief puts hiring practices under scrutiny as young people struggle to get the experience employers demand.
The care needed before the job
Leave and dependable care services shape who can accept a vacancy. Their value depends on whether families can actually use them.
An unfilled vacancy may have a qualified applicant who cannot take it. Care for a child or dependent adult has to fit around the working day, and a better wage alone may leave a clash of hours unresolved. An ILO report released in March examines how employers and collective bargaining agreements in eight Latin American countries have expanded care-related arrangements, including longer leave and more flexible working practices.
The exploratory study offers examples from covered workplaces, with no estimate of a regional output gain. Its reach is also limited by the reach of formal employment. Yet it exposes a practical weakness in a debate focused on getting more people into jobs: work at home still has to be done when a new employee clocks in. Somebody must supply that care, whether it is paid for or provided within the family.
Work before paid work
The global imbalance is substantial. Among people aged 15 or over, the ILO estimated that 708 million women and 40 million men were outside the labour force because of care responsibilities in 2023. Its October 2024 release drew on information from 125 countries. Methodological changes rule out a direct comparison with the agency's earlier 2018 estimate. The newer figures measure the scale of care-related exclusion, without establishing a trend between the two releases.
People outside the labour force differ from unemployed jobseekers: they may want an income while being unavailable for the hours a job requires. The care estimate therefore cannot be converted into a forecast of new workers. Opening a nursery would address one obstacle; the match between its hours, the available jobs and a family's other responsibilities would still matter.
The practical constraint involves reliability as well as price. A care arrangement that works on most days may still be incompatible with an employer who needs dependable attendance. An affordable service with hours shorter than the working day can leave a gap that another family member must fill. These are reasons to evaluate the service and the job together.
Leave that can be used
A separate ILO brief, published in June 2025, reported average paid parental-leave entitlements of 24.7 weeks for mothers and 2.2 weeks for fathers. It found no statutory paid parental leave for fathers in 71 countries. These legal entitlements describe the rules at the time of the study. Actual take-up is a separate question.
The agency emphasised pay, job protection and financing alongside duration. An entitlement with inadequate income replacement can be difficult to use. A household may preserve the higher earner's paid hours even if both parents would prefer to share care differently. Over time, repeated interruptions can then affect who becomes the higher earner.
This creates a policy-design problem. Extending leave on paper is easier to measure than removing the financial and workplace pressures that discourage its use. Administrators need to know who is covered, who claims, how much income is replaced and whether workers return to sustainable jobs. A national average can conceal large differences between secure employees and people in irregular work.
What employers can justify
For an employer considering care support, the comparison should include the cost of losing and replacing trained staff. A benefit may be expensive to provide and still help retain a worker whose experience would be expensive to replace. Whether that trade-off works depends on the workforce, the service and its cost. Retention supplies a question to investigate, rather than a promised return.
For governments, the problem is broader. Workplace agreements can improve conditions for covered employees while leaving others untouched. Public provision and financing must be judged against those gaps, with attention to the quality and staffing of the care services themselves. Moving a responsibility out of one household does not make the underlying work disappear.
The March examples offer a starting point for bargaining over hours, leave and support. Their success should be judged by whether people can use those arrangements and stay in work. A leave entitlement that a family cannot afford to claim, or a care place that closes before a shift ends, leaves the vacancy problem unresolved.
