Geneva - The stimulus packages being implemented by some governments lack the social protection and labour aspects needed to protect workers, the International Labour Organization said Tuesday.

"There is an urgent need to focus on all job issues," said Juan Somavia, the director general of the ILO. "This is not the time to put workers' rights aside."

Of the existing stimulus packages, about 9.2 per cent was intended for labour and only 1.8 per cent for social protection, as they tend to lean towards bailout and tax cuts, the ILO said.

"We are not criticizing the efforts to bailout banks," said Somavia, stressing that without a functioning financial system the labour market would continue to suffer. "We are saying that together with that, we have to be considering the need for reactivating the real economy."

The organization said that stimulus packages, if managed correctly and utilized full international cooperation within the next three months, could help the job market recover by the beginning of next year.

If action was delayed by six months, the market would not recover before 2011, as it would be harder to get the unemployed back into the workforce.

The collapse of the markets also created challenges for existing social nets. Pensions, in many cases tied to world markets, have taken huge hits in recent months.

"The biggest challenge is to avoid poverty among pensioners," said Raymond Torres, an ILO economist.

In the longer term, he suggested regulated pension funds, in line with an overall need to re-regulate the financial markets, to ensure that retirement benefits were put into "predictable, stable investments."

The ILO estimated that 90 million new jobs would need to be created to keep up with population growth and avoid job gaps.

While the years of boom have created new jobs, the ILO said, the quality of work was deteriorating.

"There was this notion of flexible labour markets," said Somavia. "You can see that confirmed by the rapidity at which unemployment has skyrocketed."

The ILO also warned the the number of working poor, meaning labourers who live below the poverty line, will rise.

Globalization, the ILO has said, was unfair, reducing the value of wages over the years and in the current economic climate there was concern for further devaluation of earnings.

"They overvalued the market, undervalued regulation and devalued the dignity of work," said Somavia, calling that the "crisis before the crisis."

He pushed for a "new model of globalization" and warned against "declaring victory and going back to business as usual" once the economy began to recover.

Earlier this year, the ILO predicted that the financial and economic crises would leave 14 million additional workers unemployed last year and another 38 in 2009. (dpa)