by Murad Abdo
ADEN, Yemen, May 1 (Xinhua) -- The years-long war in Yemen has pushed millions of workers into unemployment as well as thousands of families into miserable living conditions full of poverty, hunger and diseases.
As the world celebrates International Workers' Day, Yemen's internal military conflict is continuing for the fifth consecutive year, leaving the country's workers to suffer unbearable living conditions and unemployment.
Since August 2016, monthly salaries of the public sector's employees in Yemen have been suspended, with some of them being paid in irregular ways.
In the private sector, millions of Yemeni employees lost their jobs, especially those who were working in vital sectors such as industry, commerce and agriculture.
Official statistics indicate that nearly 5 million Yemeni workers affiliated with the private sector lost their jobs as a result of the ongoing war.
Earlier on Wednesday, Yemen's Minister of Social Affairs and Labor Ebthaj Al-Kamal said in a statement that workers are the most affected by the ongoing war in the impoverished Arab country.
Al-Kamal said 5 million workers of Yemen's private sector, accounting for about 60 percent of the labor force, were deprived of their jobs as a consequence of the war.
She said the instability forced many local and foreign companies to cease their operations and activities in the war-ravaged country.
The Yemeni government has made hard efforts to improve the economic situation through re-invigorating development programs in different fields, the statement said.
The government started with certain measures to reduce the workers' sufferings by declaring a 30-percent increase in salaries for all government employees, it noted.
The armed confrontations raging between the Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces and the Iranian-backed Houthis since March 2015 dramatically increased the poverty levels, leaving millions of people in harsh conditions.
According to the United Nations reports, more than 24 million Yemenis need humanitarian assistance, accounting for about 80 percent of the population.
Rashid Haddad, a Yemeni economic researcher, told Xinhua that the International Workers' Day comes as the country is still engulfed in an ongoing war for the fifth year and many workers lost their jobs as well as their legitimate rights.
"More than 850,000 public sector's employees are left without salaries during the past three years," Haddad said.
"The ongoing war largely affected the country's infrastructure and the business sector, leading to a complete cessation of companies, factories, domestic and international investment, and deprived millions of private sector's workers of their jobs," he added.
Yemeni private sector's workers in the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, where the largest and most important factories and commercial companies are located, have been severely affected by the fighting in the city.
Yemen has been mired in a civil war since late 2014 when the Houthi rebels overtook the capital Sanaa and toppled the internationally-recognized government of President Abd-Rabbuh Mansour Hadi.
A Saudi-led coalition has been fighting the Houthis since March 2015, a long-running war which has left tens of thousands dead or injured including at least 17,700 civilians as verified by the United Nations.
According to the UN Refugee Agency, an estimated number of 3.3 million people remain displaced in 2019, up from 2.2 million last year.
The number of sites hosting the internally displaced people has increased by almost half over the past year.
