GENEVA, May 12: Discrimination remains rampant in the workplace worldwide, depriving women, ethnic and religious minorities and migrants of equal jobs or pay, a report from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said on Monday.

“There is not one country in the world that can say it is free of this problem,” Manuela Tomei, ILO specialist and an author of the report, told a pre-launch news conference.

While the most blatant types of discrimination were fading, “subtle, less visible and more insidious forms” had emerged, including pre-employment testing for HIV/AIDS, the report said.

“Every day, around the world, discrimination at work is an unfortunate reality for hundreds of millions of people,” said the United Nations agency’s Director-General Juan Somavia in an introduction to the report, titled “Time for Equality at Work”.

Women are the most common target of discrimination, suffering from both the “glass ceiling” preventing their advance and significant “pay gaps” even where their educational level was equal to that of men, the ILO said.

Some 158 of the agency’s 175 member states have ratified its 1958 convention protecting workers from exclusion or preference on grounds of race, colour, religion and political opinion.

But the United States, China, and Japan, as well as Singapore and Thailand are among states yet to sign up.—Reuters