By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ PARIS

FROM LAWYERS IN Paris to factory workers in China and bodyguards in Colombia, the ranks of the jobless are swelling rapidly across the globe.

Worldwide job losses from the recession that started in the United States in December 2007 could hit a staggering 50 million by the end of 2009, according to the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency. The slowdown has already claimed 3.6 million American jobs.

High unemployment rates, especially among young workers, have led to protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France.

In January, the government of Iceland, whose economy is expected to contract 10 percent this year, collapsed and the prime minister moved up national elections after weeks of protests by Icelanders angered by soaring unemployment and rising prices.

Just recently, the new United States director of national intelligence, Dennis C.Blair, told Congress that instability caused by the global economic crisis had become the biggest security threat facing the United States, outpacing terrorism.

“Nearly everybody has been caught by surprise at the speed in which unemployment is increasing, and are groping for a response,”said Nicolas Veron, a fellow at Bruegel, a research center in Brussels that focuses on Europe’s role in the global economy.

In emerging economies like those in Eastern Europe, there are fears that growing joblessness might encourage a move away from free-market, pro-Western policies, while in developed countries unemployment could bolster efforts to protect local industries at the expense of global trade.

Indeed, some European stimulus packages, as well as the one passed in the United States, include protections for domestic companies, increasing the likelihood of protectionist trade battles.

While the number of jobs in the United States has been falling since the end of 2007, the pace of layoffs in Europe, Asia and the developing world has caught up only recently .

The International Monetary Fund expects that by the end of the year, global economic growth will reach its lowest point since the Depression, according to Charles Collyns, deputy director of the fund’s research department. The fund said that growth had come to“a virtual halt,”with developed economies expected to shrink by 2 percent in 2009.

“This is the worst we’ve had since 1929,”said Laurent Wauquiez, France’s employment minister.“The thing that is new is that it is global, and we are always talking about that. It is in every country, and it makes the whole difference.”

In Asia, any smugness at having escaped losses on American subprime debt has been erased by growing despair over a plunge in sales among major exporters.

On February 12, Pioneer of Japan said it would abandon the flat-screen television business and cut 10,000 jobs worldwide in response to sagging demand .

Millions of migrant workers in mainland China are searching for jobs but finding that factories are shutting down. There have been dozens of protests at individual factories in China and Indonesia where workers were laid off with little or no notice.

The breadth of the problem is also becoming apparent in Taiwan, where exports were down 42.9 percent in January compared with a year ago, the steepest plunge in Asia.

Chang Yung-yun, a 57-year-old restaurant kitchen worker, was laid off when her employer closed in mid-November. Her son, an engineer, has been put on unpaid vacation for weeks, a tactic that has become common in Taiwan.

“The greatest fear for our people is losing jobs,”Taiwan’s president, Ma Yingjeou, said in an interview.

Calls for protectionism have resonated among a fearful public. In Britain, refinery and power plant employees walked off the job in January to protest the use of workers from Italy and Portugal at a construction project on the coast.

Half a world away in Colombia, Jaime Galeano, 40, is among the workers having a hard time finding work. As a bodyguard in a country notorious for drug-related violence and kidnappings, Mr.Galeano thought his profession was immune until he lost his job last year.

“The conditions for finding a job are terrible,”he said. What is more, his age is now an impediment, with a ministry informing him that only applicants under the age of 32 would be considered for new positions.

“After turning 35, a person is worth nothing,”Mr.Galeano said.