E-Paper
Share of salaried jobs saw worst fall in March qtr since June 2018
The headline unemployment rate in the March 2021 quarter was 9.4%. This is the lowest since the quarter ending June 2020, which coincided with the 68-day long nation-wide lockdown which was imposed on March 25, 2020.
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Could the Covid-19 pandemic have left long-term scars on India’s labour markets? The findings of the January-March round of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), released on November 30, by the National Statistical Office (NSO), offers some answers. The quarterly round of PLFS data shows that pandemic’s adverse effect, at least in urban labour markets—quarterly rounds of PLFS only look at urban areas—could be more qualitative than quantitative in nature.
This is borne out by the fact that while the unemployment rate fell in the January-March round, the share of salaried jobs actually fell to its lowest since June 2018, the earliest period for which this data is available. The PLFS numbers also show that there is a gender bias in the employment recovery story in the post-pandemic phase, with women finding it more difficult to find jobs than men.
The headline unemployment rate in the March 2021 quarter was 9.4%. This is the lowest since the quarter ending June 2020, which coincided with the 68-day long nation-wide lockdown which was imposed on March 25, 2020. What is heartening is the fact that this decline in unemployment rate has been accompanied by a normalisation in the labour force participation rate (LPFR). LPFR is the share of population which is either working or looking for a job.
To be sure, the recovery in both unemployment rates and LPFR has a male bias, which suggests that the pandemic has made India’s labour markets even more unfavourable for women.
Availability of jobs is, however, not the complete picture of the urban labour market (see chart 1). At 48.1%, the share of regular or salaried workers—the best paid among different kinds of workers—was the lowest in the March quarter since the quarter ending March 2018. This trend was true for both men and women. The fall in share of salaried workers was accompanied by an increase in the share of self-employed and casual workers.
The latest PLFS numbers also suggest that the pandemic’s pain has begun to show in the service sector (see chart 2).
A broad-based classification across the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors—they largely capture agriculture, industry and services—suggests that even as the employment share of primary and secondary sector increased between the quarters ending March 2020 and March 2021, the tertiary sector actually saw a decline of one percentage point during this period.
