The lockdown months hit the hardest to white-collar salaried employees including engineers, physicians, teachers, accountants, and analysts due to large scale job losses during this time.
Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Analysis
According to the estimation, over 6.6 million white-collar professional jobs were lost between May and August, further bringing their employment to the lowest level since 2016.
This has wiped out all the gains made over the last four years as over five million industrial workers were out of work during this time period, as per the data provided by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE).
Earlier to this, the employment of white-collar professional employees peaked at 18.8 million during the wave of May-August 2019, which stood above 18 million until April.
Who Took The Blow?
Although, CMIE said that the lockdown did not affect the white-collar clerical employees including desk-work employees ranging from secretaries and office clerks to BPO/KPO workers, and data-entry operators.
Since mostly their work shifted to the work-from-home model.
While the biggest loss of jobs that affected salaried employees was of white-collar professionals and other employees, as per CMIE weekly analysis based data from the 20th wave of CMIE’s Consumer Pyramids Household Survey which is released every four months.
Image Source – economictimes.indiatimes.com
CMIE said, “From a peak of 18.8 million white-collar workers employed in the country during May-August 2019, their employment fell down to 12.2 million in the May-August 2020. This is the lowest employment of these professionals since 2016,”.
Further added that all the gains made in their employment over the past four years were washed away during the lockdown.
The next affected segment belongs to industrial workers, “By a similar year-on-year comparison, they lost five million employees. This translates into a 26% fall in employment among industrial workers over a year,” CMIE said.
According to CMIE analysis, “the decline in employment of industrial workers is likely to be largely in the smaller industrial units. This reflects the distress in the medium, small and micro industrial units in recent times,”.
Earlier to this, CMIE had estimated that 121 million jobs were lost in April.
Although most of it got recovered by August, however, the continued deteriorating conditions of salaried jobs cannot be denied.
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