Manufacturing jobs account for lion’s share in non-farm employment: Survey

According to the survey, the employment situation in the country improved marginally as the country came out of a deadly second Covid wave that ravaged the country in the April-June period last year.

New Delhi: The manufacturing sector accounted for 4 in 10 jobs in the nine select sectors of the country’s economy that account for 3.1 crores formal and informal employment in the non-agricultural sectors, showed a survey conducted by the Ministry of Labour and Employment.

According to the second quarter of the Quarterly Employment Survey (QES), which is a part of the All-India Quarterly Establishment-based Employment Survey (AQEES), the manufacturing sector accounted for 39% of jobs followed by the education sector (22%) and health, and IT-BPO sectors which account for 10% each.

In a clear sign of increasing participation of women in the country’s workforce, the survey showed the number of female workers rose from 29.3% in the first quarter (April-June 2021) to 32.1% in the second quarter which ended in September last year.

The establishment-based quarterly employment survey covers both organized and unorganized workers which account major chunk of employment in non-agricultural sectors. These nine sectors are manufacturing, construction, trade, transport, education, health, accommodation and restaurant, IT and BPO, and financial services.

According to the survey, the employment situation in the country improved marginally as the country came out of a deadly second Covid wave that ravaged the country in the April-June period last year. It showed that employment went up from 3.08 crore during the April-June period to 3.10 crore in the July-September period last year.

The survey also showed that employment in these 9 sectors improved from 2.37 crore jobs in 2013-14 to 3.10 crore jobs in the second quarter of FY 2021-22.

Data for this survey was collected from 11,503 establishments through field visits.

Jobs in 9 non-farm sectors

The survey showed that trade and transport sectors accounted for 5.3% and 4.6% jobs respectively.

The survey showed that 9 out of 10 establishments were working with less than 100 workers. However, the situation was different for the IT and BPO sectors where 30% of establishments had at least 100 workers and about 12% had more than 500 workers.

In the health sector, one in five establishments had 100 or more workers. In the transport sector, 14% of the companies and firms engaged 100 or more workers.

What is important is that the survey showed that nearly nine out of ten workers, 87% of the total workforce, were employed as regular workers and only 2% of staff were employed as casual workers.

However, in the construction sector, the situation was different as 20% of the workers were contractual and 6.4% were casual workers.

The survey also showed that except for the accommodation and restaurant sectors where more than 5% of units were located in households, most of the units, 98.3% of the total units, were located outside households.

Nearly one-fourth (23.5%) of the units surveyed were registered as companies. The percentage was as high as 82.8% in the IT and BPO sectors, 51.2% in the construction sector, 42.8% in the manufacturing sector, 36.4% in the transport sector, 32.1% in the trading sector, and 23.8% in the financial services sector.

One-fourth of the units were operating as registered societies, 53.9% were registered under the Goods and Service Tax Act, 2017, and 27.8% under the Shops & Commercial Establishments Act of 1958.

In order to improve the worker’s situation and simplify the labour laws in the country, the Centre had notified four labour codes. These are the codes on Wages, 2019; the Industrial Relations Code of 2020; the Code on Social Security, 2020; and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020.

However, these are yet to be implemented as states are finalizing the rules.