Business Desk, ETV Bharat: While job losses among the salaried class during the coronavirus-induced lockdown has been widely discussed, a new survey shows that the biggest casualty among salaried employees were the white-collar professional jobs.
Independent think tank CMIE’s Consumer Pyramids Household Survey shows that employment among the white-collar professional employees was down by 66 lakh, or 35%, during May-August compared with the year-ago period, the biggest year-on-year loss among all salaried employees.
Employment of these professionally qualified white-collar workers fell steeply to 12.2 million during May-August 2020 compared with 18.8 million a year ago.
Notably, the May-August figure is the lowest employment of these white-collar professionals since 2016 when the CMIE survey began tracking them. “All the gains made in their employment over the past four years were washed away during the lockdown,” CMIE managing director and CEO Mahesh Vyas said in a release.
The white-collar professional employees include engineers (like software engineers), physicians, teachers, accountants, analysts and the type who are professionally qualified and are employed in some private or government organisation.
Notably, this category does not include the similarly professionally qualified persons who run their own practice as these are classified as ’Qualified self-employed professional entrepreneurs’.
Surprisingly, the CMIE survey found that the lockdown did not impact white-collar clerical employees. These include largely, desk-work employees ranging from secretaries and office clerks to BPO/KPO workers, data-entry operators etc. “Possibly, their work shifted to the Work-from-Home mode,” Vyas noted.
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After white-collar professionals, the next biggest loss was among industrial workers. They lost 5 million employees during May-August 2020 compared with the same period a year ago. This translates into a 26% year-on-year fall in employment in the category.
CMIE noted that although the fall in employment in industrial workers is very large, it is much smaller than the fall in industrial output. According to the Central Statistics Office data, the industrial sector saw a 36% year-on-year fall in real gross value added (GVA) during the April-June 2020 quarter.
However, it added that the two set of data are not fully comparable as the time periods do not match. “This partly explains the much sharper fall in the GVA estimates as it includes the month of April when the impact of the lockdown was the most severe. And, it does not include the months of July and August when the impact was much diluted,” Vyas said.
“The second problem in the comparison is that the CMIE’s employment data covers all kinds of industries independent of their size. Quarterly GVA computations, on the other hand, rely essentially on information of larger organised companies,” he added.
Hence, it indicates that employment loss in large industrial companies will have been lesser than the 26% fall in employment in overall industrial workers and more severe in the smaller industrial units.
“This reflects the distress in the medium, small and micro industrial units in recent times,” Vyas concluded.
The findings were a part of the 20th wave of CMIE’s Consumer Pyramids Household Survey which is held every four months (also the duration of one wave). It is important to note here that the 20th wave was conducted entirely during the lockdown, from May through August 2020. But it does not include the worst month of job losses, April 2020, which was covered in the 19th wave that spanned January through April 2020.
