6.6 mn white collar professional jobs lost during May-August: CMIE

An estimated 6.6 million white collar professional jobs, including engineers, physicians, teachers, were lost between May and August, bringing their employment to the lowest level since 2016 and wiping out the gains made over the last four years while five million industrial workers were out of work during the period, the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) said.

According to CMIE weekly analysis based on the data from the 20th wave of CMIE’s Consumer Pyramids Household Survey released every four month, the biggest loss of jobs among salaried employees was of white-collar professional employees and other employees.

These include software engineers, physicians, teachers, accountants, analysts and the type, who are professionally qualified and are employed in some private or government organisation. This, however, does not include qualified self-employed professional entrepreneurs’.

“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,” CMIE said, adding all the gains made in their employment over the past -four years were washed away during the lockdown.

According to CMIE, the next biggest loss was among 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,” it said. .

“However, 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,” CMIE analysis shows.

The lockdown, however, did not impact white collar clerical employees which largely includes desk-work employees ranging from secretaries and office clerks to BPO/KPO workers, data-entry operators and the types.

“Possibly, their work shifted to the work-from-home mode,” it said. CMIE daya shows this category of workers has not been seeing any growth since 2016. “In fact, it has slid quite sharply since 2018 from about 15 million to less than 12 million by 2020. Interestingly, it did not slide any further during the lockdown,” it added.

CMIE had earlier estimated that 121 million jobs were lost in April but most of it recovered by August, but with continued deteriorating conditions of salaried jobs.