6 million white-collar jobs lost during lockdown

Around six million white-collar workers, which include engineers, physicians, teachers, accountants and analysts, have lost their jobs between May and August, the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) said.

According to CMIE, the number of white-collar jobs has been on the rise since 2016. “An estimated 12.5 million white-collar professional employees were employed during the wave of January-April 2016," CMIE said.

White collar jobs peaked at 18.8 million during May-August 2019. It remained almost stable at 18.7 million in the period of September to December 2019 and then fell to 18.1 million during January-April 2020, reported LiveMint.

The data of January-April indicate a partial impact of the lockdown imposed to contain the spread of coronavirus, CMIE said.

“Employment of these professionally qualified white-collar workers fell steeply to 12.2 million during the wave of May-August 2020. This is the lowest employment of these professionals since 2016. All the gains made in their employment over the past four years were washed away during the lockdown," chief executive Mahesh Vyas has written in a post on CMIE website.

This implies that while 5.9 million white-collar jobs were lost between May-August 2020, over the previous four months ended April 30, this job loss number stood at 6.6 million when compared to May-August 2019, reported LiveMint.

The survey’s 20th edition was conducted during lockdown in May to August. It does not include the worst month of job losses, April 2020, which was covered in the previous edition, wrote Mahesh.

“The biggest loss of jobs among salaried employees was of ‘white-collar professional employees and other employees’. These include engineers, including software engineers, physicians, teachers, accountants, analysts and the type, who are professionally qualified and were employed in some private or government organization. This does not include similarly professionally qualified persons who run their own practice as these are classified as qualified self-employed professional entrepreneurs.”

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 and data-entry operators. They possibly shifted to the work-from-home mode, said CMIE. This category of workers has not been seeing growth since 2016. In fact, it has slid quite sharply since 2018 from about 15 million to less than 12 million by 2020, Mahesh wrote.

“The lockdown has hit industrial workers. Compared to a year ago, employment among white-collar professional employees was down by 6.6 million. This was the biggest year-on-year (y-o-y) loss among all salaried employees. The next biggest loss was among industrial workers. By a similar y-o-y comparison, they lost five million employees. This translates into a 26% fall in employment among industrial workers over a year," Mahesh said