Indian workforce more diverse now but not necessarily happy: Reports

“40% of graduates in India are unemployed.”

“Over 90% of knowledge workers in India are willing for a wage cut for increased happiness at work”.

These are some startling findings from two reports on the state of workers and work in India, released on September 19.

One is the “State of Working India 2023” report by the Centre for Sustainable Employment of Azim Premji University, the fourth in this series. The main theme of this report is “Social Identities and Labour Market Outcomes”.

The other is the HP Work Relations Index, the first report in a proposed series on work relations and work atmosphere across the globe, including in India.

Main findings

What explains the stubborn labour market marginalisation of Dalits, Adivasis, and even women at the higher ends of the Indian labour market?

In addressing these issues, the Azim Premji University report comes up with surprising conclusions. It tracks the structural changes in the Indian labour market in terms of changing relative shares of regular wage/salaried workers and casual workers.

The report shows how, over generations, a sizable share of informal workers’ sons and daughters turn into regular/salaried workers, though it is somewhat marginal among Dalits. The report also captures the decline in caste-based segregation that confined SCs and STs to occupations like leather work and waste and sewage management. One of the surprising findings of the report is that the gender pay gap has also declined.

However, on the negative side, the report shows that high economic growth doesn’t translate into greater creation of decent jobs. While the post-COVID unemployment rate, in general for all categories, has declined compared to the pre-COVID levels, the report drops a bombshell that educated youth unemployment is shockingly high — 42 per cent of graduates below the age of 25 are unemployed.

Gender parity

One good news is that the female work participation ratio is increasing after prolonged stagnation at very low levels. But there is a catch. This increase is more due to the increase in the share of self-employment among women from 50 to 60 per cent in the post-COVID period. Worse still, the income from self-employment for women even two years after the 2020 lockdown was only 85 per cent of the level in the April-June quarter of 2019 before COVID-19 peaked. In other words, women’s increasing self-employment is only distress employment.

The findings of the Hewlett-Packard report, however, are somewhat self-contradictory. While, on the one hand, it says that 50 per cent of the Indian knowledge workers have a healthy relationship with their work, its main finding is that more than 90 per cent of the knowledge workers in India are unhappy about their work environment since they are only too willing to trade off their present jobs for a job with a lower salary that offers greater happiness at work.

Let us summarise below the responses of some techies and trade union leaders in different Indian cities on some of these findings.

On social inequality in labour market

Regarding labour market marginalisation of Dalits, S Kumaraswamy, a prominent trade union leader in Chennai, told The Federal: “Historically, a caste division of sorts prevailed both in education and in occupations. C Rajagopalachari, as the first Congress CM of Madras Province under the British in 1937, even proposed to formalise this as Kulakkalvi Thittam (Caste-based Education Project). Unfortunately, the PM Vishwakarma Scheme also runs the risk of being a Kulakkalvi/Kulaththozil (Caste-based Education/Occupation) Thittam 2.0 unless it is accompanied by schemes for reserving engineering, medicine, and other professional course seats for the children of these artisan occupations and subsidises their transition to higher-end tech jobs.”

He added, “The occupational caste division continued in the earlier decades among blue-collar workers, too, where workers were from peasant and service castes, which were upper and middle castes, and Dalits were excluded, except in some industries.”

In the last two or three decades there has been a change, and 15-20 per cent of the industrial workforce in Chennai comprises Dalits. Earlier, they were mainly sanitation or leather workers. But now they are into industrial manufacturing and even part delivery services. Thanks partly to the labour shortage, in companies like Motherson Sumi and Diamond Chain, the largest or second largest segment of workers is from Dalit backgrounds, and incidentally, none of them are permanent.

“Partially, the reason for Dalit entry into the industrial workforce is casualisation and contractualisation, which is the dominant trend in Coimbatore, Sriperumbudur, Ambattur, and even Trichy, where there are no permanent jobs. Most of these jobs do not require a diploma or a compulsory ITI background. The report talks of intergenerational mobility where sons of informal workers are getting regular salaried jobs, except in the case of Dalits. But here, even sons of formal sector workers are not getting regular jobs,” said Kumaraswamy.

Upper middle-class edge

On the other hand, only the urban middle classes, who were mostly from the upper castes, had the necessary educational background to first move into white-collar jobs. Only they could afford to send their children to engineering colleges, mostly private, which numbered 562 in Tamil Nadu at one point. The new generation BE/BTech graduates moved into IT jobs in the IT Corridors. Most of these engineering colleges were off-limits to Dalits and the share of women, too, remained very low as patriarchal parents were not willing to “invest” big money in girls who would be married off.

VSS Sastry from Karnataka added that the findings from the research project of an IIM-Bangalore student showed that more than 90 per cent of IT workers had no relations to land and cultivation, which meant that they were overwhelmingly urban.

On intergenerational mobility, Vignesh Kulasekaran, a data analyst in Bengaluru, quoted Nirmala, M, president of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike Pourakarmika Sangha, affiliated to AICCTU, as saying more than 90 per cent of the sweepers are women and almost all of them are Dalits. The majority of the Dalit community is still struggling hard to make their children first-generation graduates. A survey in Karnataka by Jeevika, an NGO working with bonded labour survivors, said 85 per cent of unpaid labour in bondage is performed by Madigas, a Dalit community.

Migrant identity

PRS Mani, a management consultant in Bengaluru, told The Federal that the State of Working India 2023 report should have dealt with migrants, too, as an identity group. However, among knowledge workers, outside workers are not known as “migrants” in Bengaluru because these tech industries are pan-Indian. So, there is no identity discrimination or even identity differentiation. The main faultlines are along caste lines. Though OBCs — but not many Dalits — have started coming into the tech workforce, it is the Brahmins who still dominate, numerically as well as in terms of managerial powers, though not necessarily in terms of skills.

Uday Kiran, a tech worker in Hyderabad, said there is an underlying streak of casteism in tech industries in his city even in recruitment. This is not visible because there is no data on caste composition and the share of OBCs. “All data sources, including government sources, are caste-blind. Instead of competitive OBC electoral politics, the BJP and Congress should address such issues,” he said.

Vaibhav Maini, a techie in the National Capital Region, feels there is no gender discrimination at the time of recruitment. But many women leave the job after some time due to marriage and care work and other domestic responsibilities and, hence, the overall gender composition looks tilted against them.

Such were the roots of labour market segmentation along social lines.

Skill development lagging behind

How effective are the ongoing skill development programmes in ironing out the differences in skills across social identity groups including women? The National Skills Development Mission was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 15, 2015, to impart skills to 30 crore people. The idea was to prepare the agricultural surplus population for entering the non-farm workforce.

However, between 2011 and 2017, the non-agricultural growth was 7.4 per cent per annum on an average, but non-agricultural employment growth was a mere 1.7 per cent. After 2015, non-agricultural jobs further declined.

So, beyond reservation and these token skill development programmes, what more needs to be done to make the labour market more inclusive and equal? How can the state intervene in the labour market to promote the skills of the downtrodden? What more can the governments and employers do to increase diversity?

The Justice Ranganath Mishra Commission report made several recommendations to increase social diversity in the private sector workforce. But most of these recommendations remain on paper.

The proposal for extending reservation to the private sector has also entered the policy discourse. In the backdrop of women’s reservation, the Congress is harping on increasing OBCs’ participation but both the BJP and the Congress remain conspicuously silent on this.

The industrial chambers also initiated a move to increase diversity voluntarily but they remained tokenist. The apprentice system at present only enables employers to exploit youth to get regular work done as temps for a paltry stipend. This system needs a total overhaul, and the government should pay them directly and give tax concession to companies who take them as interns.

HP report on work atmosphere

Warsha Mishra, a coding expert in software development who was working in Bengaluru until recently, felt the majority of workers with tech majors would not opt for a new job with lower pay for the sake of presumed greater happiness at work. Most of them who have hopped jobs know very well that the work atmosphere could be all the same in the new job as well. The work-life imbalance is universal in the tech industry. So are the heavy workloads and workplace bullying by supervisors and employers, she said.

However, she fully concurred with the underlying truth behind the finding that more than 90 per cent of knowledge workers in India feel unhappy about their jobs.

Padmaraj, a biotechnologist from a firm in a North Indian city, shares a similar view. “It is true that I will have to put in 14–15 hours of work a day and face lots of harassment at work. But, given such an option, I wouldn’t take a job with a lower pay even if it is lighter. This is because after taking up the present job, my lifestyle has gone up. I have bought a house for my parents and have to pay the EMIs. My child is in a high-cost educational institution. I am now accustomed to traveling by air and not train. As I cannot compromise on my family’s standard of living, I would rather endure the troublesome but high-salary job,” he said.

Prof Murugan, who teaches at the Vellore Institute of Technology, told The Federal: “It is good that the workforce is dissatisfied and is more vocal about it. The younger generation is more open to discussing it too. This will compel society by and large to address the issue. The survey missed some of the root causes of the problem, like the rat race that the present work environment has created, the repetitive mundane nature of most of the tasks, alienation at work, inherent unethical practices of business, and the absurdity of many processes and practices.”

Now, it is for the industrial chambers to undertake research as to what extent adverse workplace relations bring down productivity to instil some good management sense in employers.