Lockdown-led Unemployment - Social Disparities

What is the issue?

Data from Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE)’s Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS) was released recently.
Alongside massive unemployment, there are socio-cultural disparities in the impact resulted by the lockdown and unemployment.

What is the current overall employment scenario?

The average number of employed persons between March 2019 and March 2020 was over 403 million.
In other words, this was the scenario one year preceding the lockdown.
In April 2020, this number came down to a little over 282 million.
This is roughly a 30% drop from the earlier figures.

In other words, employment in April 2020 was 70% of the average in the preceding year.

What is the impact on disadvantaged sections?

In India, there are clear gender and caste disparities in the early lockdown-induced job losses.
Consequently, women have suffered relatively more than men (rural women more than urban women).
Also, Dalits (Scheduled Castes), specifically rural Dalits, suffered relatively more than upper castes.

Rural women’s employment has suffered the maximum relative loss.
Evidently, the effects of the pandemic-induced lockdown have not been neutral with respect to social identity.

What does the CMIE data suggest?

A comparison of April 2020 (post-lockdown) with November-December 2019 (pre-lockdown) employment status reveals certain trends.

The drop in male employment is greater than female by 17.6 percentage points.
However, the possibility of losing jobs is more for women.
Women who were employed in the pre-lockdown phase were 23.5 percentage points less likely to be employed in the post-lockdown phase.
This is compared to men who were employed in the pre-lockdown phase.
Male heads of household were 11.3 percentage points more likely to be employed in post-lockdown phase than female heads.
The caste differences are relatively smaller than the gender differences.
But the lockdown affected employment of the SC-ST-OBC groups relatively more adversely than the higher ranked group of castes.
Women and Dalits have suffered disproportionately more job losses.
However, the reality is that, risky, hazardous and stigmatized jobs are exclusively their preserve.
All frontline health workers (ASHA/ Accredited Social Health Activists) are women.
On the other hand, evidently, manual scavengers are exclusively being Dalits.
Thus, for most women and Dalits, the choice seems to be between unemployment and jobs that come with disease, infection and social stigma.
In all, the pre-existing inequalities along gender and caste lines are only likely to get reinforced with COVID-19-led economic changes.
It calls for recognition and redressal by concerted government measures.

How vulnerable are women?

Between 2004-5 and 2017-18, the male-female gaps in educational attainment have narrowed considerably in India.
However, gaps in labour force participation have widened.
Female labour force participation rate is persistently low in India over decades.
It has declined sharply over the last 15 years.
Globally - It is expected that in the Covid-19 pandemic, women are likely to be more vulnerable to losing their jobs compared to men.
There are nearly 220 million women employed in sectors that are potentially vulnerable to job cuts.
Of the 44 million workers in vulnerable sectors globally, 31 million women face potential job cuts, compared to 13 million men.

Source: Indian Express