Covid-19 has unimaginably disrupted the lives, livelihoods

There is no doubt that Covid-19 has unimaginably disrupted the lives and livelihoods in the society. Businesses incurred huge losses and business confidence is yet to fully recover. Millions of informal workers suffered multiple deprivations in the labour market. Unemployment soared quite high and employment rates declined during the peak Covid period and both did not improve significantly by the end of 2020. Even the so-called organised sector workers suffered income and job losses. Government assistance to business and workers was perceived to be inadequate. Ironically though, the Covid-19 period also witnessed a spate of changes in the labour laws at the regional levels and the passage of three Labour Codes at the national level. The world of work in India has experienced the severest crisis. Mind you that the adverse impact has landed far more severely on the vulnerably placed informal and the unorganised workers, people below the poverty line and thereby exacerbating existing inequalities in the economic system.

When unemployment as per CMIE data has been stubbornly hovering around and over seven per cent, is it not worrying that India does not have a macro level unemployment allowance/insurance scheme even for the workers in the organised sector? During 2007-2017 a total of 10,728 workers availed unemployment benefits under the stringent ESI-covered unemployment scheme which means an average claim of 978 workers per year! Will we see a repeat of poor labour market governance witnessed during Covid-19?

With the second wave of Covd-19 setting in, these are some of the most pertinent questions, because ironically we are witnessing inordinate delay in taking the corrective measures such as creating a comprehensive data base concerning migrant and the unorganised workers and framing of policies and creating governance mechanisms. The Draft Migration Policy was released just recently and the Labour Bureau is set to launch five employment surveys which though covers migrant and domestic workers strangely leaves out workers in the emerging sectors like the gig and the platform economy, informal professional service providers. These are welcome measures but there is no credible gestation plan for implementation of them.

It is pertinent to mention here that as high as 68.4 per cent of workers in the non-agricultural sector work in the informal sector, about 70 per cent did not have written contracts, more than half of them did not have paid leave and any social security (PLFS 2018-19). Given the extreme precarity of workforce in the non-agricultural sector, which unlikely to have reduced (in fact precarity would have been intensified thanks to Covid-19), the resurgence of Covid-2 poses serious and grave concerns for workers in particular and society and economy in general.

There are many labour economists, who think that it is important that workers feel safe and that involves more than gestures and indirect actions like infusing liquidity in and providing no-collateral soft loans to firms, people and street vendors in the economy.