Sudhir Kumar
In the last two years, the crisis caused by the pandemic has made the problem of employment more serious. Crores of people have lost their jobs in these two years. The problem of poverty is also taking a formidable form due to loss of employment and not creating new opportunities. The situation of unemployment in the country has become alarming, it is known from the report of Center for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) recently. Obviously, the employment crisis caused by the pandemic is not over yet.
This CMIE report is based on employment data from September 1, 2021 to December 31, 2021, which gives a picture of the labor force, labor force participation rate, employed and unemployed persons and unemployment rate. This report corroborates the fact that the unemployment rate in the country was 7.91 percent in the last December, which is the highest in the last four months and one percent higher than in November, 21.
Earlier, the unemployment rate was 6.97 percent in November, 7.74 in October and 6.86 percent in September. Last year the highest unemployment rate was in the month of May with 11.84 percent, while the average unemployment rate in the country was 7.80 percent that year. Due to the epidemic, not only the urban, but a large rural population has also suffered the brunt of unemployment. The report states that the urban and rural unemployment rates in the country were 9.3 and 7.3 per cent respectively in December 2021, which were 1.1 and 0.9 per cent higher, respectively, as compared to the month of November. The report shows that about a third of the unemployed are also women.
The unemployment rate is increasing continuously in the country. Employment generation is facing a serious challenge. Barring a few states, the condition of all the states is more or less the same on the unemployment front. Haryana was the highest unemployment state in the country with an unemployment rate of thirty four per cent in December. At the same time, the unemployment rate remained high in Rajasthan (twenty seven percent), Jharkhand (seventeen percent), Bihar (sixteen percent) and Jammu and Kashmir (15 percent). On the other hand, Karnataka, Gujarat and Odisha (1.6 per cent), Chhattisgarh (2.1 per cent) and Telangana (2.2 per cent) with 1.4 per cent unemployment rate emerged as the best states in the country in terms of providing employment to their population.
In the last two years, the crisis caused by the pandemic has made the problem of employment more serious. Crores of people have lost their jobs in these two years. The problem of poverty is also taking a formidable form due to loss of employment and not creating new employment opportunities. The depleting sources of livelihood and income have also given rise to tendencies like stress, depression and suicide in the society. It is difficult to say when this employment crisis will end permanently.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) has estimated that around 30 million new jobs could have been created had the pandemic not struck the world. According to the organization, recent global unemployment has overshadowed the last five years of progress in eradicating working poverty and returning to 2015 levels of working poverty. It is known that in 2015 itself, the ‘Sustainable Development Agenda’ for the year 2030 was also decided.
The conclusion is that we are back where we started because of the pandemic! Not only this, efforts were being made to recover from the Great Depression of 2008-09, they have also been deeply shocked by the pandemic. Unemployment is more widespread during the pandemic than during the Great Depression fifteen years ago. Also the decline in women’s employment has hindered the progress of the last fifteen years, which was based on better educational opportunities for women, more employment in the service sector and reduction in migration.
In a survey conducted by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), thirty-four percent of firms admitted that their business had declined due to the pandemic. Forty-four per cent of the firms said that measures such as complete shutdown or partial closure had reduced their business, while only ten per cent of the firms said that the pandemic did not affect their business. Obviously, the pandemic has affected the economy on every front.
The ILO report confirms that women have been affected more than men in terms of losing jobs globally due to the pandemic. Millions of women have faced economic crisis due to loss of employment, salary cuts, loss of income sources. As a result, women have lagged far behind in the labor market. In such a situation, the crisis of women’s return to the workplace is deepening.
According to the ILO, the employment level of men has shown an improvement to a great extent in 2021 compared to 2019, but compared to men, about 13 million women could not return to the employment sector. During 2019-20, 4.2 percent of women’s jobs were lost as compared to three percent of men’s jobs. At the same time, in the era of Corona epidemic, there has been a huge disparity in employment availability between men and women.
Last year, only forty-three percent of the world’s total working female population was employed, while seventy-nine percent of men of the same age group were able to find employment. This growing gender gap in the labor market is a cause for concern. The United Nations has pledged to end gender inequality in all sectors by 2030. But looking at the present situation, it does not seem that this resolution will be fulfilled in time. However, even before the pandemic, women were facing challenges like less employment, lower wages, longer working hours, limited career opportunities than men. But the pandemic has increased the difficulties of women on many fronts.
Inequality in terms of loss of employment and re-employment of men and women has been seen all over the world. In 2019-20, the employment of women in the US decreased by 9.4 percent, which was 2.4 percent more than that of men. During the same period, the employment of women in Arab countries decreased by 4.1 percent, while that of men decreased by 1.8 percent.
In the countries of the Asia-Pacific region, four out of every hundred women were lost in employment, while two men out of the same number of men lost their jobs. Similar situation prevailed in Europe and Central Asia, where the rate of loss of employment from women was higher than that of men. Although the suffering of women during the pandemic period is not limited to being denied employment, but during this period, incidents of domestic violence and gender-based violence and harassment related to work have also increased.
However, there is a need for a concrete and clear employment policy to deal with unemployment, so that it can address the problems like reduction in gender-based employment opportunities and gender-based cuts in wages paid for equal work. In order to deal with the problem of unemployment, while the governments should be serious about eradicating unemployment and creating opportunities through concrete policy, policies should also be worked on promoting self-employment.
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