Contrary to the rising economic distress on the ground since the last few years, the official press release related to the fourth Annual Report on the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) at first glance seems to give a rosy picture about the employment situation in India.  Defined as the percentage of persons unemployed among the persons in the labour force, the unemployment rate in usual status (principal activity status + subsidiary economic activity status)...

-Press release by Oxfam India dated 15 September 2022 New Delhi: Oxfam India’s latest ‘India Discrimination Report 2022’ finds women in India despite their same educational qualification and work experience as men will be discriminated in the labour market due to societal and employers’ prejudices. The academically recognised statistical model applied in the India Discrimination Report is now able to quantify the discrimination women face in the labour market. The lower...

-Hindustan Times As the public sector has contracted, there has been no other good employer that has emerged to take its place despite the economic expansion of manufacturing and services sectors. Despite several decades of rapid growth of the private sector in India, the allure of a public sector job, historically associated with security, steady pay, and multiple benefits, continues to remain strong for most Indians. The protests following the announcement of...

-ThePrint.in India’s salaried class shrank by 2.7 percentage points during pandemic, govt’s Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) shows. But data for religious minorities, women is even bleaker. New Delhi: There’s much to lament in India’s post-Covid job market, where recovery has been painfully slow. However, government data suggests that when it comes to the salaried sector, the participation of religious minorities — Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians, in that order — has been...

-Newsclick.in The authors propose a project to increase the long-term employment of women that decisively breaks from neoliberalism. Like other countries where the neo-liberal project is ascending, India is witnessing a rise in unemployment and a falling labour force participation of women. Proponents of the neo-liberal project claim that women’s labour force participation falls in periods of rising family incomes. The question, however, remains that even if family incomes were rising (though...