COVID-19 Impact: 6 million white-collar jobs lost during May-August, says CMIE

Almost six million white-collar workers lost their jobs between May and August amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) said. These include engineers, physicians, teachers, accountants, and analysts, among others.

According to the CMIE website, during May-August 2019, white-collar employment peaked at 18.8 million. It remained almost stable at 18.7 million in the September-December 2019 period but later fell to 18.1 million during January-April 2020 which showcases partial effects of the lockdown.

CMIE CEO Mahesh Vyas said, “Employment of these professionally qualified white-collar workers fell steeply to 12.2 million during the wave of May-August 2020. This is the lowest employment of these professionals since 2016. All the gains made in their employment over the past four years were washed away during the lockdown."

The website also noted that overall salaried jobs were estimated at 86.1 million in 2019-20. This fell to 68.4 million in April 2020. By July 2020, their count had fallen further to 67.2 million.

“The biggest loss of jobs among salaried employees was of ‘white-collar professional employees and other employees’. These include engineers, including software engineers, physicians, teachers, accountants, analysts and the type, who are professionally qualified and were employed in some private or government organization," it added.

It further noted that informal jobs have returned and even increased after being hit by the lockdown. Non-salaried forms of employment have increased from 317.6 million in 2019-20 to 325.6 million in July 2020.