The latest World Employment and Social Outlook Report (update for September 2024) from the International Labour Organisation highlights some disturbing trends.

Youth unemployment is an urgent problem with tragic consequences. The latest labour force survey data from the NSSO indicates how severe this is in urban India, especially in some states.

The fundamental issue raised by Hollywood writers when they had gone on a strike against being replaced by artificial intelligence, somehow receded to the background after the resolution of that particular conflict; but it remains a fundamental issue.

A Distinction is drawn in economics between demand-constrained systems and resource-constrained systems (which for simplicity and symmetry we shall call supply-constrained systems).

The unemployment situation is worse today than it has ever been in post-independence India. There are two distinct elements that have contributed to this situation. One is the fact that the output recovery from the fall caused by the pandemic-linked lockdown has not been accompanied by a comparable employment recovery.

A significant part of the recent increase in work participation rates is actually because of more unpaid workers being included in the category of "employed". The true increase in paid employment is marginal, and still bellow the rates of more than a decade ago.

In an economy like ours where the work-force is not neatly divided into "the employed" and "the unemployed", and instead there is massive and growing casualisation of work, measuring unemployment is a tricky business.

The apparent fall in the unemployment rate shown by recent data hides major areas of concern in India's employment pattern.

The data on unemployment brough out by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) present a grim picture. Not only has the unemployment rate increased sharply for some years now, starting from even before the pandemic, but the figure which had shot up during the pandemic has not come down much despite the recovery that has occurred in the level of GDP from its trough.

Self-employed workers in India—more than half the workforce—have suffered especially badly in the last few years. The official labour force survey data reveal that, even after overall economic activity has supposedly "recovered", their real incomes are generally lower than they were just before the Covid-19 pandemic.

There is a commonly-held view that while capitalism in its early stages brings about unemployment and hence an accentuation of poverty, this initial damage is subsequently reversed as it keeps growing.

Real wages of casual workers were already declining before the Covid-19 pandemic, and fell sharply during the pandemic. While they have recovered thereafter, quarterly average wages in April-June 2022 were only slightly above the pre-pandemic peak.

The preponderance of the self-employed in the labour force in many countries makes conventional schemes for ensuring social protection impossible to implement. Innovative ways of ensuring a universal social protection floor are required.

India is experiencing a job market crisis. Applicants for preferred jobs outnumber vacancies by numbers that make the process a lottery. The qualifications of these applicants far exceed the skills or knowledge required by many jobs.

Millions of urban Indian residents are struggling without livelihood opportunities, especially younger workers. A national urban employment scheme needs to be put in place immediately.

Mainstream economic policies that advocate fiscal-monetary austerity along with financialization and speculative transactions have squeezed the pace of expansion for the real economy. A major impact of above has been the dismal state of employment and job creation in the country.

There is a huge demand for employment generation because of widespread loss of rural livelihoods under lockdown. Yet, for about two months, most MGNREGS workers have not been provided any employment due to poor fiscal situation of the State governments.

The actual fresh allocation by the Centre in its second relief package is shockingly minimal. Showing liquidity provisions as spending for the pandemic and changing labour laws under the guise of self-reliance only reveal its callousness in a time of crisis.

The Covid-19 pandemic will worsen greatly the magnitude of poverty, brought about by the mass migration of the suddenly unemployed workers in urban areas towards the village, which still remains "the sink" for Indian Capitalism.

State policies to deal with the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic tend to address financial losses of companies. But the material impact is much worse for informal workers who constitute the bulk of the global workforce.

The recent labour force survey points to declines in all forms of work performed by women, including unpaid labour! Women are the worst casualties of the employment crisis in India.

Labour force and work participation rates are low among young women across India, but the 2017-18 labour force survey shows that rates in almost all states have fallen even further, pointing to particularly adverse women labour market conditions.

Indian labour force surveys indicate an increase in public employment, but very little of this is increase in good quality jobs. Instead, most new jobs are of underpaid women workers without proper conditions.

Signing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership would increase destitution and unemployment and also widen the current account deficit, worsening the coming recession.

Government's strategy of leaving public employment posts vacant to save on the potential wage bill is deeply irresponsible and unjust.

Aggregate employment contracted by 1.2 million between 2011-12 and 2017-18, because of the decline in agricultural employment and slow-down in the non-agricultural job growth.

Prabhat Patnaik argues that demonetization and GST combined with development that is inadequately job creating have led to a sharp increase in the unemployment rate.

Vikas Rawal and Prachi Bansal analyse data from the just-released Periodic Labour Force Survey to show the serious contraction of employment across states and most of the major sectors of the economy.

As the current government withholds the official employment data, Prabhat Patnaik uses per capita cereal availability to show that poverty and unemployment are likely to have worsened in the Modi years.

C.P. Chandrasekhar examines how problematic research driven by partisan biases gets academic sanctity through publication in "prestigious" journals - and then is used by policy makers to push anti-worker policies.

Prabhat Patnaik asserts that given the context of the rapid increase in unemployment in the country, MGNREGS could be an effective weapon against such unemployment, because of its high multiplier effects.

Government's suppression of all the relevant statistics is harming citizens, economy and the government itself.

Constraints imposed by the FRBM Act on fiscal and revenue deficit are just an excuse used by the government to hide its unwillingness to act on urgent and important public issues like employment crisis. In reality, government constantly cheats on the FRBM Act, through increased "off-budget" expenditures, misstatement of receipts, and holding back payments that pushes the debt onto other entities.

The Modi government's move to provide reservation for 'economically weaker sections' is a naked attempt to fortify its electoral prospects by creating an upper caste consolidation. This measure is largely for propaganda purposes and has little benefits to offer to anyone given the Modi government's poor record even on public employment.

Attempts by the Modi government to avoid scrutiny on employment generation by suspending or delaying official statistics and trying to use inappropriate and unreliable indicators are bound to fail. Independent assessments point to the dismal job situation in the country.

The current slowdown in the economy, aggravated by the persistent world economic crisis, has much to do with the twin coercive instruments of demonetisation and GST wielded by the state to strangulate the informal economy in a bid to "formalise" it.

The deeply entrenched casteist approach to manual scavenging is part of public policy and explains why the practice continues unabated and why the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan in effect relies on it.

The stagnation of employment in developed countries and apparent recovery in developing countries after the Great Recession of 2008-09 have renewed perceptions of a global shift in employment to the developing world, particularly in manufacturing activities. This article uses the most recent available ILO data to examine the extent to which such a shift is actually occurring.

There has been a significant increase in enrolment in higher education in developing countries (especially Asia) in the past decade. However, this positive change also brings forth certain challenges, the most obvious of which is the challenge of generating enough employment to meet expectations of growing numbers of new graduates.

One of the striking features of the latest National Sample Survey round results is the apparent decline in female employment in 2009-10 compared to 2004-05. The other depressing feature that emerges from the survey is that economic growth has still not generated a process of employment diversification for women.

One distinctive feature of the labour market in India is the fact that casual work in the construction sector has been the main source of employment during a period when India transited to its much-celebrated high-growth trajectory.

The results of the latest NSSO large survey on employment and unemployment provide crucial evidence on the pattern of inadequate job creation in this phase of high economic growth.

Despite numerous problems with the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the Scheme has borne some positive results. Ironically, the moderate success of the Scheme in improving the conditions and bargaining power of rural labour, including that of women workers, has now become another source of its criticism.

Data from the 64th Round of the National Sample Survey, which was specifically concerned with migration and employment conditions, allow for an examination of trends in real wages and the impact of the MNREGS on wages and unemployment. In this article, the authors consider the evidence of these effects on the work conditions of rural casual labour, especially women workers.

The NSSO 64th Round Survey, which was conducted in 2007-08, was concerned specifically with migration. This article examines the broad trends indicated by that survey. It is seen that there are some important changes in the pattern of movement for work, especially with the significant decline in rural male migration rates.

A comparison of the results of the 55th, 61st and 64th Rounds of the NSS permits an assessment of the trends in employment in India during the years when India transited to an era of high growth. It suggests that some of the optimism generated by the results for 2004-05 may not be warranted.

Despite scepticism about its sustainability, evidence shows that the crisis of 2008-09 has bottomed out and a recovery is likely, driven by the fiscal stimulus offered by governments across the world. But figures from the ILO indicate that the impact of the stimulus on employment appears uneven, with export dependent economies in Asia too adversely affected.

Lakhs of construction workers in Delhi face inadequate safety provisions, poor working arrangements and dire living conditions. But, even as the money collected as cess for meeting the social security needs of these workers lies unutilised, an outlandish proposal has been made to use a part of this money in a way that will effectively subsidise contractors and builders.