Logout
Welcome
Edit News Article
Title
*
Select Subject
Working Conditions
Wages
Construction workers
Bonded labourers
Welfare schemes
Social security
Unorganised sector workers
Minority communities
Id cards for migrant workers
Trafficking
Slum dwellers
Seasonal workers
Contract system of labour
Employment
Child labour
Children of migrant workers
Trade union
Migrants Crisis
Demonetisation
None
Description
Many of the problems faced by migrant labour – precarity of employment, lack of social security, poor safety – and by the increasing numbers of women migrating for work had existed for years. The construction sector, for instance, continues to rely on a low wage and poor migrant labourers living in hazardous conditions on urban construction sites. Though men account for over 80% of all internal migration for work, female migration more than doubled in the decade to 2011. Yet the issues particular to migrant women labourers remain largely ignored in policy and programme interventions, studies have shown. In this first article in a new series, Women@Work 2.0, which will examine the barriers to women’s employment and the solutions, we report that the Covid-19 pandemic has worsened the situation of women’s employment overall. Eight months after the lockdown was imposed, 13% fewer women than a year ago were employed or looking for jobs, compared to 2% fewer men, data show. Urban women saw the deepest losses. Women entrepreneurs are struggling to survive, women employed as domestic help in cities, at construction sites and in call centres, and in handicraft and retail units, have lost jobs, IndiaSpend reported in November. Men account for over 80% of all internal migration for work in India. But between 2001 and 2011, female migration more than doubled from around 4.1 million to 8.5 million, Mazumdar and Neetha N wrote in a paper published in The Economic and Political Weekly in May. In 2001, 47% of women migrating for work were headed to urban areas. By 2011, it was 58%, Mazumdar told IndiaSpend. “Notwithstanding the visibility of women among these migrants, the gender dimensions of the migrant question and the special conditions of women’s labour migration remained largely ignored or sidelined in the public policy debates and interventions that were pushed to centre-stage by the Covid-19 pandemic,” she added. The failure of “official macro data to delineate the scope, scale and patterns of female labour migration” and thus incorporate gender in development approaches to internal migration, was also highlighted in an IWWAGE report in May 2019. These policy failures could prove costly. “Emerging trends underline how the convergence of poverty, gender and marginalisation has played out during the pandemic, to render women, and specific categories amongst them, especially vulnerable,” write Indu Agnihotri of Centre for Women’s Development Studies and Asha Hans, founding director, School of Women’s Studies, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, in a forthcoming book on Covid-19 and migration. Women pay the highest price during any major economic shock, said Mahesh Vyas, managing director and CEO of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, whose Consumer Pyramids Household Survey has collected weekly data at a national level since January 2016 from close to 175,000 households. In the aftermath of demonetisation, 2.4 million women fell off the employment map while 0.9 million men came into jobs, said Vyas. Thus, it was women who bore the entire pain of job loss caused by demonetisation. The economic shock caused by the Covid-19 pandemic is no different, he told IndiaSpend. While it has “hit both genders”, in absolute numbers more men than women lost jobs simply because there are more men than women in the labour force, to begin with, said Vyas. “The hit on women, especially urban women, has been disproportionately high,” he added.
Keywords
households, women, migrants, labour force, urban, work, construction sector, migration, security, safety,
Upload Image
(only .gif or .jpeg files or .x-png files. Max upload size is 20MB)
Source
Display in both Policy and News
No
Yes
Enter Video url/Embed Code :
Url
Embedded Code
External Link URL
Status
Active
Inactive
Show On Home Page
Yes
No