In India, blue collar workers are in a league of their own
A wage revolution in the labour market is seeing vocationally skilled profiles being offered better pay
No one wants the blue-collar worker to be underpaid or denied opportunities, but the diminishing breed of white collar workers are desperately seeking parity
You’re so foolish, shortsighted,” my daughter messaged me the other day. I could feel the fury in the emojis that followed. She had just come home after a long day in a clinic in Bengaluru where she has parked herself after graduation. So I rightly guessed the message has got something to do with her education or job.
Pat came the second message: “You should have invested less than ₹25,000 in a second-hand scooter instead of the ₹4 million wasted on my course. A delivery job would have made me a millionaire within the five years I had slogged in the college.”
“I am not Warren Buffet. I am an average dad. What’s going on?” I enquired.
She threw at me a table of bluewhite collar wage comparison that had her blood boil. “A delivery boy earns ₹34,000 a month, while a dentist gets just about ₹7,000!” She sounded shocked, and pointed out another flaw in the chart. “It doesn’t talk of the slavery system prevalent in the dental field.”
She is a dentist. And a fresher. “You are holding me from the newsroom work. Tell me quickly.” I was growing impatient.
“In the one month I roamed around in the sheeting rain in Kochi, clinics wanted me to work for free for a year. Freshers are exploited to the hilt on the pretext of unemployability. This is unacceptable,” she fumed. She refused and boarded a bus to Bangalore where she found the story same. Her friend Polo’s messages talked of similar predicament in Kolkata.
I did a quick research to check the veracity of the wage chart. It was a recent Indian Express report headlined, Blue is the new white, which talked about how vocationally skilled bluecollar profiles are offered fatter pay cheques than engineers and management graduates. The story had gone viral in the Indian academia.
By conventional wisdom, though blue-collar jobs involved more laborious work, they were paid less than their white-collar counterparts. What the Express report has laid bare is the blue-collar wage revolution that has been silently sweeping the labour market. The first trigger for change was pulled by none other than the law of demand and supply a few years ago. A reverse migration wave caused by prosperity and an urge for education in traditional labour-supplier states would explain the shortage in labour-user cities.
The second revolution was one of the indirect effects of economic globalisation. Business models are undergoing a significant change, impacting
the skills and capabilities required for success in select sectors. “India’s job landscape is in transition with a slowdown in employment in core sectors and the concurrent emergence of new engines of job creation. Increased infrastructure and construction sector activity driven by government spending, new self-employment models, and emerging technology aggregator models are transforming the job landscape in the country,” according to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci) in its report titled Future of Jobs in India.
Keeping this in mind, the government of India has launched various projects such as Make in India, Digital
India, Startup India, Skill India which would create more blue collar jobs, and improve the skill sets of other job seekers. The Skill India initiative alone aims to train over 400 million people by 2022. To serve the mostly unorganised blue-collar workforce in India, LinkedIn has also partnered with IL&FS Skills Development to help them improve their employability. There are over 25 blue collar job portals operating in the country.
No one wants the blue-collar worker to be underpaid or denied opportunities, but the diminishing breed of white collar workers are desperately seeking parity. It’s a paradox that unemployability, not unemployment, is the bigger problem facing India. According to Ficci, 93 per cent of MBAs and 80 per cent of engineering graduates in India are unemployable, owing to the lack of connect between what they are taught in colleges, and the industry requirements. The Gross Enrolment Ratio (GRE) for Indian higher education has been just 34 per cent which is very low in comparison to developed countries that have a GRE of 56 per cent, according to industry data, which says 80 per cent of the higher education system in India is yet to be realigned for the year 2030.
According to reports, outdated curriculum, inadequate infrastructure and poor quality of faculty, combined with old delivery platforms, make it difficult to equip students with relevant skills. Hence companies rely more on their own training given to the freshers rather than what they learn in college.
Given the situation, it’s comforting that the All India Council for Technical Education has shut down hundreds of ‘substandard’ engineering colleges across the country, bringing down the number of seats in engineering colleges by 310,000 in the last four years.
Coming back to my daughter’s grievance, many vocationally skilled blue-collar profiles are offered fatter pay cheques than engineers and management graduates. “For example, many engineers and BDS graduates earn less than ₹10,000 while cab drivers, delivery boys and cooks earn more than ₹30,000 a month,” says the Express report.
My sister back home showed me much more exciting figures. A coconut-plucker in Kerala on average charges ₹35 per tree. He could climb approximately 100 trees in eight hours which would earn him ₹105,000 a month. And he works 365 days. Let’s say good for him.
“Whatever happened to the government’s much-hyped plan to introduce a minimum wage of ₹15,000! I wish it would come true so that a dentist’s salary would double,” quipped my daughter.
“So what’s your plan to tide over the situation,” I queried.
“At the moment I am a blue collar in the clinic. I work seven days with half day on Sunday. I am taking my passion seriously. I have put all my friends on notice that future fashion shoots will be charged. I am also planning to temp as a model.”
“Timely thinking,” I said. “All the best for life in the blue, blue world.”
“Dad, you have come of age. Brilliant.”