3 Did workers return to the same type of work they had prior to the lockdown?

CPHS data has four employment categories in increasing order of informality — permanent salaried, temporary salaried, self-employed and casual. We find that employment recovery post-pandemic has taken the form of increased informality. This means that there was an increase in the proportion of self-employed and casual wage workers as compared to salaried workers between December 2019 and August 2020.

Given the large earnings difference across employment types in the pre-covid period, we can surmise that this (and other such) transitions were detrimental to workers’ earnings and welfare.

Overall, 68% of workers experienced a fall in income between December 2019 and August 2020. The median fall in earnings was 26% ( the corresponding change in the preceding year, from December 2018 to August 2019 was 0%). In addition to the detrimental effect of such employment transitions on workers’ incomes, it should be noted that average August incomes remained significantly below pre-pandemic levels for all types of workers.