Cos scale down blue-collar jobs in small towns | Economic Times

Rising Covid cases in rural India and smaller towns have hit the employment prospect of frontline and blue-collar workforce in these places as several states have imposed lockdowns to contain spread of the infection. Blue-collar hiring in tier 2 and 3 towns has come to a grinding halt in the last 4-5 weeks as many small and medium-sized manufacturing companies are on the verge of stopping in these markets, job market experts and economists said. “It is not possible for many SMEs to keep paying people when productivity is badly hit due to the lockdowns,” said Madan Sabnavis, chief economist at Care Ratings. “Hence, all hiring plans will be put on the back burner for some time.” A survey by recruitment services firm CIEL HR Services, shared exclusively with ET, showed that companies in smaller towns hired only about half the number of blue-collar workers they intended to hire in April.While more than 600 companies across industries in smaller towns had shown clear intent and plans to hire more people last month, their actual hiring numbers were much less than planned due to lack of growth in the business, especially in manufacturing and engineering sectors, restrictions in operations, and uncertainty about the severity and depth of impact of the second wave of Covid-19 on consumer sentiment, the survey showed.“We have seen a 50% gap between the hiring mandates given out by companies and the actual job offers and candidates onboarded in the blue-collar sector in smaller towns in April,” said Aditya Narayan Mishra, chief executive of CIEL HR Services.82921506As per CIEL Hiring Index, which calculates hiring activity on a monthly basis across industry sectors, actual job offers in blue-collar roles in smaller towns stood at 149 in April against hiring intent of 294.The study covers hiring in 20 tier-two cities including Aurangabad, Baroda, Chandigarh, Coimbatore, Dehradun, Indore, Jaipur, Jamnagar, Kanpur, Kochi, Kota, Madurai, Nagpur, Panaji, Patna, Pondicherry, Surat, Varanasi, Vijayawada, and Visakhapatnam.On a pan-India basis, though, the actual blue-collar job offers were only about 8% lower than the original hiring mandates. “The impact hasn't been seen in the pan-India numbers yet due to the activities in ecommerce, supply chain, retail and infrastructure projects,” Mishra said.