by admin | May 25, 2021 | Employment, Opinions
By Abhik Ghosh,
A recent amendment to the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Rules, 1946, has sparked excited debates by its proponents and critics alike.
Some observers see the latest move as the ushering in of much promised big ticket reforms in the labour and employment sector. Employers generally have welcomed the development, whereas workers’ representatives have by and large castigated it as a subterfuge for legitimising contract labour. Will the big bang sustain or will it end in a whimper?
I have argued elsewhere that, given the political situation — not to mention the disadvantage it faces in the Rajya Sabha — the government’s intent to bring about major legislative changes in the labour and employment sector may remain a pipe dream. If the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, with its overwhelming numerical strength in the Lok Sabha, could not steer through any worthwhile labour reforms in four years of its tenure, it is highly unlikely that the situation will change dramatically in the last year. The pragmatic route is to find areas that may be addressed through executive action. And that is precisely what the government seems to have done.
It has introduced a seventh category of fixed-term employees in addition to the extant six classifications of workers under Schedule 1-A of the Rules, for which conditions of service may be separately prescribed by the employer. The amendment lays down that fixed-term workers would enjoy the same emoluments and allowances as permanent workers, albeit pro-rated for the period of their employment. This places them in a category superior to contract workers who are generally paid less and do not enjoy any of the statutory allowances and benefits available to regular workers.
In this sense the government has tried to balance the wages, social security and welfare of fixed-term employees, but because their term is fixed, their termination with notice is inherent in their employment contract.
Fixed-term employment will provide employers with flexibility to adjust the workforce in response to changing market conditions, which has been a longstanding demand to aid ease of doing business. The seasonal and cyclical nature of employment in certain economic sectors such as apparel manufacturing and exports was earlier recognised and fixed-term employment was allowed.
The government has now extended the concept across all employment sectors with a view to providing more job opportunities and more secure working conditions for fixed-term employees. With rising economic growth, greater job openings and multiple skill levels, workers should be able to opt for greater employability rather than job security. Creative destruction should be the new catch phrase.
The lament that fixed-term employment will promote contract labour is the result of misconception. There is already empirical evidence of the secular growth of contractual employment across all employment sectors. The problem lies in the differential treatment of workers employed through contractors as compared to regular employees. By mandating comparable wages and allowances to fixed-term employees the government has tried to provide them with greater protection and benefits than workers supplied by and through contractors. It is salutary that employers have consented to the amendment despite the higher costs it would entail.
Will the new amendment promote employment generation, which is the government’s avowed objective, at a time when job opportunities appear to be shrinking? The higher cost of compliance may act as a dampener, but the jury is still out on that.
Trade unions resent the fact that the government’s intent to amend labour laws and rules was announced in the Finance Minister’s budget speech, indicating absence of prior tripartite consultations. Employers, on the other hand, are satisfied that the protocol of tripartite consultations have been followed. The fact that even the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), a trade union centre affiliated to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is critical of meaningful social dialogue on such important issues is worrisome. Perceptions in such cases matter more than form.
Is there any hope of big bang reforms in the labour and employment sector in the foreseeable future? Regrettably, it is a case of missed opportunities. The much-touted rationalisation and consolidation of 44 labour laws into four omnibus codes has yet to see the light of day.
Big ticket reforms such as amending Chapter VB and Section 9A of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, cannot take place as time is really running out for the present government. At best, it can undertake incremental steps by tweaking rules through executive action. The challenge is to put in place a few more such constructive changes aimed at speedy job creation by carrying all major stakeholders on board before the government goes into election mode.
(The author is former IAS and ILO Official. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at abhik.ghosh1@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate Jobs, Employment, Overseas
Bengaluru : Global software major Infosys on Thursday said it will soon open a technology and innovation hub in the US state of Connecticut and hire about 1,000 American workers by 2022.
“We will open our next technology and innovation hub at Harford in Connecticut and hire 1,000 American workers in the state by 2022,” said the IT major in a statement here.
The Connecticut hub will focus on insurance, healthcare and manufacturing to bring the company to the eastern state’s clients and serve as the global hub for its InsurTech and HeathTech efforts.
“Investment in Connecticut is a part of our commitment to accelerate innovation for American enterprise by amplifying local talent and shrink the IT skills gap in the marketplace,” asserted the statement.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Corporate Jobs, Employment, Large Enterprise, Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Overseas, Private Jobs, Technology
New Delhi : Online hiring activity registered a 6 per cent growth year-on-year (YoY) in February as job markets continued to remain volatile, a Naukri.com report said here on Wednesday.
The survey said the Naukri Job Speak index for February at 2,087 recorded a 6 per cent growth from the corresponding month in 2017, indicating optimism across industries, including BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance).
According to the job portal’s report, the YoY comparison highlighted that top metros maintained a steady growth while the tier II markets were not far behind — signalling a healthy uptrend.
Mumbai witnessed a significant 12 per cent jump in hiring when compared to February 2017, while the national capital New Delhi grew by 4 per cent, it added.
“As predicted earlier, the job market continues to be volatile. The Job Speak index has shown a YoY growth of 6 per cent in February,” said V. Suresh, Chief Sales Officer, Naukri.com.
“This growth is primarily driven by non-IT sectors like oil and gas, BFSI, industrial products, construction and automobile. The IT sector continues to be under pressure, we can expect this volatility to continue for a few more months before it moves north,” he added.
The report revealed that in February 2018, the industry which incurred a record high in terms of hiring was the oil and gas sector.
“This trend is closely followed by banking and financial services, and insurance sectors at 16 per cent and 22 per cent, respectively,” the report said.
It pointed out that while the index noticed less movement for IT and BPO sectors during the month under review, jobs in industrial products/heavy machinery grew by 22 per cent.
In terms of functional areas, the report showed that banking/insurance grew by 7 per cent in February, while production/maintenance and site engineering jobs saw a 21 per cent and 19 per cent growth, respectively.
Marketing and advertising roles saw a 9 per cent growth during the month under review.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
For representational purpose only
By Arnav Joshi,
While much of the world is busy worrying about losing jobs to automation in the future (and this is overstated), what has crept past for over a decade is that automated systems (to most, Artificial Intelligence, or AI) already play a major role in whether or not — and how — we get the jobs we still have, and these are used by a steadily growing number of Indian and multinational companies.
The current breed of algorithmically-driven, automated decision-making systems warrant our attention and alarm. All but ubiquitous, particularly in mass hiring, these systems are largely opaque as to their decision-making process, potentially making many unethical (or illegal) decisions, whilst dehumanising the hiring process in general.
Usually, the bigger the company, the more the applicants, the wider the automation, and larger the potential of being “wronged” by a machine. Lured in by sales pitches peppered with higher productivity and lower costs and attrition, who wouldn’t want to use them?
There are benefits, but they don’t outweigh the concerns yet. What often goes unseen is how the secrecy around the deployment of these systems (ironically, in part owing to the fear of them being gamed) combined with a lack of both awareness and adequate legal safeguards creates a deadly cocktail of misuse of personal data, automated discrimination, and abject uncertainty for hundreds of millions of job-seekers.
So what does an applicant drowning in rejection emails do? The Guardian, in a rather click baiting-ly titled piece, “How to persuade a robot that you should get the job”, (inadvertently) offers up some solutions, seemingly suggesting that there are ways in which you and I can, in fact, fight back against the machine.
After highlighting the plight of the job-seeker in the age of AI, towards the end, where one expects a silver lining, the article gets into how people discuss and offer various ways to stress-test and “game” the system. One ludicrous solution comes up (citing “an HR employee for a major technology company”) — slipping words such as “Oxford” and “Cambridge” into your CV in invisible text to pass automated screenings. It may not be The Guardian’s, but it’s someone’s solution, arguably offered to almost 25 million readers, without raising the red flag about its potential futility.
Complex machine learning systems that parse and analyse things like CVs to assess candidates are not yet the stuff of Elon Musk’s worst nightmare, but they’re not so gullible either. For starters, many of these systems use tonnes of other data points — social media posts, video essays, scroll speed, text entered (and deleted), and much more is logged and analysed. The systems learn quickly and constantly from this perennial supply of training data, using incredibly complex neural networks we cannot yet adequately comprehend, to draw correlations they themselves cannot justify. Just how many things can a candidate hope to adapt to for a system he knows nothing about?
Michael Veale, a prominent researcher in automated decision systems at the University College London adds that “While there are a lot of studies lately pointing to how individuals can ‘fool’ machine learning systems, they tend to require people to have access to the systems already. That’s a cybersecurity problem more than anything.” And that even where a candidate thinks he or she may succeed, “It is definitely possible to adapt systems if they are being gamed, but it’s not assured it will happen. More likely than not, attempts at gaming will just make systems useless.”
What would it take a system like this to game the gamer? Not much at all. Would an application that would otherwise have been selected by such a system be binned because it attempted to use invisible ink? A raised eyebrow? A certain number of words per minute? We just don’t know. Systems also change from company to company and vary by narrow contexts — there are no catch-all solutions.
What we do know is that someone hoping to achieve a different (positive) outcome thanks to slapdash measures is likely to come out feeling far more dejected when rejected — for if even gaming didn’t work, they must really not be good enough. That is not it, the problem (most often) is not with the applicant. First and foremost, this is the message that needs to go out.
What should you really be doing? There is no quick-fix solution, and not as simple as invisible ink. The silver lining, however, is that the movement towards greater fairness, accountability and transparency is already well under way. Long overdue updates in data protection regulations are also on the anvil, including in India, which will directly challenge many of the automated hiring solutions companies currently offer, severely restricting complete automation as well as what data they can gather, how they gather it and what they can do with it — a big departure from the current free-for-all data (mis)use.
As interim measures, candidates should first work towards making themselves more aware about the level and scale of automation, and asking the right (and difficult) questions of their potential employers. While polite emails may not get clear answers, in more severe instances where you feel you may have been unfairly discriminated against by an automated system, consider taking a slightly more formal, legal approach.
When it comes to hiring, there are already laws that require employers to account for equality, anti-discrimination and disparate impact — and these apply to an algorithm as much as they do to hiring manager John Doe. While systems can (in some cases) be designed to ignore certain attributes in an attempt at fairness and equality, this is not a comprehensive solution (for technical reasons to do with machine learning that I won’t get into here).
When companies know they are unlikely to be able to prove that their automated hiring process was (legally) fair, a letter from your lawyer or professional association will get them breaking into a sweat.
There is also fantastic academic and data activism research taking place in many parts of the world, applying various methodologies, old and new, attempting to reveal the many issues with widely used automation systems, holding their makers and users to account. What researchers often lack is data, being outside actors, locked out of the companies they would like to audit. Use your data for good — contribute it meaningfully to sound, ethical research which needs it to effect change.
For the companies themselves, should growing awareness and potential legal challenges prompt a rethink, Veale suggests that rather than over-reliance on automation and trying to remove the human element altogether, “They should be investing in ways to better help their employees sift through applications in computational ways. Data visualisation tools and user interfaces also enable people to deal with great numbers of applications, and they’re often lacking and lagging behind right now. Use computers to help humans make decisions, not to help humans offload decision-making responsibilities.”
(Arnav Joshi is a technology lawyer, Data and Society masters candidate and data ethics researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He can be reached via twitter @boom_lawyered)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Employment, Overseas, World
FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva
Khartoum : Africa must, in coming decades, explore the entire food chain to create adequate jobs for young people, especially in rural areas, the head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation said on Thursday.
“Countries need to promote a rural and structural transformation that fosters synergies between farm and non-farm activities and that reinforces the linkages between rural areas and cities,” said FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva.
This includes processing, packaging, transportation, distribution, marketing and service provision, especially financial and business services, he said at FAO’s Regional Conference for Africa centered on the theme of creating decent and attractive jobs in the continent – the world’s youngest in terms of the average age of its population.
Estimates suggest that up to 12 million new jobs will have to be created every year to absorb new labour market entrants over the next 20 years, FAO said.
Today some 54 percent of Africa’s workforce – especially farming families – rely on agriculture for their livelihoods, income and employment, the UN agency said.
With more people moving to cities, demand on urban food markets will grow, which in turn can generate job opportunities in all agriculture-related activities, but more must be done to create non-agricultural employment in rural areas, including agro-tourism and other services, FAO believes.
“More than ever, strategic partnerships are needed to bring together the African Union, the African Development Bank and the UN system and other development partners,” Graziano da Silva said.
He pointed to FAO’s regional programme, “Youth Employment: enabling decent agriculture and agri-business jobs”, which goes beyond farm jobs and seeks to develop capacity and scale up successful approaches through programme formulation and partnerships.
But FAO urged measures to help smallholders and farming families as more profitable urban markets can concentrate food production in large commercial farms, with large processors and retailers dominating the value chain (products or services sold to consumers).
“Smallholders and family farmers need specific policies and regulations. This includes providing access to inputs, credit and technology and improving land tenure,” Graziano da Silva said.
Social protection programmes, including cash transfers can play a crucial role by linking public food purchases to family farmers’ production, he noted.
—IANS
