Job Contracts

This chapter considers the distribution of job contracts — in terms of casual jobs, temporary jobs (that is, those of less than a year’s duration), and permanent jobs — across different subgroups of the population. Although the analysis of chapter 5 echoes that of chapter 3, which is cast in terms of regular salaried and wage employment and casual employment, the novelty of chapter 5 is two-fold. First, it explicitly addresses the question of job tenure: while much of the regular salaried and wage employment discussed in chapter 3 may have been permanent employment, some of it may not have been. Second, and more importantly, it addresses the issue of “desirable jobs” using a data set different from the NSS data used in the earlier chapter (that is, unit record data from the Indian Human Development Survey relating to the period 2011–12). The Survey provides details about the job tenure of persons by distinguishing between three types of jobs: casual (daily or piecework), contracts of less than one year duration (hereafter, simply, “contract jobs”), and permanent. The importance of the analysis contained in this chapter is that if one defines job insecurity as workers’ fear of involuntary job loss, job insecurity has negative consequences for employees’ attitudes towards their job, their health, and the quality of their relationship with their employers.