Quality of Informal Jobs in India’s Banking Sector: A Primary Study Through the “Decent Work” Framework

Abstract

“Decent Work” is International Labour Organization’s (ILO) umbrella strategy to promote the “quality of work/job” for all, which is aimed at more productive, well-remunerative and better quality jobs. However, the prevalence of informal employment and growing “informalization” of jobs indicate a general deterioration in the quality of work. The present study, based on a primary survey of employees in banking sector, shows that the “decent work” framework has had limited influence on the growing non-standard forms of employment (NSFE) in India. Even in a sector like banking, which is considered more formal and regulated, jobs fell short of “decent work” criteria. This article explores various indicators that have been used to gauge “quality of jobs” from the literature and shows how the prevailing NSFE in the Indian banking sector lack almost all of them. Analysis of the primary data shows that workers in NSFEs have lower levels of job satisfaction and receive low wages and minimal or no training. The findings of the study confirm that NSFEs do not ensure basic labour rights and decent standard of living and are also not desirable when compared to permanent jobs.

Keywords

Decent work quality of job standards of employment informalization NSFE

Introduction

The concept and measurement of “quality of job” or working life were developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. Since the launch of the book Social Indicators in 1966, the quality of work and the characteristics of jobs were immediately included in the research agenda of social science in many countries around the world, focusing on non-pecuniary aspects of jobs and individuals’ experience of their working environment (Burchell, Sechnbruch, Piasna, & Agloni, 2013). There are a number of reasons that justify the research on the quality of jobs and its measurement. During the last two decades, it has been observed that for many people, having a job does not ensure a basic standard of living¹ (Burchell et al., 2013), since a large amount of jobs created are neither productive² nor remunerative. In the dual process of globalization and liberalization, employment patterns are changing from standard employment which ensures stable, secure, productive and well-remunerative jobs towards more non-standard forms of employment (NSFE) where employees lack basic labour rights. The International Labour Organization (ILO) report on World Employment Social Outlook³ (2015b) reveals that nearly 6 out of 10 wage and salaried workers worldwide are in either part-time or temporary forms of employment. The standard employment model is less and less representative of today’s world of work (ILO, 2015a). The report estimates that the ongoing transformation of employment has led to a negative impact on labour incomes, productivity, and thereby resulted a shortage in aggregate global demand.⁴ A similar situation can be observed in the Indian economy.

Despite being one of the most important emerging economies of the world, the employment conditions in India continue to remain poor (Ghose, 2012). Historically, the Indian labour market is dominated by the informal sector, with only a minority of workers being engaged in formal employment with formal labour rights (Gooptu, 2013). However, increasing informality has eroded the limited formal employment opportunities that existed. Most of the employment generated in the Indian labour market has been in the informal sector and insecure in terms of its quality (IHD Report, 2014). ILO estimated that with 83.6 per cent of employment being informal, India has the highest percentage of informally employed persons in a group of 40 countries, and only 18.5 per cent were “regular” workers. However, even amongst them, less than 8 per cent have regular, full-time employment with social protection (IHD Report, 2014; ILO, 2012). Accordingly, certain occupations which seem to be in the formal sector may possess some defining features of informality in terms of employment conditions.

Against this background, the present study sheds light on the changing nature and “quality of employment” in a highly formal and well-regulated organized sector, the Indian banking industry. Jobs in the Indian banking sector were traditionally considered to be highly formal/standard jobs in terms of job conditions, including job security and various social security benefits which together made banking sector jobs as “good jobs”. However, with the onset of liberalization, technological change and growing competition with private and foreign banks, outsourcing and sub-contracting of jobs have rampantly increased. This has resulted in an increase in various forms of non-standard employment in the banking industry. Through a primary survey, this study probes the question of “quality of jobs” for these increasingly non-standard forms of employment and the different indicators of “quality of job” that makes the banking sector jobs “bad” for these non-standard employees. The study also analyzes the extent to which ILO’s decent work dimensions apply to these NSFEs. It is, however, difficult to reach a universal agreement on what constitutes a “good” job (Burchell et al., 2013). The second section provides the methodology and survey designed of the study. Literature on this subject is diverse and theoretically diffused and lack practical influence. Although the concept was developed in the late 1960s, at the onset, it lacked the data and methodology required for measurement. The third section of this study explores the available literature to study the evolution of the concept of “job quality” and the dimensions/indicators used to identify it and provides a brief overview of the methodology adopted for the purpose of this study. The fourth section measures and assesses the quality of jobs that prevail for the growing NSFEs in the Indian banking sector based on the dimensions identified, finding that these NSFEs lack most of them. The fifth section explores the framework of ILO’s decent work (1999) that has attempted a systematic definition of the “quality of work/job” through its concept of “Decent Work”. It shows how the NSFE fall short of the standards established by the ILO agenda of decent work. The sixth section emphasizes the need to incorporate better “quality of job” for the banking NSFE in order to come closer to the coherent framework of the decent work agenda developed by ILO.

Methodology and Survey Details of the Study

The study is aimed at analyzing the emerging non-standard/informal employment in the banking industry. There was no availability of secondary data which captured such indirect contractual “informal employment” prevailing in the Indian banking sector. A primary field survey was, therefore, undertaken in this study—involving a survey of 200 employees who are not on the direct pay-roll of the banking sector. Indirect employees (employed by the third party intermediary organizations), working both within and outside the bank premises have been interviewed for this survey. The survey assesses the working conditions and quality of work/job of such employees.

As identifying and approaching such non-standard employees are difficult, the survey relied on the snowball sampling method to identify its respondents. The study was located in Kolkata, an urban metro region characterized by high volume of banking activities and higher concentration of manpower. Commercial banking industry in India started from this region in 1786 and is also the foreground for the largest and oldest national trade union centre of bank employees in India, with a number of banks union offices like All India Bank Employee Association (AIEA), Bank Employees Federation of India (BEFI) and Federation of Bank of India Staff Union.

Since public sector banks (PSBs) comprise 75 per cent of Indian banking system, the coverage of PSBs in this survey is more than that of private sector banks. In the selection stage, the survey covers 10 public sector banks, five private sector banks and a few private financial agencies/companies to which banks outsourced their non-critical activities. At least three branches from each bank group have been covered in the survey. The survey consists of equal number of temporary employees both from the PSBs and private sector banks. Again, for the purpose of this study, the employees were classified according to their occupation types and 20 employees were selected from each category (20 × 10 = 200). Out of these 20 employees in each occupation type, 10 non-standard employees from PSBs and 10 employees from private sector banks have been selected. The 200 temporary employees selected from both the sectors were further sub-divided into three different segments depending upon their work arrangement or type of contract. Such categorization of employees (according to the work arrangement) helped in reducing the heterogeneity among employees, making it simpler to analyze the sample.

“Quality of Job” and Its Measurement

“Quality of job” is a profoundly important subject of research; as de Bustillo, Fernández-Macías, Antón, and Esteve (2009) emphasize, people work not only to earn a living, but work is important also for self-realization and social integration. Without “good” quality of jobs, existing policies of job creation will have little effect on the overall well-being of the society or even on the economy of the country. However, the well-being of workers is difficult to measure as it varies according to region, economy, sex and time (de Bustillo et al., 2009). In the literature on quality of jobs and work, two broad ways of measuring the well-being of workers on jobs have been developed—the objective and subjective approaches.

Objective Approach: Attributes that Make a “Good” Job

In this approach, the quality of job is evaluated by selecting some employment conditions or attributes that are conducive to have a better quality of working life, based on a solid theoretical foundation from academic research and from a large body of empirical work. This approach is not completely incompatible with the subjective approach but varies in terms of the emphasis placed on the different elements/dimensions taken into consideration in the process of choosing the job as “good”, by considering different possible dimensions of job quality (de Bustillo et al., 2009).

Researchers have identified attributes that define a “good” job, based on either intuition or theory. While building a system of indicators for job quality, they included both the intrinsic and extrinsic qualities suggested by the scholars from across different mainstream social sciences. Table 1 presents a summary of the type of the dimensions recommended for “good” quality of job that have been suggested by the theoretical approaches from different social sciences.

Table 1.

Dimensions of Job Quality by the Different Social Sciences

The Orthodox Economic Approach: Compensating Differentials	The Radical Economic Approach	Behavioural Economic Approach	The Traditional Sociological Approach: Intrinsic Quality of Job	The Institutional Approach: Employment Quality	Work–Life Balance Studies	Psychological Quality of Job
Labour compensation	Power relations	Participation	Skills	Contractual status	Physical risks	Duration
Wages	Industrial democracy as a compensating power	Relation with the boss	Autonomy	Stability of employment	Psychological risks	Flexibility
				Opportunity for skill development		Regularity

Source: de Bustillo et al. (2009).

Measuring Job Quality Indicators for Non-standard Employees in Banks

In any standard/regular forms of employment, employees have job security, better working conditions, voice rights and access to social security. Non-standard employment, on the other hand, lacks direct employer–employee relation and thereby results in the evasion of several employment rights such as provision for retirement benefits, social security and job stability. For this reason, non-standard employment/jobs are often equated with poor quality “bad jobs” (Kalleberg, 2000).

Employment in the Indian banking sector has well-defined terms of conditions for jobs that are protected by tripartite agreement among employees, unions and the management. However, with the onset of outsourcing, sub-contracting and contractualization of jobs, NSFE arises in the Indian banking industry. The process of evaluating quality of employment in the banking sector proves to be difficult because of multiple factors; first, the lack of proper sources of data availability on the quality/nature of employment; second, with regard to the level of analysis or investigating, it is difficult to determine whether to investigate at the individual level or at the level of labour market. To resolve these difficulties, this study conducted a field survey to cover a coherent set of different attributes—earnings, poor working conditions, job insecurity, absence of social dialogue, lack of social security, poor skill development and training, and lack of promotion to gauge the well-being of the non-standard employees of the banking sector and to analyze their job quality. The data collected is at the individual level, comprising details of the job or the context of the job. A measure of bad quality of jobs in the banking sector is assigned by analyzing Korner et al.’s (2009)⁵ work which adopts a broader perspective and looks at various aspects of employment which together focuses explicitly on job quality.

Drawing from the above approaches, a coherent set of different attributes were selected to gauge the well-being of the non-standard banking sector employees, representing dimensions of their job quality or quality of work. The data collected is at individual level comprising details of the job or the context of the job. A measure of bad quality of jobs in the banking sector is assigned by analyzing these fundamental dimensions in job qualities.

Different Dimensions of “Bad” Quality of Jobs in the Banking Sector

Wages/salary makes a good proxy for job quality because of its high association with productivity and acts as a good determinant for better working conditions (Munoz, 2011). However, the survey reveals that 27 per cent of the non-standard employees earned less than ₹5,000 per month, while 64 per cent have monthly income less than ₹10,000. Only 25 per cent of them have earnings around ₹15,000 monthly. The proportion of income inequality between regular and outsourced employees for work of a similar nature is as high as 4:1 (Paul & Mahurkar, 2016); low levels of wages/salary is viewed as “bad” (Kalleberg, 2000).

The emolument structure is based on the education, experience and work arrangement⁶ of the employees; therefore, better educated and well-experienced employees employed as temporary hiring agency (THA) and company contract employees (CCE) earn more in term of monthly emolument ranging from ₹6,000 to ₹15,000; but again, the per cent of such employees have their salary based on 26 days (around 34% of highly skilled THA employees and 86% of casual employees). Some highly skilled and educated employees at THA level earned salary around ₹20,000. Such high salary is based upon their experience, education, skills levels, etc. Casual employees are at the lowest quintile of monthly emolument having their daily salary fixed at ₹110 to ₹180 only the payment in this case is based on the policy of “no work, no pay”.

Another factor for emolument is working hours. Longer working hours generally affected work–family balance. According to the survey, 58 per cent of non-standard employees are working for more than 10 hours. Working hours are not fixed and are rather flexible for such employees; most of such employees work for longer duration. Although there is a provision of over-time payment for the standard employees mentioned in the RBI (staff) regulation (1948), no overtime pay is given to non-standard employees.

Job uncertainty is more common for non-standard employees. A written contract establishes the link between the employee–employer and is associated with the employers’ responsibility towards its employee. The lack of a contract makes the employee–employer relationship fragile and relegates the employees to a vulnerable situation. Around 68 per cent of non-standard employees have a written contract for a year, while the remaining 32 per cent employees lack any written contract for their jobs. Although, every THA and CCE employee reported to have a written contract, these contracts remain valid for a year only.

These employees are not allowed to form collective associations. Formation of collective bargaining groups could result in the loss of jobs. They do not even have any grievance cell to address their problem or any issue related to their job. Lack of unionization increases employee’s exposures to bad quality of jobs.

Access to employment-based social security is an essential dimension for well-being of a worker. The two major social security provisions for the banking sector non-standard employees’ are the Employees’ State Insurance (ESI) and Provident fund (PF) Act. According to survey, only 24 per cent are getting ESI health facility, while 51 per cent of employees are covered under PF scheme. However, 25 per cent of employees are denied of having any social security or retirement benefits. It is seen that THA generally provides PF and ESI to all its employees; CCE largely provides PF to all its employees though only 8 per cent have ESI facility. Whereas, casual employees are denied of both kinds of social security benefits. Overall, non-standard employees are not entitled to have sick leave, compensation, maternity leave, dearness allowance or gratuity.

Also, since training is not provided to the employees, large numbers of employees continue to work in the same positions from where they started because of their limited skill and potentiality; there is thus no scope for any promotion or enhancement in the quality of jobs.

These different dimensions and measures of “bad” jobs are highly correlated to each other. If a job is bad on one dimension, it tends to be bad on some other dimension (Kalleberg, Reskin, & Hudson, 2000). There is a high inter-relation among non-standard work arrangement, lack of health insurance and absence of pension benefits. Table 2 presents the percentage of employees having poor quality of job, measured upon 10 attributes, separately for three different types of non-standard work arrangement/contract prevailing in the Indian banking sector. The results suggest that casual employees are at the bottom level and suffer from the maximum number of “bad” characteristics of jobs followed by CCE and THA employees.

Table 2.

Different Quality of Working Conditions of Non-standard Employees

Types of Employees/Attributes of Job	Percentage of Respondents Who Indicated Poor Quality of Job
Types of Employees/Attributes of Job	THA	CCE	Casual
Low emolument*	55.3	76.4	84.7
No promotion	77.6	94.3	100
No paid holiday	80.8	23	100
No break-time	47.4	94.5	100
Max. <10 hours’ work	45.5	38.4	87.6
No national holiday	NA^	23	52
Multi-tasks	16.4	76.2	NA
No grievance cell	NA	NA	NA
No bargaining power	NA	NA	NA
No resting place	26.3	97.6	78.4

Source: Primary Survey.

Note:* Emolument ranging between ₹5,000 and 10,000; NA = Not applicable.

In order to rigorously explore the association among various dimensions, the study developed a scale of poor working conditions from 1 to 10, measuring the given numbers of poor working conditions that respondents have stated. This scale, with a summary score formed from 1 to 10, presents a good consistency with high reliability co-efficient (Cronbach’s alpha)⁷ of 0.78. The high value of Cronbach’s alpha shows the investigated “bad” qualities of jobs are indeed interrelated, that is, a worker who is denied one kind of basic employment benefit is likely to be denied other kinds of benefit as well.

Subjective Approach: Job Satisfaction as an Indicator of “Quality of Job”

An alternative way in which the literature focused on measuring “quality of job” is through workers’ own evaluation (Burchell et al., 2013). The recognition of the difficulties faced in properly identifying all the aspects affecting job quality and their importance has led researchers to propose a shortcut to measure the impact that job characteristics have on the well-being of the worker at his job. Instead of focusing on the inputs (characteristics of jobs), the scholarship suggests to focus on measuring the output, that is, the prospects for well-being of the workers after receiving their jobs (de Bustillo, Fernández-Macías, Esteve, & Antón, 2011). An obvious and common choice is to use the declared level of satisfaction of workers with their jobs, a strategy which has several advantages. First, it allows the multidimensional concept of job quality to convert into a single index which in turn makes it easier to measure and interpret. Second, the otherwise rigid framework of “good” and “bad” characteristics of a job is made more relevant by measuring it according to the worker’s own criteria. Third, it avoids the need to measure the different characteristics of the job and weight them according to the researcher’s criteria (de Bustillo al., 2011). Job satisfaction depends on the available attributes that an employee receives out of his job, “job satisfaction” sums up to those receiving “good” attributes. A higher level of satisfaction shows that most of the attributes provided of any given job is sufficiently large or “good” enough to make the job worthy, while the low levels of satisfaction depict the reverse scenario for the given individual employee/worker.

Given the importance of job satisfaction as an important aspect of job quality as well as of general subjective way to measure the overall well-being of an employee/worker, the study seeks to measure the “quality of job” for the NSFE in the banking sector by analyzing the job satisfaction of the sample employees from their respective jobs. The survey presented a close-end choice of three levels of satisfaction: (a) less than 50 per cent satisfaction; (b) 50–70 per cent satisfaction; and (c) above 70 per cent satisfaction, asking the workers/employees to choose the given level of satisfaction they were getting from their current job. The survey results show that around 46 per cent of the sample employees are actually satisfied at the level of 50–70 per cent. Almost 18 per cent reported more than 70 per cent satisfaction and 35 per cent reported being less than 50 per cent (or 30–40 per cent) satisfied. A higher level of satisfaction is taken as an overall measure of having “good” characteristics of jobs, and lower satisfaction is assumed to show the presence of poor or “bad” characteristics of jobs.

The survey results indicate that the level of satisfaction depends upon the type of employment arrangement. THA employees are more satisfied than Contract CCE, followed by the casual workers. Almost 58 per cent of THA employees are highly satisfied with their job, whereas 68 per cent of them are moderately satisfied; while around 78 per cent of CCE employees are highly to moderately satisfy from their job. On the other hand, casual employees are quite unsatisfied with their jobs, but owing to low levels of education and skills, they are unable to move to a better position. Indeed, the dependence of job satisfaction on the types of work arrangement is very much associated upon the employees’ status at work as it is highly correlated with the components/characteristics that are attached with the employees’ job. Along with the reports on the overall satisfaction levels for each category of employees, the survey data also shows that the level of job satisfaction of an employee is expected to depend largely on different job components such as promotion, working hours, number of tasks to perform, availability of social security, job security, a weekly paid holiday, pay scale and many more.

Results of Ordered Logit Regression

Table 3 reports estimates of an ordered logit model of seven⁸ different components upon which job satisfaction of employees/workers is expected to depend, separated for three categories of employees depending upon their employment arrangement: THA, CCE and casual employees. The level of satisfaction is scaled from 1 to 3, where a value of 1 corresponds to “least satisfaction level” and a value of 3 corresponds to “highly satisfied”. The overall measure reveals that THA and CCE forms of employment lead to significantly more satisfaction for the employees while that of casual employment is the least. By considering job satisfaction as related to different job components, the results show that THA and CCE employees are significantly more satisfied with their job overall if they are given promotion in the job, paid holidays and more social benefits

Table 3.

Job Satisfaction* of Non-standard Employees: Temporary Hiring Agency (THA) Employees, Contract Company Employees (CCE) and Casual Employee

Aspects of Job Quality	THA	CCE	Casual
No promotion	–0.70 (0.65)	0.81 (1.82)	Omitted
Flexible task	–0.94 (0.72)	Omitted	NS
Flexible hours of work	2.16 (0.69)	–4.21 (1.22)	Omitted
No paid holiday	–0.16 (0.60)	–066 (1.01)	Omitted
Written contract	Omitted	Omitted	Omitted
Availability of social benefits	0.25 (1.24)	NS	Omitted
High emoluments	1.28 (1.24)	NS	Omitted

Source: Calculated from primary survey data.

Notes: *Coefficients are obtained from ordered logit regressions. For each row, the dependent variable is “job satisfaction” measured on a scale from 1 to 3, where a value of 1 corresponds to “least satisfaction level” and a value of 3 corresponds to “highly satisfied”. The reported numbers are the coefficients (and standard errors) on seven different components of job for THA, CCE and casual employees of the survey. A separate regression is estimated for three different types of non-standard employees.

** parentheses figures has significant at 0.05% level.

Omitted are the variables having no significance as the given indicators are absent for casual employed employees.

NS = Not significant, N = 200 and Pseduo R² = 0.318.

Considering the effect of different aspects of job qualities on the level of satisfaction, the study finds that having no prospects for promotion in the job (–0.70) and not providing a weekly paid holiday (–0.16) have a negative effect on attaining higher level of satisfaction. However, availability of social benefits (0.25) and high emolument (1.28) have positive effect on satisfaction level. It is interesting to note that working for flexible hours has no significant impact on the satisfaction level of THA employees, whereas it has negative impact on CCE employees, possibly because THA employees mostly work within the bank premises along with regular employees and their tasks resemble that of regular employees; hence such employees do not consider flexible or long working hours as problematic. However, in contrast, the CCE employees worked off-site and mostly for odd-hours; hence long hours of work and over-time decreases their satisfaction levels. Job security is omitted for being highly collinear between THA and CCE as none of these non-standard forms of employees provide job security. The case of casual employees is very different from the other two categories; casual employees are mostly deprived of having any benefits of employment. They work on low daily wages with no job security of any kind of employment or social security benefits; as a reason they report lowest levels of job satisfaction.

Using job satisfaction as an overall indicator of job quality helps in simplifying the definition, modelling, measurement and analysis of an otherwise complex concept of “quality of job” (de Bustillo et al., 2011). Although job satisfaction stands as a single indicator to measure the overall quality of good jobs, its usefulness is limited by many external and internal factors. It is observed that the level of satisfaction is highly affected by the workers’ marginal position in the labour market, sex of the worker, overall economic situation/condition, etc. Literature on subjective well-being also emphasizes the impact of individual differences in terms of the ability to cope and to adapt to favourable or unfavourable conditions, which in turn affect their satisfaction levels. Although the subjective approach of job satisfaction is simple and easy, its use as an indicator for “quality of job” might be problematic (Fernández-Macías, de Bustillo, & Antón, 2014). Therefore unfortunately this approach has important shortcomings, which makes it less suitable as an indicator for measuring the quality of jobs.

Moreover, it is said that although job satisfaction might be related to job quality, there are many more variables/dimensions related with job quality. Various studies propose looking at good job practices provided by the employer which are arguably conducive to workers’ well-being, such as health facility, high wages, promotion opportunities, provision for social benefits, etc. (Burchell, 2013).

Decent Work: Concept and Components

The concept of decent work was launched in the report of the Director-General for the 87th International Labour Conference meeting in 1999, with the aim of promoting decent and productive work in conditions of freedom, equality, security and human dignity (ILO, 1999, p. 3). The four strategic objectives of the ILO “Decent Work” agenda have remained constant since the time of its launch in 1998 in the ILO “Declaration on Fundamental Principles” and “Rights at Work”, they are:

Employment and income opportunities

Social protection against vulnerabilities

Social dialogue

Employment rights; conditions at work.

The four components of decent work are multi-dimensional with both quantitative and qualitative dimensions taken from various multi-disciplinary studies. The components required for forming the index for decent work consist of a set of indicators that provides an approximate measure for this concept; the different indicators that are used as components of decent work are:

Remunerative employment which means that the workers should benefit from employment by earning an income sufficient to sustain a decent life.

Conditions of work which includes rights at work, limited hours of work, weekly rest and paid leaves.

Basic rights such as freedom of association and social dialogue which are essential for defending the interests of workers. Social dialogue takes place in the form of collective bargaining between the employer and employee regarding the terms and conditions of employment.

Social security which includes protections against contingencies such as unemployment, sickness, retirement, disability, maternity, etc.

Substantively, decent work constitutes an effort to view the different dimensions of “quality of work/job” within a single framework. Before, ILO’s notion of decent work, the dimensions for “good” quality of jobs tended to be treated separately and in isolation. Thus, when the ILO launched its concept of decent work in 1999, expectations amongst labour market analysts were raised. They hoped that the concept would lead to new measurements, more extensive and internationally comparable data gathering, synthetic employment indicators and theoretical advances in the functioning of the labour market (Burchell et al., 2013). Decent work is therefore regarded as the fundamental dimension for the quality of life and productive work as the main source of overall well-being.

Decent Work in India

In February 2010, the Government of India and the Indian employers’ and workers’ organizations agreed on a Decent Work Programme (DWP), in collaboration with ILO. The ILO hailed it as “the biggest and most widespread DWP to be launched by the ILO and social partner so far” (ILO, 2010). The Decent Work Programme in India is aligned to the 11th and 12th Five-Year Plans. The programme focuses on (a) employment creation through skills development, (b) social protection for groups in the informal economy and (c) continued elimination of “unacceptable forms of work”.

Although the ILO has signed the Decent Work Programme with India, it quietly made an exception to the (very limited and very basic) formal minimum requirements of the decent work agenda in order to get India “on board” (Lerche, 2012). However, the overall conclusion is that the Indian government does not seriously want to regulate labour markets in the informal economy with regard to conditions of recruitment, work and pay, not even maintaining the minimal standards of decent work criteria (Lerche, 2012). It is in this context, that the present survey gauges the pattern and performance of the decent work agenda for the NSFE in the banking sector.

Patterns and Performance of Decent Work for the Non-standard Employee

In this present study, both subjective and objective indicators are used to study the decent work conditions of non-standard banking sector employees, using a well-structured questionnaire which includes all the indicators of decent work. On the basis of their decent work profiles, we can group the different occupations in the following categories:

Employees that have a triangular employment relationship enjoy certain privileges of decent work. This includes aspects of social security such as PF, ESI facility and work security for a year and having a written contract for their jobs; better working conditions if the employee is working within the bank premise. However, the right to form any union is restricted.

Employees that have a casual employment relation are denied all components of decent work. Such employees lack any provision of security and work benefits or rights. There is no provision for any social protection or security of their job, even though some have been working for more than 5 years in the same bank.

An atypical employment relationship fetches few benefits for the employees. This mainly includes employees who have been hired by an external agency subcontracted by a bank for tasks such as ATM replenishment, cash collection or recovery; they have restricted benefits that may include PF, few holidays, and some also have ESI. However, there is no provision for the formation of unions or any kind of association rights for such employees.

Table 4 lists the seven dimensions of job quality which are widely considered to be necessary for decent work by several studies, in addition to the four major components. As discussed, three out of the seven major dimensions of good quality of job or decent work are largely unknown among the non-standard employees, including social dialogue, promotion or training and dearness relief (DR)/gratuity.

Table 4.

Selected Qualities of Job Indicators of the Non-standard Employees

Occupations/Dimensions	Written Contract	Health Facility	Pension/PF	DR/Gratuity	Flex. Working Hrs	Social Dialogue	Prom
Executives	✓✓	✓✓	✓✓	✕	✓✓	✕	✕
Tellers	✓✓	✓✓	✓✓	✕	✕	✕	✕
Tele-caller	✓✓	✓✓	✓✓	✕	✕	✕	✕
Office boy	✕	✕	✕	✕	✓✓	✕	✕
Credit/loan	✓✓	✓✓	✓✓	✕	✓✓	✕	✕
Cash collection	✓✓	✓✓	✓✓	✕	✓✓	✕	✕
Security guards	✓✓	✓✓	✓✓	✕	✕	✕	✕
House-keeping	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕
Janitors/electricity	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕
Canteen Boy	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕

Source: Computed from primary survey.

Note: Written contract is for a year only; health facility includes ESI facility only.

Summary and Conclusion

This article made an attempt at examining the quality of job for the prevailing NSFEs in the banking sector. The concept “quality of employment/job” is multi-dimensional evolving from different disciplinary dimensions both qualitatively and quantitatively and hence is difficult to analyze from a single measure or methodology. The concept evolved from simple studies of job satisfaction moving towards more comprehensive measures of job and employment quality. This study analyzes the “quality of job” for the NSFEs in the banking sector using two parallel measurements or methodologies developed by the European Union and the ILO’s decent work agenda. Using two different but complementary methods to measure the quality of job clearly revealed that NSFEs of the banking sector lacked most of the “qualities” that qualify a job as being a “good” or “decent” job. This adversely affects the workers in terms of low income, poor access to social security, job instability, lack of healthcare and denial of employment rights to organize, collective bargaining, civil rights, freedom of association, etc.

Deteriorating conditions of work and weakening of workers’ rights have ranked India among the world’s 10 “worst” countries to work in by the International Trade Union Confederation’s (ITUC) Global Rights Index (2016), which ranked 141 countries on a scale of 1–5 on the basis of 97 international indicators of working rights. India has been ranked in group 5 (indicating no guarantee of job rights), along with 25 countries, on grounds of rising contractualization and “disproportionate violence” against workers. According to the report, countries with the rating of 5 are the worst countries in the world to work in. While legislation may spell out certain rights, workers have effectively no access to these rights and are, therefore, exposed to autocratic regimes and unfair labour practices. Thus, in India, by and large, growing informality adversely affects the quality of employment as the jobs created are not well remunerated and are low in productivity. As a result, India has a perennially low unemployment rate but a very high rate of poverty since majority of workers are poor and vulnerable. Thus, given the persistence of informal and poor quality employment, the biggest challenge for the Indian labour market is not to create employment, but the need to create productive and remunerative jobs (Ghose, 2014; Papola, 2013).

The overall impact of concepts like “quality of employment” and “decent work” on research and public policy is extremely limited compared to the influence achieved by other concepts like Human Development Index or informal sector (Burchell, 2013). No institution or researcher has been able to develop a comprehensive and coherent measurement of job quality as none of the indicators commonly used are completely satisfactory from a methodological point of view. There is, thus, a need to apply greater efforts and resources to construct theoretically more clear and strong indicators for measuring the quality of job with an international perspective on the subject of quality of employment.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article is a part of my doctoral thesis submitted at the centre for the study of regional development, Jawaharlal Nehru University. I am thankful to my research supervisor Prof. Ravi S. Srivastava for his guidance and interest in this work. I would also like to thank union leaders Mr Bhattacharya, Mr Bose and Mr Sharma for their immense help and guidance during my survey. I would finally like to thank my respondents, the employees (hired by outsourced agencies) and the outsourced agencies (Brink firms, OM logistics, etc.) interviewed for providing their ample time and information for this survey.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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