Worker

Topic: Employment, Unemployment and Informalisation · NCERT: Class 11, Ch 6 "Employment: Growth, Informalisation and Other Issues"

Meaning

A worker is any person who does an economic activity, in any capacity, "high or low". An economic activity is any activity that adds to gross national product (GNP) (the value of all final goods and services made by a country's normal residents in a year).

• This covers people paid by an employer, the self-employed, helpers of main workers (including unpaid family members), and people temporarily absent from work.
• Who counts as a worker decides the size of the workforce, the Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and the unemployment rate. So it shapes how India measures jobs, growth and women's work.
• WPR = (employed persons ÷ population) × 100 [2]

Explanation

The test: does the activity add to GNP?

• GNP = GDP + net factor income from abroad (NFIA).
• GDP (gross domestic product) is the value of final goods and services made inside the country's borders.
• NFIA is what Indian residents earn abroad (wages, rent, interest, profit) minus what foreigners earn in India.

• NCERT Class 11 adds the "net earning" from exports and imports to GDP to get GNP. This is wrong. Net exports (X − M) are already part of GDP.

• If the activity adds new goods or services to GNP, the person is a worker. The status or size of the job does not matter.

• Not workers: a beggar, thief, smuggler or gambler. Their activity adds nothing to GNP.
• Some of it is a transfer: money moves from one person to another, but nothing new is made.
• The rest is illegal.

Who is included

• Paid employees. They get a wage or salary from an employer.
• The self-employed. They run their own enterprise, like a farmer on their own land or a shopkeeper. They are not anyone's employee, and they may or may not hire others.
• Helpers of main workers. This includes unpaid family members who help on a family farm or in a family shop.
• People temporarily absent. A person who misses work because of illness, injury, disability, bad weather, festivals or social and religious functions is still a worker.
• The form of payment does not matter:

Payment	Meaning	Example
Wage	Paid by an employer for a set period of work	Daily wage of a mason
Salary	Fixed regular pay, usually monthly	Bank cashier
Payment in kind	Pay in goods, not cash	Farm labourer paid in mangoes of equal value
Fee	Paid for professional advice or services	Doctor's or lawyer's fee

• A labourer paid in mangoes is still a worker. The farm output still counts in GNP.

NCERT cases

Person	Worker?	Why
Raj, a schoolboy who works on the family farm after school	Yes	Farm output counts in GNP, and helpers are workers
Meena, a housewife who helps in her husband's cloth shop	Yes, for the shop work	She is an unpaid helper in a family enterprise
A woman who does only housework	No	Housework for one's own family is outside the GNP boundary

• The ILO boundary is wider:
• The 19th ICLS (2013) (International Conference of Labour Statisticians, run by the ILO) defines work as any activity that produces goods or services for use by others or for own use [3][4].
• It sets out five forms of work: own-use production work, employment, unpaid trainee work, volunteer work and other forms of work [3][4].
• Employment is only work done for pay or profit [3][4].
• So under the ILO, housework is "work" but not "employment". This is the same line NCERT draws for Meena.

How workers are counted: a worked example

• Usual status (the reference period is the last 365 days) [2]:
• Principal status (ps): the activity a person spent most of the year on.
• Subsidiary status (ss): an extra economic activity done for 30 days or more in the year.

• Usual status (ps+ss) counts both. So a part-timer like Raj is counted as a worker.

• Current Weekly Status (CWS): the reference period is the last 7 days [2].

• Example: a village has 1,000 people aged 15 and above. 600 are in the labour force (working, or looking for or available for work), and 580 of them are working.
• WPR = 580 ÷ 1,000 = 58%
• LFPR (Labour Force Participation Rate) = 600 ÷ 1,000 = 60%

• UR (Unemployment Rate) = 20 ÷ 600 = 3.3%. You divide by the labour force, not the whole population.

• What makes the worker count rise or fall:

• More people joining family farms and shops as helpers → more workers counted.
• Machines replacing people (Gandhi warned about the "craze" for labour-saving machinery) → technological unemployment (jobs lost because machines replace people) → fewer workers.
• Choosing a short 7-day window → seasonal and part-time work is missed → fewer workers counted.

In India

• Who measures it: the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS). The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) under MoSPI launched it in April 2017 [2].
• Sample, 2023-24: 1,01,920 households and 4,18,159 persons (July 2023 – June 2024) [2].
• Latest WPR, persons aged 15+, usual status (ps+ss) [2]:

Indicator	2017-18	2022-23	2023-24
WPR (all)	46.8%	56.0%	58.2%
WPR, male	71.2%	76.0%	76.3%
WPR, female	22.0%	35.9%	40.3%
WPR, rural	48.1%	59.4%	62.1%
WPR, urban	43.9%	47.7%	49.4%

• Female workers:
• Female WPR almost doubled, from 22.0% (2017-18) to 40.3% (2023-24) [2].

• Rural female WPR rose from 23.7% to 46.5%. Urban female WPR was only 26.0% in 2023-24 [2].

• On CWS (2023-24): WPR is 53.7% [2]. It is lower because the 7-day window misses seasonal work.

• Size of the workforce (NCERT): about 545 million in 2022-23.
• About two-thirds are rural, and about 77% are men.
• Women are one-fourth of the rural workforce and one-fifth of the urban workforce.

• The same chapter gives 535 million for 2019-20. Use each figure only with its own year.

• Unpaid work outside the worker count (Time Use Survey 2024):

• 83.1% of women and 26.4% of men did unpaid domestic services for household members [5].

• Women aged 15-59 doing this work spent about 305 minutes a day in 2024, down from about 315 minutes in 2019 [5].

• New forms of work:

• Home-based work: footballs stitched in homes in Jalandhar, Punjab are sold by MNCs (multinational companies).
• Work from home: millions worked this way during COVID-19 (2020-21).
• Moonlighting (taking a second job along with a regular one): this became a dispute in the IT sector in 2022.
• All of these people are workers.

Don't confuse with

• Employee: works for someone else for a wage or salary. Every employee is a worker, but not every worker is an employee. The self-employed and unpaid helpers are workers without being employees.
• Labour force: workers plus the unemployed who are looking for or available for work. That is why LFPR (60.1%) is higher than WPR (58.2%) in 2023-24 [2].
• ILO "work" vs "employment": under the 19th ICLS, "work" includes own-use production such as housework, but "employment" means only work for pay or profit [3][4]. NCERT's "worker" also covers unpaid family helpers, so it does not match "employment" exactly.
• Beggar, gambler, smuggler: they may earn money, but they are not workers. Their activity is a transfer or illegal and adds nothing to GNP.

Prelims Hooks

• A worker is anyone doing an activity that adds to GNP. Unpaid helpers in a family enterprise (Raj on the farm, Meena in the shop) and people temporarily absent because of illness, bad weather or festivals are workers. A beggar, thief, smuggler or gambler is not.
• Payment in kind (for example, mangoes for farm work) still makes someone a worker. Housework alone does not.
• WPR = employed ÷ population. UR = unemployed ÷ labour force [2].
• PLFS was launched by NSSO (MoSPI) in April 2017. Usual status = 365 days. Subsidiary status = 30 days or more. CWS = 7 days [2].
• PLFS 2023-24 (15+, ps+ss): WPR 58.2%, male WPR 76.3%, female WPR 40.3%, LFPR 60.1%, UR 3.2% [2].
• Trap: GNP = GDP + net factor income from abroad, not GDP + net exports. NCERT Class 11 has this wrong.

Mains Points

• Invisible women's work (GS-I/GS-III):
• 83.1% of women do unpaid domestic work, against 26.4% of men (TUS 2024) [5].
• This work is outside the GNP boundary → women who only do housework are not counted as workers → their contribution to the economy is under-valued.

• The ILO's wider "work" concept [3] and time-use surveys help make this work visible.

• Rising female WPR: good news or distress? (GS-III):

• Female WPR rose from 22.0% to 40.3% between 2017-18 and 2023-24, mostly in rural areas [2].
• Part of this rise may be women joining family farms and shops as unpaid helpers. They count as workers, like Meena, but may earn little and have no job security.

• A good answer judges the quality of work, not only the number of workers.

• The home as workplace (GS-III):

• Outsourcing, work from home and home-based production (like the Jalandhar footballs) make "the home … the workplace".
• This gives people flexibility. But it pushes work into the informal sector, with no fixed hours, no social security and weak bargaining power.
• The 2022 moonlighting dispute shows the same tension in formal jobs. The employer wants loyalty and data security, and the worker wants the right to earn more in their own time.

Related concepts

• Economic activities
• Workforce
• Wage
• Salary
• Payment in kind
• Fee
• Employee
• Employer
• Work from home
• Moonlighting

Read more

• Work, workers and the boundary of economic activity