With the festival season around the corner, Indian businesses are getting heated up which in turn has spiked their workforce in attrition rate. Thus, online businesses are opting for new hires, as well as devising incentives to retain and motivate the restless workforce. However, the annual attribution levels have observed a rise of 250 percent in certain segments.

The food industry and miscellaneous delivery segment have picked up significantly which has led to the escalation in blue-collar wages. But, the supply of manpower continues to remain low. The blue-collar manpower supply had dropped as low as 40 percent during the lockdown as the restaurants had shut down. For instance, Zomato is hiring more than 5,000 delivery partners a week in India. Further, it is looking to elevate the number of the delivery person by 40 percent to address the growing demand. A Zomato spokesperson says, “We believe this is going to stabilize over the next few months and may witness growth due to the order volume exceeding the pre-COVID levels in certain cities.”

Industry experts believe that the employers are offering some sort of social security to gig workers to retain them at work and they are also looking forward to implementing more such measures. Likewise, Swiggy has also enabled accident insurance, medical insurance (including dependents), educational scholarship programs, on-call doctors for its delivery staff and their family, tie-ups with banks to offer personal loans at a better rate.

Commenting on the existing scenario, Pravin Agarwala, Co-founder and CEO, Betterplace, a blue-collar life cycle management startup says, “The blue-collar market normally sees circular migration, and the logistics sector especially continues to grapple with anywhere between 150-250 percent attrition.”

Pravin further states that the firms are figuring out to map out the correct range of incentives across demographics and job profiles that would work best for their requirements rather than contractually obligate people to stay. The Betterplace report on blue-collar workforce management states that the gig economy would soon recover to 80 percent of pre-COVID demand.

However, at present, the demand is at 70 percent just like it was in 2019. The report says job opportunities would see massive growth in the tier-II and III cities.