Fresh restrictions push low wage earners out of frying pan into fire

The growing restrictions imposed on the daily lives of people, claiming to contain the virus spread, are making more damage than the virus itself, rendering large swaths of people out of their livelihoods, who mostly earn a living out of their daily work to keep their families fed. 

Sri Lanka’s COVID task force has been imposing mobility restrictions and isolating increasingly more areas sporadically, effectively cutting people off from their livelihoods and other forms of economic activities.

Sri Lanka’s informal sector, which mostly consists of low daily wage earners, accounts for more than 57 percent of the total employment in the country and of this, almost 61 percent are employed in the non-agricultural sector, making the latter segment the most vulnerable, the Central Bank data shows.  

“Although the economy is steadily returning to normalcy, concepts of ‘physical distancing’ and the stringent health regulations that are to be adhered to will have some lingering effects on the economy,” the Central Bank said. 

“In such situations, the most vulnerable people are low wage workers in low income households, i.e., broadly informal sector workers and lower occupational categories among formal sector workers,” the Central Bank added, taking a stock of the impact the pandemic-induced restrictions have on these most vulnerable groups. 

A more detailed analysis carried out across occupational categories under the informal sector has identified the most vulnerable segments are the people engaged in services and sales, those who work in the agricultural sector, craft workers, plant and machine operators and other related elementary occupations. 

These segments comprise of a whopping 88 percent of the informal sector employment and 50 percent of total employment, the data shows.

The Central Bank said the unskilled nature of these categories makes them the most vulnerable to COVID-19-related disruptions among other things. 

For instance, although not necessarily an elementary skill occupation, Gamini Makandura, a mason with three children working in Maharagama, said that he couldn’t work because his support staff fear returning to work from their home towns and thereby he remains hamstrung since he stopped work just before the New Year.

“And people also don’t want us coming because they fear that we bring the virus to places where we have work. We have in fact fallen from frying pan to the fire,” Makandura said. 

Globally too, employees in the sectors that require physical presence to deliver their work, who are identified as blue collar workers, suffered the most job losses and took the most economic plunge from the pandemic compared to the office-based, white collar workers, who could continue working from home through technology. 

While the latter stockpiled cash when their spending options became limited, the former burned through their entire savings for their sustenance.

Sri Lanka proved last month that it is a country in dire poverty, as nearly 3.0 million households, out of just 5.1 million qualified to receive the Rs.5,000, stipend from the government to celebrate the New Year. Hence, a countrywide lockdown remains completely out of question, despite the sharp rise in virus cases.