A big part of Upaya’s mission is expanding the conversation about job quality to intentionally include jobs created for those living in extreme poverty in emerging markets. But even within that subgroup, there are important variations that we need to understand in order to measure impact. 

In 2020, while analyzing the income effects across jobholders of our portfolio companies, the impact management team at Upaya found ourselves asking an important question: how can we compare the quality of jobs that may share a general purpose — employing the poorest of the poor — but are different in many other ways? Can the job of an agricultural laborer in West Bengal really be compared with that of a textile artisan in Uttar Pradesh?

We know that dignified work creates impacts across more than just employment rates. But we needed to dig deeper and understand what those impacts were in context — with gender, with geography, and with industry. 

As we dissected the jobs being created across our portfolio, we first differentiated between “direct jobs,” where the jobholders are paid or otherwise have direct economic engagement with the portfolio company, and “indirect jobs,”  where the jobholders are spread across supply chains and are not being directly paid by the companies. Even within direct jobs, we can distinguish between full-time and part-time jobs and something we see frequently in our companies: microentrepreneurs. 

Identifying these job categories helped us start building the evidence needed to refine our impact survey tools and map the survey findings for these categories. We then split our results for income and job quality across sectors, states, and gender.

Our portfolio company Lal10 is a good example of how and why these distinctions are important in impact measurement. Lal10 is a Delhi-based aggregator of artisans, providing them with technology, skills training, sustainable eco-friendly designs, and market linkages to help them make a good living from their trades. The company primarily engages with two types of jobholders:  textile cluster owners (microentrepreneurs), who are paid by Lal10 for their work, and the textile artisans (affiliates) who are paid by the microentrepreneur. While Upaya counts both the microentrepreneurs and the affiliates as jobholders for the purposes of measuring the number of jobs created, their experiences — in terms of income stability and cycle, respect from society, and skill-building — are quite different. For instance, Lal10’s cluster owners (microentrepreneur) earn their income based on the production sold to Lal10, while their artisans (affiliates) earn a daily / per piece wage.

We kept digging, analyzing the incomes of jobholders across these different categories and also by gender, geographic location within India, and industry. Here’s what we observed on the impact side for jobholder earnings (income stability and wages) and skill-building. 

Earnings:

We started to explore how the wages earned under these job categories vary by geography. Microentrepreneurs in the textile industry have a differential income and a potential for huge earnings gain in the future. This is evident across our portfolio. All the low-income states are paying an income of less than $5 per day across job categories, with an exception of Microentrepreneurs in Uttar Pradesh, who we observed, are earning $13.2 per day. These are the textile microentrepreneurs. Though microentrepreneurs, on average earn a higher income amongst all jobs, a low-income state like Uttar Pradesh employing a textile microentrepreneur is an anomaly against other low income states like Chhattisgarh and West Bengal employing agricultural microentrepreneurs (they are yet to witness the expansive gains) who continue to earn a lower wage. 

The intersection of a job category like a microentrepreneur with its industry will continue to be a differentiator in creating high-impact jobs.

Affiliate jobholders who are the last mile artisans, workers, daily-wage labourers, and small-holder farmers follow a different pattern of earning potential depending on the nature of work, community unison, and most importantly supply of labour. 

Affiliate jobholders in the textile industry,  consistently earn an income of less than $5. These regional artisans working long hours on power looms and stitching machines to produce finished products, struggle to survive by earning a minimum wage. Being a labour cost, this is one of the stickiest costs for businesses but continues to determine the fate of the artisanal community.

An affiliate jobholder in a waste management company working as a waste picker and sorter, however, holds the potential for a higher income. Given the precarious nature of the job and the conscious attempt of the companies, higher income, better working conditions and safer equipment are increasingly becoming the norm of the industry. 

Skill-building:

The quality of a job is validated by ‘Skills being learned on the job’, ‘Societal perception of the job’, ‘Self-perception of the job’, and ‘Additional non-monetary benefits being provided on the job’, are some of the many indicators that construct the matrix of a dignified job. The future of the workforce, whether formal or informal will be determined by these metrics. The experience of working for a textile micro-entrepreneur v/s a textile artisan v/s a waste picker v/s an agricultural farmer will continue to vary, and we need to fill in every gap to navigate the ecosystem towards creating not just jobs but dignified jobs.

We also observed an inverse relationship between income stability and skills being learnt by the jobholders at their companies. For instance, affiliate jobholders and microentrepreneurs in the textile industry are learning new skills but at the same time, they report unstable income. On the other hand, the affiliate jobholders and full-time jobholders in agriculture and waste management report stable earnings but low-skill learnings.

Conclusion

Targeting jobholder categories needs an alignment with the sector, geography, and gender of the jobholder. While Upaya will continue investing in lower-income states in India, learning where in the supply chain the jobholder lies in a particular industry will refine our investment and impact criteria even further. 

We at Upaya are committed to fighting poverty by creating dignified jobs. To create meaningful impact in the lives of the jobholders, we must customize our targeting tools, build transparent impact reporting formats, and most importantly implement back our learnings - such that we are creating the most conducive job market for our jobholders to earn a dignified living.