Employment : Growth, Informalisation And Other Issues | Class 11 Economics Notes
By ConceptScroll Team · Published on 17 July 2026 · 2 min read
Employment : Growth, Informalisation And Other Issues – this guide gives you a concise, exam-ready overview of Employment : Growth, Informalisation And Other Issues from Class 11 Economics, written by ConceptScroll editors and reviewed against the latest NCERT textbook.
6.4 SELF-EMPLOYED AND HIRED WORKERS
Employment status reveals the quality and nature of jobs. Workers can be self-employed, regular salaried employees, or casual wage labourers. Self-employed workers own and operate their enterprises, such as shop owners or professionals, and constitute about 58% of India’s workforce. Regular salaried employees work for others and receive fixed wages regularly, making up about 22% of the workforce. Casual wage labourers work on a temporary basis for daily wages, often in agriculture or construction, accounting for about 20%. The attachment to the job, job security, and authority differ among these categories. Men and women have different distributions across these categories; self-employment is the major source for both, but women have a higher share in casual wage labour. Rural areas have more self-employed workers due to farming, while urban areas have more salaried jobs. Casual wage labourers are the most vulnerable due to irregular work and lack of social security. Understanding these categories helps analyze employment quality and worker vulnerability.
📊 Diagram: Chart 6.1 shows employment distribution by gender and status; Chart 6.2 shows rural-urban differences in employment status.
🧪 Activity: Exercises ask students to classify various workers into self-employed, regular salaried, or casual wage labourers and discuss vulnerability.
🔗 Connection: This section prepares for understanding employment distribution by industry sectors in the next section.
Frequently asked questions
1. Who is a worker?
A worker is a person who is engaged in any economic activity to earn a livelihood. This includes those who are employed in any form of work, whether in agriculture, industry, or services, and includes both formal and informal sector workers.
2. Define worker-population ratio.
Worker-population ratio is the percentage of workers to the total population. It is calculated as (Number of workers / Total population) × 100.
3. Are the following workers — a beggar, a thief, a smuggler, a gambler? Why?
No, these are not considered workers because they are not engaged in any legal economic activity that contributes to the production of goods or services. A worker is someone engaged in lawful economic activities, whereas beggars, thieves, smugglers, and gamblers are involved in non-productive or illegal activities.
4. Find the odd man out (i) owner of a saloon (ii) a cobbler (iii) a cashier in Mother Dairy or Milk Cooperative Society of your area (iv) a tuition master (v) transport operator (vi) construction worker.
The odd man out is (i) owner of a saloon. Explanation: All others are workers engaged in providing services or manual work, whereas the owner is an employer or proprietor, not a worker.
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