Understanding the new restless middle class of India

From a decade or two ago when moving jobs was viewed as a risky proposition and white-collar workers exhibited a clear preference for stability and loyalty, a shift in professional imperatives is clearly underway. A study by Executive Access India has indicated that 64 per cent of those surveyed held their current positions for less than five years and 35 per cent of the respondents had occupied their current positions for less than two years. Only 12 per cent had served tenures exceeding 10 years in a single role, while just a decade ago, this figure was over 25 per cent. What these statistics reveal is a significant change in the character of the middle class, portrayed in the years after Independence as a conservative group with a marked affinity for fixed incomes and accumulation of savings, often devoting their entire working life to one employer.

Ever since India liberalised its economy, the services sector has witnessed a prolonged phase of economic growth, creating adequate jobs in the private sector for the urban educated middle class. This has also resulted in India enjoying the reputation, or notoriety, depending on where one stands, for the highest rate of global attrition. In 2013, it was estimated that one in four Indian employees switched jobs. The new economy has exhibited a disruptive character, fundamentally altering the nature of employee-employer relations in white-collar jobs, which unlike blue-collar workers, have rarely posed trouble for employers. The rules of the game have changed to offer dramatic salary rises to employees who change companies rather than those who play the waiting game of annual increments, bonuses and promotions by staying put at current roles. In this scenario, there is little incentive for employees to stay on, unless employers offer comparable benefits or widen their roles, both of which happen rarely. On the other hand, many companies view employees who stay back in a job as a telltale sign of lack of ambition or option. Moreover, loyalty takes a hit when longstanding employees find new entrants cornering senior positions and getting better perks.

The danger in this high rate of attrition for companies is the challenge of maintaining continuity, adhering to ethical principles and quality standards, and the difficulty of ensuring accountability. With employees moving on in quick succession, it is possible that projects are stalled because of changed priorities or the incumbents are saddled with the bad decisions of their predecessors. For individuals too, the possibility of conceiving a life beyond the same job, employer and station in life, has come with the liberating option of quick career progression or entrepreneurial ambitions. Even then, many of them also become hampered by EMIs and expensive lifestyles that entail conspicuous consumption. The example of 25-year-old IIT-Bombay dropout Rahul Yadav, the brash and irrepressible ex-CEO of Housing.com, who made a quick exit from the company he co-founded, because of disagreements with his investors, is bandied as an example of changing middle class behaviour.

While it would appear from such surveys on attrition that the narrative of the unemployed graduate is changing, there is reason to conclude that such upward mobility has been restricted to the urban middle class. Across India, media reports reveal PhDs, post-graduates and graduates queuing up by the hundreds for government recruitments to posts of peons and jawans and other low-paying contract jobs. There is clearly a twin-narrative of an aspirational India and a desperate India unfolding, even within the wide spectrum of those who consider themselves middle class. While such contradictions are inherent in many developing nations, their very existence and the difficulty of sustaining the high growth trajectories could become a source for fresh tensions.