Retailers, e-commerce, FMCG to hire migrant workers

KOLKATA: Several food and grocery retailers and e-tailers as well as essential manufacturing industries plan to hire migrant workers stuck in cities and large industrial towns as they continue to fill an acute labour shortage.

Large retail chain, FMCG companies like Amul and Parle Products, e-commerce firms like Flipkart and Grofers, RPG Group and several temp staffing companies like TeamLease and CIEL HR Services have already hired some of the workers or are in the process, company executives said.

“There is a big opportunity to hire migrant workers in places like Delhi, Mumbai, Gujarat and other cities,” said RS S Sodhi, MD at Amul, India’s largest dairy firm. He said the company will work with partners to facilitate the process.

Flipkart has already hired migrant workers in its ramping up of back-end manpower by 4,000 new people and looking at more opportunities. So has Grofers, which has hired few migrant workers amongst the 2,000 people it has already onboarded and will continue in its plans to hire an additional 5,000.

Retailers Association of India (RAI) CEO Kumar Rajagopalan said some of the large food-and-grocery retail chains are already hiring or going to hire migrant workers for backend roles like loading and unloading.

“But not all can be employed or would want to work, since they are skilled like painters and carpenters, and several want to go back home,” he said.

Lakhs of migrant workers are held back in large cities because they could not return to their native places due to the lockdown clamped last month. Partial relief to some industries like e-commerce and manufacturing from next week could create demand for these workers, industry executives said.

Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder at temp staffing firm TeamLease Services said she was tapping into jobless migrant and local workers.

“We are trying to put them in jobs like delivery, in stores, warehouses, stacking, which are suffering from a labour shortage,” she said.

Recruitment and staffing firm CIEL HR Services CEO Aditya Narayan Mishra said the labour problem in many companies may not ease anytime soon since there are curbs on interstate movement.

“Right now the priority is not the quality or the training, but to start and ramp up operations,” he said.

However, industry executives said one bottle-neck could be the restrictions on allowing workers in plants, which at best is 50%, and in most cases much lower, depending on the states.

India’s largest biscuit maker by volume, Parle Products’ category head Mayank Shah said while it wants to hire more workers, there are manpower restrictions to be followed.

RPG Group-owned KEC International chief of HR Somraj Roy said its projects across T&D, civil, railways need a large workforce.

“While we have close to 20,000 contractual workers in various categories at our project sites ready to start work as soon as the lockdown is lifted, some of them have gone back to their villages. We do hope to meet our requirements in a phased manner once lockdown is over,” he said.