Income and Wages

As digital platforms reshape work across Asia and the Pacific, new opportunities for income and flexibility are emerging — but not equally for all workers. Rising task-based work raises urgent questions about governance and the extension of labour and social protections. This report examines emerging regulatory approaches and pathways to decent work in an increasingly digital world, and comes at a critical moment as the ILO prepares a new Convention and Recommendation on platform work to be discussed at the International Labour Conference in June 2026.

India's welfare state is held together by over five million women, namely the ASHA workers, Anganwadi workers, and mid-day meal workers & helpers, who deliver essential public services daily, yet remain classified as 'volunteers', denied fair wages, formal contracts, and basic protections. This is no accident: with women already spending nearly twice as much time on caregiving as men, the state has long relied on deeply entrenched gender norms to keep care work cheap and informal. In this piece Renjini Rajagopalan makes the case for why it's time to move beyond the honorary label and recognise care work for what it truly is: work.

JJN's Isha Gupta provides crucial insights into why participation among young jobseekers remains low, highlighting the structural barriers that continue to hold India's youth back from accessing meaningful internship opportunities.

As the Union Government of India presents its interim budget, Sabina Dewan reviews the state of the country's labour market, and related policies. Theincrease in overall labour force participation is largely driven by an increase in rural female labour force participation, and comes against a backdrop of heighted rural distress with a consistent decline in inflation-adjusted real wages over the last five years. In light of shifting demographics, technological upheaval, climate change, and the pandemic, she makes the case for a robust policy response codified in a national employment strategy that can foster an ecosystem conducive to the growth of good jobs.

This data story analyses the agriculture sector in Odisha through the lens of gender, and spotlights transformations and disparities.

The success of UWEI and MUKTA, Odisha’s initiatives to curb pandemic-induced urban employment could well be the blueprint for a National Urban Employment Guarantee Act that emphasizes worker security, community involvement and a gender-inclusive design.

This brief provides an overview of the current state of India's social security system and raises questions about how to best streamline and restructure the current fragmented approach to iteratively move toward universal provision that extends coverage to more people.

Legacy cities of the Transatlantic region experienced prosperity and growth during the industrial era in North America and Europe. Globalization and technological advancement have compelled these urban areas once built on heavy manufacturing industries to reform and revitalize their economies. What will the 21st century bring for workers and economies in Transatlantic legacy cities?

JustJobs Network Research Associate Jit Shankar Banerjee recently published an op-ed in the Myanmar Times proposing key reforms to the incoming government to increase productivity, while ensuring a high minimum wage floor and social protections such as healthcare and pensions.

Case studies from Brazil to China, from the United States to Germany, reveal that to square higher wages and competitiveness, governments must adhere to three rules of thumb.