Последствия кризиса 2020–2021 гг. для различных профессиональных групп российского общества

Социологический журнал. 2021. Т. 27. № 2. С. 46–67.

Tikhonova N. E.

The economic crisis caused by the pandemic has had a profound impact on the economic situation and the employment of Russians. However the most common among its consequences appeared to be pay cuts and increased workload rather than the transition to  telecommuting.  The  social  security  of  employees  has  also  decreased.  Meanwhile certain effects of the crisis were present within different professional groups to varying degrees. Manual workers, especially those employed in the private sector of the economy, were,  relatively  speaking,  more  prone  to  face  the  most  severe  consequences.  Working Russians’  situation  deteriorated parallel  to  a  further  decline  in  their  resourcefulness. From this perspective, the working portion of the general population is divided into three groups:  high-resource  managers  and  professionals;  semi-professionals  and  ordinary office personnel occupying an intermediate position in terms of their recourses; mostly low-resource and no-resource trade and manual workers. Since the gains on resources in Russia for members of the mass layer of the population are relatively small and tend to  decline  in  all  of  them,  the  role  of  the  labor  market  in  the  strategies  that  Russians employ  in  order  to  improve  their  well-being  is  gradually  decreasing,  while  the  spread of  passive  and  non-constructive  strategies  is  growing.  The  low  resourcefulness  of  the country’s general population also causes universality of means to improve material status among members of different professional groups. At the same time, within the different professional groups individual resourcefulness significantly affects the choice of means for improving material status, or the refusal to take any actions for that purpose. This, taking  into  account  the  specifics  of  the  resources  possessed  by  members  of  different professional groups, ensures their unequal resistance to consequences of the crisis and different effectiveness of their actions when it comes to improving their situation, which leads to the differences between them deepening even further.

Keywords: professional groups, профессиональные группы, adaptation strategies, ресурсообеспеченность, адаптационные стратегии, последствия пандемии, population’s resources, ресурсы населения, consequences of the pandemic, resourcefulness