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Дифференциация занятости и её влияние на социальную структуру российского общества
Drawing on data from the 2024 RLMS-HSE, the article shows that employmentrelated risks are increasingly being shifted onto workers in Russia, while employment differentiation already affects more than 40% of employed Russians, even without taking into account deviations from standard working hours, which are typical of most representatives of the mass social strata. Employment differentiation in Russia is characterized, however,
by a weak association between most indicators of non-standard employment, both with individuals’ position in the social structure and with one another. Only informal employment, the absence of a fully official wage, and the absence of paid leave over the past 12 months are closely linked both to one another and to workers’ position in the hierarchical system of inequalities. Cluster analysis, based on these indicators, made it possible to identify
three groups with different employment patterns. These groups differ in the age, gender, and occupational asymmetries of their composition; in the varying prevalence of overtime, underemployment, and horizontal mobility; in the concentration of their members in the public or private sector of the economy; in the characteristics of the socio-psychological climate at work; and so on. Their members’ position in the social structure of Russian society
is also specific. Although in all strata identified by their position in the hierarchical system of inequalities the majority are workers with formal employment status, fully official wages, and at least partial use of paid leave over the past year, this share differs by more than 1.5 times, while the share of those characterized by a concentration of violations of these basic labor rights differs by more than four times. The article concludes that: 1) non-standard employment in Russia today is associated not so much with technological innovation and institutional change as with non-compliance with legally guaranteed workers’ rights; 2) where non-standard employment is not associated with violations of labor rights, it does not entail significant changes either in the system of social stratification or in workers’ position within
it; 3) employment characterized by a concentration of non-standard features resulting from violations of workers’ labor rights creates risks of the formation of large precarious groups in the social structure and of deepening disadvantage of some members of all strata as a result of the overlap of different types of inequality, but does not lead to a reconfiguration of the model of the social structure.