Precarious Employment in the Vologda Oblast: Current State and Trends

The paper is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of precarious employment in Russian regions. Today, the socio-economic sciences lack a single concept of precarious employment applicable to Russian conditions. Despite the considerable amount of scientific and practical works of domestic and foreign authors on the issue of precarious employment, the criteria of its statistical evaluation as applied to Russian conditions have not been determined. At the same time, the development of precarious employment threatens the country’s socio-economic welfare, because it creates the risk of unwanted effects such as poor employment, hidden and open unemployment, lower labor productivity, degradation of human capital, etc. The paper provides a brief review of research on the problem stated, and defines precarious employment. The author makes an attempt to determine and substantiate the list of indicators available in official statistics for assessing precarious employment in the region. The study allocates three blocks of indicators: indicators of institutional regulation, conditions of employment and functioning of the labor market. Based on these indicators, the author analyzes the status and trends of precarious work in the Vologda Oblast in the period from 2001 to 2015. In some cases, the author presents a comparative analysis of the data for the Russian Federation and Northwestern Federal District. The analysis has helped identify positive and negative changes in the field of precarious employment in the Vologda Oblast. In particular, the author identifies the following problems: an increase in the share of those employed in the informal sector, a relative increase in the number of the working poor, an almost three-fold growth of overdue debts on wages in comparable prices per worker. On the basis of this analysis, the author identifies the directions of the state policy that can help reduce precarious employment: development of information interaction between authorities and population, strengthening of control over the dynamics of overdue debt on wages in troubled sectors – agriculture, manufacturing and constructio