Sweeping changes have transformed Russian society in the 1990s. Many people have been hard-hit by the effects on access to welfare and work. A University of Nottingham study suggests that in the new Russia, as in all industrial societies, labour markets, industrial relations, and social policy interact dynamically with one another. Such links become most obvious at times of economic upheaval, says the study report. Survey data from 240 households in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Voronezh cast fresh light on these feedback loops. Can broader insights be gleaned, such as how, if at all, Russia's welfare agenda compares with social policy elsewhere?

The study explores the idea that meaningful connections can be traced and comparisons drawn between social policy, the labour market, and industrial relations in Western Europe and the USA, despite the problems of lining up different social liability parameters used on either side of the Atlantic. If so, the report asks, can the situation in Russia since perestroika be located within the bigger picture, too?

In Russia's newly liberalised economy, social and industrial relations have been dominated by the introduction of unemployment benefit and increasing pressures on welfare services and 'safety nets'. The official end of the right-to-work has also spelt the end of automatic access to related services. High-speed turnover of employees as a result of economic restructuring has put many out of work, whose skills - once highly valued - are no longer in demand. The survey involved groups of workers at four points of the job change cycle: redundancy, unemployment, re-employment, and compulsory leave. Key features of the social fallout from the continuing process of transition included signs that:

• reform is advancing rapidly towards a western-style mix of social insurance and private provision;
• welfare nevertheless remains largely controlled at the Federal level, whilst private provision is growing by default at the regional level;
• many employees, although still technically employed, are working short hours on low or no wages;
• unemployment benefit remains meagre and has not been claimed in most parts of Russia;
• to survive, many under-employed and unemployed turn to resources other than wages or benefits.

For most urban Russians, changes in the labour market and in industrial relations have been less marked than social policy change, whilst official unemployment figures have only marginally increased. In all three survey locations, there was discrimination in the job market against women and older people who were consequently over-represented among the unemployed and those facing redundancy.

The rate and structure of unemployment varied sharply in the three cities under study. These differences hinged mainly on which sector of the economy used to be the main source of employment. Workers in heavy industry were more hard-hit than those in catering, culture, trade, and education. Growth of infrastructural services and construction in Moscow eased unemployment in the capital but also meant more economic inequality, partly because poorer people had fewer alternative means of support to fall back on.

In the world picture of social policy approaches, the Russian welfare state is drifting away from the social democratic tradition towards 'corporatist' policymaking in a free market mould combined with residual minimum support for those unattached to the labour market. Informal resources such as home-grown food, help from friends or relations, and exchanged work are being widely used as substitutes for waged work or to subsidise short-term employment. Hence raising wages or benefits alone would not necessarily boost the national take-up of these incentives.

Source(s):
Social policy, labour markets, unemployment, and household strategies in Russia, International Journal of Manpower, by Nick Manning, 1998

Funded by: DFID, INTAS

id21 Research Highlight: 25 June 1999

Further Information:
Nick Manning
University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham
NG7 2RD
UK

Tel: +44 (0)115 951 5426
Fax: +44 (0) 115 951 5232
Contact the contributor: nick.manning@nottingham.ac.uk

School of Sociology and Social Policy ,University of Nottingham

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