ISSN 0798 1015

Vol. 38 (Nº 62) Year 2017. Páge 4

Modern global trends and Russian specifics of changing employment forms

Tendencias globales modernas y especificidades rusas de formas de empleo cambiantes

Mihail Nikolaevich DUDIN 1; Nikolay Vasilyevich LYASNIKOV 2; Nikolai Alexeyevich VOLGIN 3; Elena Valeryevna VASHALOMIDZE 4; Nadezhda Alexandrovna VINOGRADOVA 5

Received: 06/10/2017 • Approved: 20/10/2017

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Methods

3. Results

4. Discussion

5. Conclusion

References

1. Introduction

The globalization processes flowing in employment that affect the change in people's work activity presuppose the formation of new social and labor relations. The latter regulates the spatial distribution of labor, shift from one industry to another, and also contributes to the modification of traditional and the emergence of entirely new forms of employment. Particularly important in modern conditions are the transformation of forms and types of employment, as well as the content and nature of labor, which involves: development of non-traditional forms of employment and labor organization, change in the general structure of employment, shifts in the professional structure, and the like.

Investigating the processes of employment of the population in the recent period, one can say that the market transformation of the economy has caused large-scale transformations both in economic relations and in the structural modernization of production. The change in social relations occurred in parallel with changes in the development of productive forces from classically industrial to information and high-tech.

Today, trends of gradual decline in the level of people's employment in the production sector of the global economy and significant increase in the level of employment in services are becoming more noticeable as global employment declines. In Russia, the process of transformation of the employment institution is also intensifying, characterized by the emergence of its new forms and kinds, and changes in collective-contractual regulation. Under such conditions, public policy must take into account these trends and their objective nature and provide adequate protection for people involved in all forms of employment. That is why the selection of new features of the sphere of employment is an urgent issue and requires more detailed research.

Despite the intensification of the research interest in this problem, the new features of the employment sphere and the prospects for its regulation have not been sufficiently studied by the national economic science. Accordingly, the study of the specific features of the impact of structural changes in employment on the transformation of the labor market and the configuration of the national economic mechanism is an urgent task that has social and socio-economic importance.

Structural shifts occurring in modern national economic systems have certain regularities, namely: an increase in the share of high-tech industries, telecommunications, financial and business services; the emergence of new technological processes, use of new technology, new types of raw materials and the making of new types of products. They form the strategic vectors for the development of national economies, and are the main reasons for global changes in the structure and forms of employment in the labor market.

Changes in the structure and forms of employment affect the value system of the modern employees, deepen their differentiation in the labor market. Informatization and intellectualization of the economy require highly educated, highly skilled workers with high communication potential, able to produce new knowledge, ideas, methods, capable of learning, endowed with critical thinking, ready to change, to abandon stereotypes endowed with such traits as dedication, perseverance, responsibility, discipline, innovativeness, adaptability, self-control, resistance to neuro-psychological overload, high level of workability.

As opined by D. Bell, "...intensive introduction of new progressive technologies, primarily information and communication technologies, is increasingly evoked both by the transformation of forms of employment and by the growth of demands on the subjects of labor activity. Strengthening the role of a creative person in production contributes to increasing demand for intellectual, creative work, for highly skilled workers with a tendency to constant learning, assimilation and interpretation of the new. Human capital becomes the leading factor of economic development, an effective economic resource" (Bell 1999, p. 73). Given this, the transformation of forms and types of employment can be defined as the result of the instability of the labor market and the employment system. Today, the volume of standard employment is decreasing, and the traditional practice of securing a job for a long-term employee has lost relevance, the development of information technology has created the prerequisites for the approval of new forms of work (Loginova 2009, p. 269).

Today, the fundamental innovations in employment can be considered borrowed labor (leasing, outsourcing, outstaffing) of personnel; telework, or distance work; remote work (freelancing), atypical models of working hours ( division of the workplace between two employees, flexible working hours, amorphous working hours), etc. The new quality is acquired by the flexibility of the labor market in its various forms and manifestations. These processes in employment have significant impact on the social and labor spheres, since both the structure and the content of social and labor relations change (Myungkyu & Hee-Seung, 2016).

Borrowed labor should be attributed to those forms that allow employers to increase labor flexibility and, accordingly, to reduce labor costs. The essence of the borrowed labor lies in the fact that labor relations are transformed from classical bilateral into tripartite, this being achieved through the participation of a "third" party – the recruitment agency. In these conditions, the function of recruiting and hiring employees and paying for their labor is performed by the intermediary, and the function of giving labor tasks, controlling of the work process is performed directly by the user of labor. Thus, borrowed labor should be understood as a tripartite labor relationship based on such distribution of the employer's roles, where hiring (hiring, contracting, dismissal) and payment are performed by one party (employer), while the determination of labor functions and monitoring of performance are performed by another (user). The employee, in this case, is transferred by the employer to the user, and the first cannot independently influence the social and labor relations and standards the user establishes for him/her, since he/she is not an employee of this enterprise and has no opportunity to enjoy the rights granted for regulating social and labor relations (Neumark & Reed 2004).

In the scientific literature various interpretations of the concept of "personnel leasing" are presented. Prokhorov considers leasing of personnel as a form of temporary or urgent recruitment of personnel from a third party (Prokhorov, 2007, p. 63). In the opinion of Bizyukov, leasing provides “... the possibility of recruiting staff of the required quantity and quality within a short time; reduction of administrative expenses, including personnel records keeping; reduction of expenses for temporary attraction of highly qualified specialists; minimization of taxation of the wages; seasonal provision of personnel” (Bizyukov, Gerasimova, & Saurin, 2012, p. 98). Thus, leasing of personnel is the activity of a recruiting agency for concluding an employment contract with an employee on its own behalf, sending it to work in any organization for a relatively long period.

Another qualitatively new phenomenon in the era of the information economy and one of the types of borrowed labor is the attraction of highly qualified foreign specialists through outsourcing tools that allow "virtual" attraction of workforce to production processes in the territory of foreign countries without changing the physical location of stay. This form of borrowed labor is actively used by multinational corporations. Due to outsourcing, Western companies achieve a significant cost cut, primarily due to the reduction in the wage fund, thereby increasing competitiveness and increasing profits (Žitkienė & Blusytė 2015).

Among the new atypical forms of employment (borrowed labor) is also personnel outstaffing. The term "outstaffing" (exclusion of employees from the company staff) means the provision of services in personnel management in connection with hiring people by a specialized agency of employees, while the latter remain to work and fulfill their duties at their previous places of work, but the agency is their boss. Accordingly, this agency assumes responsibility for the personnel, including payment of wages, taxes, social and medical insurance, registration of holidays, business trips, bonuses for personnel records’ management, accounting reports, etc. When using outstaffing, a company may not pay taxes, also eliminating guarantees to employees which otherwise are provided under employment contracts, creating conditions for administrative abuses: failure to grant leave to pregnant women (or in connection with disabilities, childcare), waiver of employee services, reduction of wages and restrictions on social guarantees.

One of the non-standard forms of employment in modern conditions can be teleworking. The term "teleworking" means doing the work at home transferring the results using telecommunication technologies. Distance employment is defined as a non-standard form of employment, which provides for flexible social and labor relations between the employee and the employer directly in a virtual environment using information and communication technologies. The non-standard nature of this form of employment is caused by the nonstationarity of the workplace, the unregulated working time, the instability and flexibility of social and labor relations. The virtual environment of distance employment provides for a wide application of information and communication technologies, work through information networks, work at home and in special centers that are spatially remote from corporate headquarters (Frey, & Osborne 2017).

Distance employment may be used in the following forms. First, it can be the main form of employment of an individual in an organization; subject to a good arrangement, work at home can be performed by the majority of those who wish. Second, it is the possibility of remote work for individual employees of the company. Today, the Internet has created a steady layer of freelancers, earning living from a distance (Lechmann & Wunder 2017).

Using flexible forms of employment, it is possible to solve some important problems of market economy. First, this form of employment enables the able-bodied population to make a choice regarding the use of time for work or leisure. Second, it helps entrepreneurs to manipulate the quantity and quality of the workforce at the enterprise in accordance with the needs of product development and the economic situation, without creating social tension when employees are dismissed. Thirdly, it allows to effectively solve problems on the employment of women, pensioners, students, immigrants, etc. (Baumann & Brändle 2012).

In recent decades, a number of important changes have taken place in the structure of employment by sectors of the world economy, the most significant of which being the excess of the share of those employed by the services sector over the share people employed by the agricultural sector, which is due to the shift of the source of value and wealth from the sphere of material production to the sphere of immaterial knowledge production. Therefore, under the conditions of the movement of workers from the production-related sectors to the services sector, various national types of employment structure are being formed. Thus, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, an "information" model of the employment structure has been formed, characterized by the priority of the services sector (Failla, Melillo, Reichstein and 2017).

For example, in the UK, 70% of economically active population work in the services sector, in the USA and Canada – 73%. The "information-industrial" model of the employment structure has been widely developed in Japan and in several countries of Western Europe (Germany, France, Italy). Namely, in Japan, the services sector is 58.4%, in Germany – 63.0%, in France – 69.0%, in Italy – 62.0% (World Social Protection Report 2014-2015).

A distinctive feature between these models of employment is the structure of the organization of the IT sector, which is the core of the services sector in all developed countries of the world and which has the highest growth rate of employment. For example, in the US, Canada and the UK, the IT is an independent sector, employing 48.3%, 45.7% and 45.8% of all people in the services sector, respectively. In Japan and Germany, the share of employed in the IT sector is significantly lower (32.2% and 28.4%, respectively) (World Social Protection Report 2014-20150, which can be explained by the fact that in Japan and Germany, IT services are integrated directly into the production process. The growth of employment in the IT sector is associated with an increase in the role of knowledge and information in ensuring labor productivity and economic growth. Therefore, the IT sector is strategic in the new economy.

2. Methods

The aim of this research is to study the structural changes in the sphere of employment in the world labor market and in Russia, highlighting its new features and identifying promising directions for regulation.

The distribution of employment forms was estimated on the basis of an analysis of the data on 90 countries by income groups (13 low-income countries, 42 with middle income and 35 high-income ones), reflected in (Eurostat Statistics Explained; World employment and social outlook 2015), which represented 84% of the world labor market (all employed).

3. Results

The study of the core current trends in employment showed the following.

At present, only half of all working people in the world and only 20% of workers in regions such as the countries of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia account for employment. On the one hand, in a number of countries with developed economies, the share of wage employment shows a downward trend, which is a deviation from historical patterns (World employment and social outlook 2015). On the other hand, self-employment and other forms of employment outside the sphere of traditional "employee-employer" relations are expanding. In developing countries and countries with market economy, the historical trend of expanding employment is slowing down. In most developing countries, the number of jobs associated with the informal economy and unpaid family work remains consistently high.

In addition, a new dynamic arises among employees. Less than 45% of wage earners are employed full-time on an ongoing basis, but even this share is declining. This means that almost 6 out of 10 wage earners worldwide work part-time or under temporary employment. Women are disproportionately represented among workers on temporary or part-time jobs.

That is, the standard model of employment is less and less reflective of the modern sphere of labor, since under the conditions corresponding to this model, less than one out of four workers is employed (Figure 1).

Figure 1
Distribution of employment forms, % of total employment

As can be seen from Fig. 1, self-employed persons or unpaid family workers account for 46.0% of the total number of employees. Informal employment remains a widespread phenomenon in most developing countries, although there are significant regional differences. For example, in Eastern Europe, the CIS countries and several advanced economies, informal employment accounts for more than 20.0% of the total number of employees, in Latin America – below 50.0%, and in some countries in South and South-East Asia informal employment reaches 90.0% (World employment and social outlook: Trends 2015).

The ongoing transformation of labor relations has serious economic and social consequences. The gap between labor incomes and productivity is widening, while in most parts of the world productivity is growing faster than wages. In turn, this leads to a deficiency of aggregate demand, which is invariably occurring over many years from the beginning of the crisis. The decline in global demand is estimated at USD 3,700 billion, which is the result of unemployment and a reduction in labor incomes, as well as their impact on consumption, investment and government revenues. Despite the ambiguity of data from different countries of the world, work under the standard form of employment is paid on average more than under other forms, and this gap tends to expand over the last decade. Temporary and informal workers, part-time workers and unpaid family workers, many of whom are women, also suffer disproportionately from poverty and social isolation.

As for Russia, it should be noted that the analysis of the dynamics of the employed population distribution by sectors of the national economy in 2001-2015 showed a steady increase in the portion of people employed in the services sector, namely from 52.8% to 62.1%. In general, the structure of the employed population by sectors of the economy in Russia indicates the spread of the services sector in the system of social production. By kinds of economic activity within the services sector, almost 37.0% of employees worked in the sectors of redistribution of the value of the GDP created (wholesale and retail trade), 13.4% were engaged in education, transport, warehousing, postal and courier activities, as well as in healthcare and social assistance – 9.6% and 9.9% of the total employed population aged 16-65 years, respectively. The number of employees in the provision of information and telecommunication services in 2015 amounted to 3.0% of the total employment in the services sector (Labor and employment in Russia, 2015).

4. Discussion

So, the modern employment system in Russia retains the characteristic features of the industrial system and despite all attempts by the country's leadership to intensify the process of its transformation, it is premature to talk about the establishment of a post-industrial national employment system. A number of unresolved problems, starting with informal employment and ending with a low level of job satisfaction, inconsistencies in the interests of the main parties to social and labor relations, and a lack of a direct correlation between labor productivity and remuneration make it impossible to transform the industrial employment system into a qualitatively new state. The above problems are not unique, experienced only in Russia, but, on the contrary, are typical for most countries of the world, being in the course of transition from an industrial to a post-industrial development stage. In order to solve existing problems, it is necessary to identify the factors that set the transformational dynamics in the employment system at the present stage.

Proceeding from the foregoing, it is expedient to single out the following features characterizing the modern sphere of employment:

strengthening global competition;

significant expansion of the services sector in the social production system with a special focus on the IT sector, which is the core service sector in all developed countries of the world;

structural shifts in the process of transition from the sphere of material production to the sphere of knowledge production;

increased use of information and communication technologies;

the emergence of new technologies and changes in the industrial engineering at enterprises that cause changes in labor relations;

increasing flexibility of the labor market and production;

increasing demand for highly educated, highly skilled workers with high communication potential, who are able to produce new knowledge, ideas, methods;

distribution of non-standard forms of employment, namely – self-employment and other forms of employment outside the sphere of traditional "employee-employer" relations becoming popular;

an increase in the gap between labor income and productivity.

The emergence of new, the spread of non-standard and the change in existing forms of employment is an inevitable process that should provide additional competitive advantages for employers and help to improve the quality of working life for working individuals. Therefore, it is possible to note the positive impact of the spread of new and changing existing forms of employment on the economic development of the country, which manifests itself at the level of individuals, employers and the national economic system.

For individuals, the most attractive and promising features are: opportunity to make more risky decisions; opportunity to choose a job corresponding to personal professional abilities; increasing level of satisfaction with professional activities; increasing level of individual success; obtaining guaranteed profits and retaining employment; increasing competitiveness in the labor market; increasing use of the acquired knowledge at work; fuller use of individual professionally qualified and creative potential; opportunity for career and professional growth; opportunity of accumulating personal capital; increasing level and quality of life; providing innovative activity.

For employers, the most important aspects are: increasing labor productivity; strengthening of corporate assets related to human capital; growing quality of working life; increasing corporate income level; increasing innovativeness and mobility of staff; formation of innovative features of employees, readiness and ability to master new technologies, products, working with new production facilities, developing new knowledge and skills; increasing educational and professional-qualification level of employees, formation of modern competences; increasing efficiency of the use of personnel.

A positive outlook for the state is related to the stabilization of aggregate demand; macroeconomic stability and social cohesion; rapid response to the crisis and structural shifts; provision of productive employment and development of entrepreneurship; development of human capital; increasing the level of state competitiveness in the world market; increasing the level of social responsibility of all parties to social and labor relations; increasing intellectual and educational potential; formation of a qualitatively new sense of the country's economic development.

Meantime, this process of spreading non-standard and changing existing forms of employment creates a number of social risks for both employers and employees, which requires the development of tools for its regulation, improving the regulatory framework for governing labor relations in new forms of employment, creating an effective system for the protection of interests of all parties to social and labor relations.

First of all, the current legislation needs to be updated in the sphere of employment, taking into account the spread of new forms of employment: it is timely to amend regulations that should govern specific labor relations between all parties in conditions of self-employment, part-time work, work under fixed-term employment contracts and be able to provide protection for workers employed in both standard and non-standard conditions; a new meaning is acquired by the system of contractual governance of labor relations through the introduction of amendments to agreements and contracts concluded at the national, regional, sectoral and production levels; it is also socially required to develop and implement social insurance programs on the basis of contributions for the self-employed, as well as to ensure the pension rights of employees involved in non-standard forms of employment.

Such innovations in the field of legislative support of employment policy will help to expand the legal and, in some cases, the real provision of social protection for workers employed in non-standard forms of labor through such measures as the identification of new categories of payers, simplification of the procedure for registration and collection of taxes, and subsidizing contributions to social protection systems (National Employment Policy, 2015).

The modern rapid expansion of the services sector in the system of social production requires the introduction of active labor market policies to ensure quick response to any changes in demand and effective formation of the new vocational and educational potential of people, namely, highly skilled personnel capable of effectively using the acquired knowledge, and actively introducing the newest methods of work (Guidance on the development of national employment policies, 2013; Dudin, Ivashchenko, Frolova, & Abashidze, 2017; Dudin, Lyasnikov, Kuznecov, & Fedorova, 2013). In this context, the problem of ensuring consistency and balance between the vocational qualification structure of training and the needs of the labor market acquires a new sense. It is important to ensure continuous updating of knowledge and skills throughout the entire working period of the worker. It is advisable to significantly increase the role and responsibility of employers to create and maintain the level of abilities, skills and mastering of employees.

Supporting the formation of the ability to innovative work in personnel requires the identification of a number of activities in education and social and labor relations, namely: formation of professional skills and competencies among today’s graduates, stimulating their creativity, activism and initiative, creating effective incentives for innovation, developing competition at work.

It is also necessary to introduce in the practice of management in Russia some methodical approaches to forecast the needs of the national economy in employees, taking into account the changes in the structure of employment. Within the framework of this forecast, it is advisable to carry out an assessment of the current trends in the country's economic development; to introduce continuous monitoring of the professional and qualification structure of employees; to forecast employment indicators at the national, regional and sectoral levels; to identify the types of economic activity that are crucial for the dynamics of employment.

5. Conclusion

The current state of the employment system is characterized by a decrease in global employment and economic activity of the population, a steady increase in labor productivity in the global economy in the absence of significant fluctuations, a decline in the employment of the population in the agricultural sector of the global economy, and an increase in employment in the services sector. Under such conditions, the dissemination of new and changing forms of employment is urgent, which will contribute to the formation of a qualitatively new level of development of the national economy, providing additional competitive advantages for employers and improving the quality of working life for people. The implementation of the proposed areas of regulation of employment will ensure an improvement of the regulatory and legal framework on the governance of labor relations in connection with new forms of employment, the rapid response to changes in demand and the formation of an effective system for forecasting the needs of the national economy in employees, taking into account the changes in the structure of employment. 

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