E-Book Overview
Mass unemployment has usually been seen as a necessary accompaniment to major structural adjustment, yet in Russia, amid economic collapse, enormous structural changes have taken place with remarkably low levels of unemployment. Some have seen low unemployment as a sign that Russia has undergone no real changes, but others see it as a sign of a remarkably flexible labor market, with very high rates of labor turnover and extremes of wage differentiation allowing low-wage (and even no-wage) employment to persist in the old industries alongside the growth of a new private sector. On this interpretation, Russia shows to the world, in extreme form, both the benefits and the costs of labor market flexibility. Drawing on the latest Russian and Western research, the contributors consider the debates surrounding the retarded levels of official unemployment and question why these levels remain so low. They offer theoretical and empirical critiques of orthodox Western interpretations of the Russian labor market and discuss labor market flexibility, proposing that increased flexibility has resulted in a downgrading of skills in the industrial labor force. This phenomenon, they argue, has particularly affected women who, as a result, have now become marginalized in the labor market. In the detailed empirical evidence they conclude that official statistics ignore the fact that both the employed and unemployed are active and adaptable in their search for new forms of employment and, as a consequence, will respond to more active and effective policy interventions. In view of this the contributors raise questions about appropriate industrial and labor market policies for all transitional economies. Structural Adjustment without Mass Unemployment? will be welcomed by students, researchers and academics working in the fields of labor and industrial economics and the economics of transition.
E-Book Content
Structural Adjustment without Mass Unemployment?
i
Lessons from Russia
Edited by Simon Clarke Professor of Sociology Centre for Comparative Labour Studies University of Warwick Coventry, UK
Edward Elgar Cheltenham, UK • Lyme, US
ã Simon Clarke 1997. Copyright of individual chapters remains with the contributors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited 8 Lansdown Place Cheltenham Glos GL50 2HU UK Edward Elgar Publishing Inc. P.O. Box 330 Lyme NH 03768 US
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Contents List of Tables
vii
List of Figures
xi
Contributors
1 2
3
xiii
Introduction Simon Clarke
1
Structural Adjustment without Mass Unemployment? Lessons from Russia Simon Clarke
9
The Restructuring of Employment and the Formation of a Labour Market in Russia Simon Clarke, Veronika Kabalina, Irina Kozina, Inna Donova and Marina Karelina Reviving Dead Souls: Russian Unemployment and Enterprise Restructuring Guy Standing
87 147
4
The Economic Development of Industrial Enterprises and the Dynamics and Structure of Employment Pavel Smirnov 186
5
How Vulnerable is Women’s Employment in Russia? Galina Monousova
200
Russian Unemployment in the mid-1990s: Features and Problems Tatyana Chetvernina
216
Economic Restructuring and Employment Promotion in a Russian Crisis Region: The Case of Ivanovo Maarten Keune
256
Aspects of Official Unemployment in Moscow and St Petersburg: The Views of the Registered Unemployed Kathleen Young