The precariat instead of the proletariat: how the working class is changing in the 21st century

Now workers are considered both peasants and sellers, and not just welders and turners. The proletariat replaced the precariat.

Yelena Ivanova, Natalia Seibil

Is the working class alive or dead?

This discussion began in Russia in the early 2000s. And in general, is it possible in the post-industrial era, when the share of workers fell below 20%, to generally apply class concepts to modern realities? Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Policy, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Leading Research Fellow at the Federal Research Sociological Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Associate Professor Vasily Anikin says:

"This discussion was, it has not yet been resolved by anything. There are works that the class is alive, that the class concept of economics and social inequality still has the right to exist. There are just more classes".

The Soviet Union lagged behind the developed industrial countries not only in terms of economic indicators. At the end of the last century, there was a transition to a post-industrial society with might and main, when robots replaced people in production. In Russia, this process began after the transition to a market economy. As a result, the sphere of material production began to shrink sharply, and the sphere of services began to grow at an unprecedented rate. Rostislav Kapelyushnikov, Deputy Director of the HSE Center for Labor Studies, speaks about tectonic shifts in the economy:

"Now in the sphere of material production, as it was defined in Soviet times or determined in statistics, about less than 30% are employed, and more than 60% are in the service sector. It is clear that hired workers can also work in the service sector. So far I'm talking about industry changes, not professional ones. And these processes led to a drop in the number of employees. In agriculture, the decline was twofold in relative terms, in industry - also twofold, or by one third".

Associate Professor of the Basic Department of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation "Development of Human Capital" of the PRUE G.V. Plekhanova Lyudmila Ivanova-Shvets cites this Rosstat for 2019 - in general, the share of the working class in the total number of people employed in Russia is 36.6% .

Professional employment structure

There are three groups of workers in the professional structure. These are skilled workers, semi-skilled workers who are now called operators, and low-skilled workers. According to the statistics department, 9 million 661 thousand people belong to the first group of skilled workers in industry, construction and transport, as well as workers in related occupations.

The second group includes operators of production plants and machines, assemblers and drivers, numbering 9 million 227 thousand people . Rosstat classifies sellers ( 5 million 431 thousand ) and skilled workers in agriculture, forestry and fishing ( 1 million 742 thousand people ) as workers. Lyudmila Ivanova-Shvets says:

- The largest share of highly qualified workers works in Moscow and the Moscow region, and the least of such workers are in those regions where the level of wages is low and there are practically no educational institutions left that train in popular working specialties - Kurgan, Novgorod, Vologda regions, Trans-Baikal Territory ...

The demand for all categories of workers in the country is increasing from year to year, as Novye Izvestia wrote. According to headhunters, salaries for highly qualified blue-collar workers are growing from year to year. However, there is no trend towards an increase in the number of skilled workers, experts say.

- Regardless of the wishes of employers, young people choose other professional trajectories. There are still workers of previous generations, but gradually everything will escalate. If we are talking about changes in the sectoral structure of employment, we can compare the early 90s with the present. The share of those employed in industry has almost doubled from 31% to 16.5%. In agriculture, it fell from 15% to 6%, and in trade, it rose from 8% to 16%. This is just an illustration of the structural changes that have taken place in terms of the sectoral structure, says Rostislav Kapelyushnikov .

Since the beginning of the 2000s, this trend has not changed in all three groups of the working class. In twenty years, the number of skilled workers fell by 20% , semi- skilled workers by 10% , and the share of unskilled workers fell by 40% . The number of specialists with higher education continues to grow. If in 2000 there were 19% of them , then in 20 years every fourth person employed in the labor market has a higher education. In a situation where the entire economy is shifting towards service, and young people are not satisfied with only vocational and technical education, an increase in the number of people in blue-collar professions is simply not to be expected. In this situation, there are only two ways left - either to import labor, or to sharply increase wages for blue-collar occupations.

Migrants especially often work in Russia in construction. Due to the pandemic, a particular shortage of workers has formed at construction sites. The scale of construction is not reaching pre-pandemic peaks, not only because prices for building materials have risen sharply, and inflation has returned to the country, but also because there is simply no one to build. Time will tell to what extent developers are ready to raise wages for low-skilled and semi-skilled workers.

The number of workers will decline

Since 2017, the number of the working class, according to Lyudmila Ivanova-Shvets , has remained stable, and fluctuations are no more than 70 thousand people. However, the number of young people getting education in blue-collar jobs continues to decline. Over the past five years, it has not exceeded 550 thousand people throughout the country. Workers are being trained in advanced training or retraining programs, but the working class regiment is not arriving. Experts talk about long-term sustainable trends.

"This is not hesitation, this is the road along which the economy goes. Therefore, all speculations about the revival of the working class and the number of workers have no real basis. In the best case, one can hope for stabilization, but even this raises strong doubts in me", - Rostislav Kapelyushnikov is sure.

What is "precariat"

Social science in its studies of working relations observes the same diversification as, for example, political scientists in politics. There are now significantly more classes. There are such concepts that now there is not one middle class, but several at once. There is a theory of microclasses, which is based on the professional activities of their members. Recently, the term "precariat" has appeared. We are talking about socially unsettled people who do not have guaranteed full employment. By and large, the precariat is the 21st century proletariat. At the end of the 20th century, people who do not work at the factory, but according to their position in society, they have such a position as the proletariat, began to be ranked among the proletariat. A striking example of a precariat is office plankton. Their jobs are extremely insecure and the risks of being fired are high. At the slightest fluctuations in market conditions, they are the first to fly out into the street. The salaries of a small person in the office are not high, and they can easily be replaced with machines.

- The precariat - all those people who are in precarious work situations. For them, no deductions are made to social funds, this is cheaper labor, these are temporary contracts. Sometimes it is even employment that is not formalized. Etc. There is a whole range of indicators here that can be characterized as precarious employment. There are more and more such people, - says Vasily Anikin.

However, the working class as a phenomenon has not gone anywhere. Don't be fooled. Yes, deindustralization led to the fact that there were no people engaged in manual labor, but the working class remained, says Vasily Anikin.

- The classical interpretation is that the working class is those who earn their ability to work. The cashier or administrator earns his ability to work. If they are injured, they will not be able to earn money. At the same time, the injured scientist does not lose this opportunity and can continue his activities. So what is an administrator if it is not a working class?

If you look at the latest reports from the World Labor Organization, it becomes obvious: jobs are decreasing, and the situation with their receipt is more and more unstable.

However, it is impossible to prepare the population for new risks, therefore the changes will be different every time. Vasily Anikin believes that if the state considers itself social, it must create conditions under which people could live in the changes and earn on these changes. The precariat is the social stratum that carries these risks, the expert believes, and Russia, unfortunately, does not occupy the best position in this dynamics.