This is my second post about the papers presented as part of a panel on Class formation in Russia at the BASEES Uppsala conference, Regimes and Societies in Conflict: Eastern Europe and Russia since 1956.

The second paper I want to discuss is Harri Melin’s “Working life and the myth of precariat in Russia.”

Melin interrogates the applicability of the ‘precarity’ concept to Russia using survey data about jobs. Following Guy Standing, Melin presents precarity as a process: ‘to be precaritised is to be subject to pressures and experiences that lead to a precariat existence, of living in the present, without a secure identity or sense of development achieved through work and lifestyle’ (Standing, 2011: 16). For Melin, Standing’s work shows that the precariat lack a work- or occupational-based identity. However, Melin cites his own and others’ work in Finland as an example that shows the rise of insecure and temporary work is, in his view, not the case.

Melin is interested in O. Shkaratan’s concept of etacratism to understand Russia’s social structure.  Just as Soviet society was not really socialist but form even approaching state capitalism (insert your own caveats here!), contemporary Russian society is a direct continuation of this etacratic tradition (Radaev & Shkaratan 1992). This approach influenced S. Kordonsky about whom I’ve written recently.

Melin’s survey data tell a story about an absolute and relative growth in ‘skilled working-class’ jobs in Russia, at the cost of unskilled work and ‘nominal’ managerial positions. To collect data Melin used Erik O. Wright’s class typology (Wright 1978, 1997) and to triangulate that with precarity Melin’s respondants are sorted into 1) unemployed, 2) fixed-term labor contracts 3) part-time jobs. The data is from the European Social Survey 2010 set. Precarity is defined as ‘several unemployments, part-time or fixed time employments’. By this measure women in Russia are much less precarious than men, who are more similar to Northern European counterparts. Perhaps more interestingly, Melin counts a very small Russian middle-class – barely 20%. The high number of Nordic youth he counts as precarious is compensated for by the more comprehensive social protections in those countries.

Melin then moves on to subjective measures of precarity: “While in the Nordic countries 55 % of the skilled workers feel that they can live comfortably with their income … in Russia, only 5 % of skilled workers feel living comfortably.” Melin finishes by drawing attention to what I consider a ‘symptom’ of high subjective precarity: my and Sarah Hinz’s work on high labour turnover in the Kaluga Volkswagen factory where relatively well-paid blue-collar jobs there should mean less job ‘churning’. Melin notes how this could be related to precarization and the increase in the use of short-term labour contracts.

It might be worth thinking about the agency of workers in making the above ‘necessity’ of turnover into a virtue. ‘Bad jobs’ leading to turnover, leading to making of turnover into a form of skilling up (or ‘trying out’ of different skills pathways – as the very least). At least within the limits of one’s ‘profession’. This also calls back Markku Kivinen’s point in his paper about the conundrum of high inequality yet lack of class-based polarisation. Partly this can be explained because of the remarkable turnover – ‘exit’ as the only viable strategy.  There’s a lot in my book about the final destination of workers who ‘churn’ – it’s an equally precarious existence in the informal economy.  This is why there are so many male unregistered taxi-drivers. The Russian state has declared ‘war’ on this type of informal income recently.

We could also here take some issue with the blanket position of Harri – that the etacratic system provides more stable and safe employment to workers. My gut feeling is that this is being severely eroded for a number of reasons – corruption leading to the replacement of ‘meritorious’ workers by clients, and welfare state residualisation/austerity meaning the laying off of many workers. Mikhail Chernysh’s paper takes this up. I will discuss his paper in my next post.