Report on Employment Restructuring Project.
This project was based on an earlier pilot project, funded by the ODA, conducted in Samara and Kemerovo, fieldwork for which was completed in April 1996, with the final reports being presented at seminars in Moscow in July and Warwick in September 1996.
The formal start of this project was postponed from April to September 1996, to allow for the appointment of research staff, but in fact the groups contracted to undertake the fieldwork decided to start their work in May 1996, immediately following the end of the fieldwork for the ODA project.
Veronika Kabalina and Vadim Borisov were appointed as the research fellows attached to the project, each on a half-time basis. Veronika Kabalina has been responsible for the scientific direction of the Russian side of the project, conducting a literature and research review, developing contacts with other researchers and with government bodies in Moscow, co-ordinating the scientific aspects of the fieldwork and working closely with Simon Clarke on the analysis of results. Vadim Borisov has been responsible for the administration and supervision of the fieldwork, the organisation of seminars, the co-ordination of the preparation and publication of research findings and reports in Russian, and disseminating findings amongst policy makers in Russia.
The early start to the fieldwork meant that we were able to complete the first stage of research in the case study enterprises by April 1997. Simon Clarke and Veronika Kabalina concentrated in the first six months of the research on extending and developing their research and literature review and revising the report of the pilot project in the light of the subsequent findings of this research. This was completed in June 1997 and incorporated in the first two chapters of a book published by Edward Elgar in January 1998, Structural Adjustment without Mass Unemployment? Lessons from Russia. Close links were established in this first phase with the OECD and ILO teams working on employment issues in Russia and communication was maintained with the World Bank specialists who had formerly worked in this field. Close working relationships were established with the Russian Economic Barometer team and the Centre for Labour Market Studies, the principal groups researching employment issues in Russia, involving the exchange of data and mutual evaluation of hypotheses. We have been very pleased that our findings are supported by others’ data and that our analysis throws light on their statistical findings. We also established close connections with the labour statistics department of the state statistical agency, Goskomstat, as a result of which we were invited to participate in the November 1997 Labour Force Survey in our target regions, adding a supplement in Komi and Kemerovo, and in the further elaboration of the labour force survey which is planned over 1999-2000 with World Bank funding.
The fieldwork moved into the second phase in April 1997. This involved an intensification of the case study research at shop level and the conduct of semi-structured work history interviews with a stratified sample of 50 respondents in each enterprise. This sample is not representative, for various reasons, but we can achieve some very interesting results by exploring the relationships within the achieved sample, even though we cannot validly generalise from the sample to any particular population. On the other hand, a systematic review of other survey and official data shows that our results are at least consistent with the findings of other researchers. Analysis of the data, which is being made available to other researchers, is continuing. The findings will be incorporated into the various thematic reports of the project and a paper on job search will probably be presented to the American Sociological Association conference in August 1997.
While we were acquiring comprehensive and extremely valuable data relating to state and former state industrial enterprises and their employees, there was no available data to enable us to assess the extent to which these findings could be generalised to the labour force as a whole. We therefore decided that we had to conduct additional work of our own, and successfully sought funding from DFID to conduct complementary case studies of the new private sector and a large-scale survey of 4,000 households in our four target regions. To accommodate this we accelerated the completion of the basic fieldwork for this project, the work on shops and on labour market institutions being largely completed in July 1997, in time for the writing up of the first stage in August 1997 and to allow us to conduct fieldwork in new private enterprises from September, participate in the Labour Force Survey in November and conduct our household survey in April 1998, while continuing to monitor new developments in our case study enterprises and in local labour markets.
The four research groups have kept in regular contact by email and telephone, with planning and review meetings of the team leaders being held every three months. All the researchers participated in three-day research workshops in Syktyvkar in September 1996 and Moscow in May 1997. A one-month research workshop involving all participants in the project was held at Warwick in August 1997 in which the researchers worked in thematic groups to elaborate hypotheses, evaluate them against the data and prepare research reports. The final Russian language versions of these reports were circulated at the end of January 1998 and made available on our website. Simon Clarke and Veronika Kabalina are currently preparing final thematic reports, together with an analytical overview of the findings, with the English version scheduled for publication by Edward Elgar at the beginning of 1999, and Russian publication expected as soon as funds can be found. We expect to prepare additional papers for journal publication in Russian and English developing theoretical aspects of the research and incorporating the analysis of other data, including that of our surveys.
Simon Clarke has presented research findings at conferences organised by the Bank of Finland in Helsinki, the OECD in Moscow and the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow and at seminars at the Universities of Glasgow, Oxford, Warwick and Essex. The results and policy implications of the research will be presented to Russian scientists and policy makers at a major seminar to be organised by IMEMO in September 1998. Our expectation is that the plans incorporated in the objectives of the original application will have been overfulfilled by the project completion date.
The first phase of the case study research on the new private sector has now been completed and interviewing for the household survey will take place in April 1998. The household survey aims to locate employment decisions in the framework of household survival strategies and so focuses on the household division of labour, the role of subsistence production, social benefits and social networks. This should provide us with invaluable data for more detailed investigation of the role of age and gender in the labour market, which have emerged as central analytical themes of our work, which we will be undertaking alongside our review of new private sector employment over the summer of 1998, with reports on this aspect of the research to be presented in December 1998.
In addition to our close collaboration with the ILO, OECD, other researchers and government bodies in the immediate field of labour and employment restructuring, we have become increasingly involved with wider aspects of the issue. Vadim Borisov combined his work on this project with parallel work on the social impact of the restructuring of the coal-mining industry, a continuation of our earlier ESRC-funded research, in collaboration with the miners’ trade unions and with the World Bank. In June 1997 we were asked to co-ordinate and provide research support for a major ILO-ICFTU campaign on the non-payment of wages in Russia, in collaboration with the Russian social partners, which culminated in a major conference in Moscow in November. As a result of the success of this campaign we have been strongly encouraged to continue this work by representatives of the ILO, ICFTU and ITSs, all of whom are increasing their involvement in Russia, as well as by Russian governmental and trade union bodies. At the same time, Simon Clarke was commissioned by DFID to prepare a research report on Poverty in Transition, which was presented to the Know How Fund in December 1998, and has led to further contacts with Oxfam and the UNDP to discuss the problems of poverty and low pay in the transition countries.
The next stage of our research, for which we are now seeking funding, brings together and consolidates these apparently disparate directions of work and allows us to develop the policy implications of the research in a more concrete way by reviewing the institutional framework within which the key issues of low pay/no pay and employment restructuring are addressed.