Consequences of the 2020–2021 Crisis for Different Professional Groups in Russian Society

Abstract

The economic crisis caused by the pandemic has had a profound impact on the economic situation and the employment of Russians. However the most common among its consequences appeared to be pay cuts and increased workload rather than the transition to telecommuting. The social security of employees has also decreased. Meanwhile certain effects of the crisis were present within different professional groups to varying degrees. Manual workers, especially those employed in the private sector of the economy, were, relatively speaking, more prone to face the most severe consequences. Working Russians’ situation deteriorated parallel to a further decline in their resourcefulness. From this perspective, the working portion of the general population is divided into three groups: high-resource managers and professionals; semi-professionals and ordinary office personnel occupying an intermediate position in terms of their recourses; mostly low-resource and no-resource trade and manual workers. Since the gains on resources in Russia for members of the mass layer of the population are relatively small and tend to decline in all of them, the role of the labor market in the strategies that Russians employ in order to improve their well-being is gradually decreasing, while the spread of passive and non-constructive strategies is growing. The low resourcefulness of the country’s general population also causes universality of means to improve material status among members of different professional groups. At the same time, within the different professional groups individual resourcefulness significantly affects the choice of means for improving material status, or the refusal to take any actions for that purpose. This, taking into account the specifics of the resources possessed by members of different professional groups, ensures their unequal resistance to consequences of the crisis and different effectiveness of their actions when it comes to improving their situation, which leads to the differences between them deepening even further.