Internal Mobility and Labour Market Flexibility in Russia

Abstract

IN TIIIS ARTICLE WE EXPLORE the changing character of internal mobility in Russian industrial enterprises over the period of reform. First we discuss the dualistic character of the Soviet labour market, review the evidence for the rigidity of the internal labour market and report survey data that indicate a significant increase in internal mobility in the period of reform. Next we review qualitative data, based on work history interviews, to characterise the changing forms of internal mobility from the perspective of employees. Then we review the same phenomena as aspects of managers' employment strategies. The article concludes that increased employment insecurity has reinforced rather than reduced the dualism of the Russian labour market, but that there has been a significant growth of multi-skilling and multi-tasking as line managers try to preserve the core of the labour collective in the face of financial and employment constraints and as workers seek to protect themselves from redundancy by acquiring a range of skills. The cost of this increase in flexibility is an intensification of labour, a degree of de-skilling, and the 'closure' of the labour market. Dual labour markets in the Soviet system of production The ideal in the Soviet period was for the worker to find a suitable workplace and then to remain in the same enterprise or organisation for his or her entire working life. This was an ideal for the party-state, since the enterprise was the core social institution and the primary locus of social integration and social control. It was the ideal for enterprise management, because it encouraged the formation of a socially integrated labour force and the development of job-specific and enterprise-specific skills, while seniority, and the benefits associated with it, provided an essential lever of informal managerial control. But it was also an ideal for the worker, for many of whom the workplace was their second home and their workmates a second family. Although this ideal was not fully realised, and the regime indulged in frequent breast-beating about the problems of high levels of labour turnover, in fact by the 1980s labour turnover in the Soviet Union was not excessive, and was heavily concentrated among young people, who would wander around in search of a suitable opening, and unskilled workers and workers in low-paid low-prestige industries, who would be constantly on the look-out for something better. The norm of stability was reinforced by a number of quite substantial incentives to