Risk factors and situations of illegal labor activity

Introduction: the article is devoted to the study of processes related to illegal labor activity (including migrants) and counteraction institutions used by public authorities at the federal and regional levels, as well as identifying risks and threats to the state stemming from illegal labor relations and outlining the directions for government regulation of these processes. Illegal labor activity is defined as a set of processes covering emergence, implementation and termination of labor relations between an employee and an employer involving violation or non-compliance with formal norms, as well as labor relations in the illegal sector of the economy. Objectives: to substantiate the conceptual foundations of the methodology for assessing situations and risk factors from illegal labor activities, considering the risk owners. Methods: special economic and general scientific methods that allow us to comprehensively consider the problems of informal labor activity (content analysis, statistical and economic analysis, identification of cause-and-effect dependencies). Results: the analysis of the indicators of the informal labor relations revealed that some industries show a slight decrease in informal employment, whereas the others show an increase. Traditional approaches divide the situations of risk from illegal work into risks for an employer and risks for an employee. The authors propose to supplement the illegal labor activity risk factors with risk factors for the state. The study provides an overview of possible illegal labor risk situations and provides recommendations for reducing risks, which clearly illustrates the possibilities of identifying them and eliminating their causes and conditions of implementation. The authors developed a classification for illegal labor activity risk factors based on the degree of legality and specifying the risk factors and their owners (state, employee, employer). Conclusions: the obtained research results made it possible to substantiate an expanded list of state risk factors from illegal labor, classify them considering the risk owners, identify risk situations from illegal labor and propose directions for an integrated approach to assessing the illegal labor risks of the state.