Open and Latent Unemployment in the Context of the Pandemic

The specifics of the pandemic crisis and the features of the Russian labor model suggest that the impact of this crisis on the labor sphere may differ from the usual implications of crisis-driven recessions in economic activity, and create new points of vulnerability. The aim of this article is to trace changes taking place in the sphere of employment during the pandemic, to reveal how unemployment, including its latent forms, is spreading, and to identify risk areas that should become the focus of public policy. On the basis of available statistics data from Rosstat and independent sociological surveys, we explain significant discrepancies between the dynamics of objective indicators of unemployment and the extent of people’s concerns related to their perception of this problem; we assess the structure of unemployment and the scale and dynamics of its latent component. The study has shown that at the peak of the crisis, latent unemployment exceeded open unemployment by more than three times. Unemployment, either in an open or latent form, has affected every fourth worker. Nevertheless, in general, in terms of the dynamics of macroeconomic proportions, the labor sphere is coping with the challenges of the crisis: the sector of large and medium-sized enterprises managed to maintain almost pre-crisis levels of employment, open unemployment remained within socially acceptable limits, a dangerous surge in latent unemployment was overcome by the beginning of the third quarter of 2020. At the same time, serious shifts have taken place in the usual structure of redundancies: highly qualified and educated workers employed in key sectors of intangible production, who felt confident in the labor market and got used to the stability of their socioeconomic situation, have been considerably affected. Geographically, the crisis has had the most serious impact on large cities with a significant amount of middle class population. This aggravated the acuteness of people’s perceptions of the crisis and jeopardized the preservation and reproduction of elite segments of national human potential.