Main employment trends and features in modern Russia

In the context of growing global challenges that have a direct impact on the economy and society development, employment issues are becoming especially topical. The confirmation of it is the emergence of a broad discussion about the future of the labor sphere, and, as a result, the formation of a large number of contradictory scenario patterns that somehow declare the formation of a new image of labor relations. Despite the institutional differences between countries, some transformational shifts in the practices of public participation in paid socially used activities have been observed everywhere over the previous decades. In this regard, the purpose of the research is to deepen the understanding of employment trends and highlight its features in modern Russia, where the labor market demonstrates stability even in the face of the strongest macroeconomic shocks. The information base is data from the Federal State Statistics Service in 2000-2019. The analysis shows that the employment dynamics in Russia has several features. On the one hand, the situation remains fairly stable in terms of the overall level of labor activity, the structure of employees by the availability of additional work, the proportion of employees, the length of working hours and the use of employment contracts. On the other hand, there is a further concentration of people employed in the economy’s tertiary sector, employment practices among private persons and individual entrepreneurs are spreading, and informal employment is rapidly growing. However, there are no significant gender differences. The main limitation of the research is related to the use of purely official statistics which significantly narrows the range of considered aspects of employment.