Mutual effect of labour market development and COVID-19 pandemic progression

This paper tackles the economic impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on the labor markets and human capital. Specifically, it looks into the issues the pandemic brought upon the human resources and personnel during coronavirus lockdowns. The high level of globalization characteristic of the modern economy has only exacerbated the negative impact of the pandemic. At the moment, it remains impossible to assess the qualitative and quantitative parameters of the damage caused to the economies of countries and regions by this event. However, it is possible to identify the main directions of analysis of the consequences of the pandemic, including in terms of the impact on the state of the labor market, which was the main goal of this study. In particular, the authors highlight a number of consequences, the work on overcoming which is still to be done by the Russian socio-economic system. The most obvious of them is the growth of unemployment, the release of part of the employed and the reduction in the number of jobs, and this is observed extremely unevenly across the sectors of the economy. Nevertheless, the authors point out that the problem of staff release is aggravated by the size of the share of informal employment in the labor market, especially in the sectors of public catering, leisure and tourism that have been most affected by the pandemic. As the second important problem, the authors point to ineffective staff reduction, the dismissal of useful and valuable employees of some organizations while maintaining an unnecessarily bloated staff of others. It also mentions the reasons and forms of staff retention, some of which, being either forced or economically and technologically attractive, give rise to additional problems. The authors call an important social consequence of the pandemic a reduction in the number and level of personal contacts in society, in particular, in working groups. As a result, the author's vision of the long-term consequences of current events for the state of the labor market, employment of the population and the economy as a whole is proposed.)