Legal Issues of Stimulating Efficiency Work

The article is devoted to legal regulation of efficiency work in the Russian Federation and some foreign countries. The main problems in the sphere are revealed including the lack of legislative support of the efficiency proposal author’s right to reward, and severely outdated legal documents regulating efficiency work that were adopted more than twenty years ago. The approach to the promotion of efficiency work in such developed countries as the USA, Japan and in promptly developing China is analyzed. The article contains a review of legal acts regulating efficiency work in Russia and in some countries of the former USSR, particularly in Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan. Two basic approaches to the promotion of efficiency work are identified: the first is typical for technologically advanced countries with a long tradition of direct support of efficiency work and innovative activity directly at enterprises without participation of the state. The second approach has been developed in the former socialist countries where the state traditionally has strong influence on virtually all spheres of social life, in particular on creating instruments for the stimulation of efficiency work. In the countries, belonging to the first group, efficiency proposals are not regarded as legally protected results of intellectual activity. In the second group of countries legal protection of efficiency proposals presently remains in force. There is some legal uncertainty in Russia nowadays: on the one hand efficiency proposal is not a legally protected result of intellectual activity, on the other hand it can be protected as know-how. However there are no legal norms providing for the know-how author’s right to remuneration for the creation of the result in the course of the employment. The article suggests amendments to the Russian labor law, aimed at stimulating efficiency work.