Socio-economic sustainable development and the precariat: a case study of three Russian cities

Sustainable social and economic processes of the recent decades are characterized by the emergence of new phenomenon known as precarity and its new accompanying class known as the precariat. The precariat as a social class or social community is primarily associated with a factor of instability and insecurity of workers with flexible employment. This paper studies the precarity on the labor market for the socially-oriented professions in the three Russian metropolitan areas: Moscow, Kazan, and Rostov-on-Don. The paper searches for the causes of precarity of socially-oriented professions based upon the analysis of economic processes in the public sector, and of the reformers’ rhetoric and its reflection in the discourses of the main actors about the goals and direction of the reforms. Socially-oriented professions are associated with the creation of benefits, which are very little associated with markets and in most cases belong to public or mixed goods. Our findings suggest that the reforms of Russian education and healthcare spheres are accompanied by large-scale institutional changes which resulted in bureaucratization, orientation toward achieving performance indicators not related to professional values, stagnation of incomes, inequality between regions, and instability of professional trajectories. We conclude that reducing the prestige of socially-oriented professions, the material well-being, along with instability, become the main factors of precarity.