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Chaplashkin N.V. [Is free employment precarious: the applicability of precarity in the study of flexible forms of employment in modern Russian conditions] World of Science. Series: Sociology, Philology, Cultural Studies, 2024, Vol. 15, No. 4. Available at: https://sfk-mn.ru/PDF/10SCSK424.pdf (in Russian).

Is free employment precarious: the applicability of precarity in the study of flexible forms of employment in modern Russian conditions

Chaplashkin Nikolay Vladimirovich
Center of Educatzion Development and International Activities («Interobrazovanie»), Moscow, Russia
E-mail: kalyan82@rambler.ru
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-8282-1909
RSCI: https://elibrary.ru/author_profile.asp?id=661602

Abstract. The article examines freelance employment, a form of employment related to non-standard and flexible forms of employment, through the prism of precarity. Flexible employment is becoming increasingly popular, giving workers the opportunity to independently determine their work schedule and location for performing tasks, but the question arises as to whether this form of employment is precarious.

The study of precarious employment in the country has gained popularity in recent years, especially against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, the original meaning of precarity, which consisted not simply in unstable employment, but in its randomness and dubiousness, is lost in modern works of Russian researchers. As a result, it has become possible to classify any employment where at least one of the criteria of precarity is manifested as precarious employment as a negative manifestation of non-standard forms of employment.

The article analyzed and analyzed modern criteria of precarious employment, based on which conclusions were made about the artificiality and unjustified classification of some of them as criteria of precarity. Precarious employment should be defined by a combination of several criteria, and therefore it seems incorrect to set the boundaries of precarity based on coincidences in at least one or even two of the criteria. The consequence of this is the blurring of the boundaries of the precariat. It also seems incorrect to classify representatives of free employment as precariat only on the basis that this is a type of non-standard employment. At the same time, based on a combination of various characteristics, a small part of free workers who use freelancing for additional income and have pronounced characteristics of the precariat can still be classified as a borderline group of the precariat.

Keywords: self-employment; freelance; precarious employment; human resource management; flexible forms of employment; free employment; remote employment; precariat; four-day working week

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