The Ministry of Labor has submitted a plan to combat illegal employment
The Ministry of Labor, together with a number of other departments, will analyze the number and composition of non -working Russians and develop proposals to stimulate their access to the labor market. This follows from the plan to counteract shadow employment, which on Friday, April 25, the department presented the Russian tripartite commission. However, according to experts, there are no more hidden labor reserves in the Russian Federation.
On Friday, the Ministry of Labor presented at a meeting of the Russian tripartite commission (RTK) a government plan to combat illegal employment for 2025–2027, it will replace a similar document adopted in 2021 by 2022–2024: this is required by the FZ-565 “On Employment in the Russian Federation”.
According to the Ministry of Labor, which the department gave in its final report on the results of departmental work in 2023, 9.6 million people work illegally in the Russian Federation.
This is less than 15% of all employed (over 75 million people). The planned landmark for 2024–2026 in terms of reducing the indicator is 2.9 million people, in 2023 the authorities managed to identify 795 thousand informally employed.
As follows from the plan discussed at the RTK, to the relevant departments (the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Labor, Rostrud, the FSIN) and the regional authorities will have to jointly implement 18 of its points – these are various events: from information and preventive to analytical. So, for example, the regional authorities are invited to develop their own plans to identify those who work without paperwork, as well as monitor those who are at risk. Federal departments and services, in turn, will be engaged in the creation of methodological recommendations, as well as maintaining information systems that will help to better reflect the situation with illegal employment. So, Rostrud will continue to work on the register of employers convicted of the substitution of labor relations by civil law.
“In general, the plan does not cause us objections. Another question is that the trade unions and employers initially are in many ways different views on what is considered shadow employment, ”said Igor Kovalchuk, chairman of the executive committee of the Russian Work Confederation. In turn, as reported by the Managing Director of the Department of Labor and Social Partnership of the RSPP, Marina Moskvina, employers had questions to the clause on the endowment of interdepartmental commissions to counteract illegal employment to draw up protocols on an administrative offense for failure to appear at their meetings. “This regulation seems excessive to us. It would be more appropriate to stimulate employers to turn out to be a meeting, and this approach is now being worked out, ”she notes.
At the same time, as follows from the plan, not all of its points are connected exclusively with illegal employment. One of the initiatives looks larger and, possibly, is a new approach to solving the problem of personnel deficiency in the Russian labor market.
It is recorded by paragraphs 10-11, from which it follows that the Ministry of Labor, together with Rostrud, Labor All -Russian Research Institute, Socialist Fund, the Ministry of Education, the FSIN, the Federal Antimonopoly Service and the Ministry of Education and Science, will determine the number of non -working citizens of working age and their sexual age structure. After the analytical work of the department, the initiatives will be developed that will allow such citizens to take the labor market – probably with the help of measures provided for by the National Project “Personnel” within the framework of the Federal Project “Active Employment Promoting Measures”, including by advanced training and retraining. The ministry will have to submit a report to the government by the spring of 2026. At the time of publication, the Ministry of Labor did not respond to a request “Kommersant” about possible options for stimulating non -working work.
According to Rostislav Kaplyushnikov, Deputy Head of the Center for Labor Studies of the Economics of Economics, all possible employment reserves have already been exhausted and it is unlikely that existing groups of economically inactive population to work administrative measures. “More active involvement in the employment of young people will not allow them to study, and the level of participation in the labor market in women with children in the Russian Federation is about 80%. The elderly is pushing to work in 2018 by raising the retirement age. In combination, due to all these categories, maybe it could be attracted to work an additional 200-300 thousand people, but these are crumbs, ”he says.
