The Trajectory of Development of Social Partnership

Abstract

Profound changes in the social and labor sphere are followed by both emergence of the new opportunities associated with the development of flexible forms of employment, expansion of opportunities for employment, humanization and digitization of work, and the emergence of new threats: the occurrence of such phenomena as employment preсarization, growth of the informal components in the labor relations, distribution of practice of bringing the labor relations to the civil legal area, and so on. As a result, controversies between the main participants of the social and labor relations grow. An effective and worldwide recognized mechanism of resolving them is the social partnership which has the deep historical roots going back to outstanding thinkers of antiquity. During later historical periods the ideas of social partnership gained development in the works of domestic and foreign scientists, public and statesmen. In the Russian Federation social partnership has the specific trajectory of development which has developed under the influence of both historical and modern factors. The carried-out analysis allowed to reveal the following problems of formation and development of the social partnership system in the Russian Federation: sociocultural features, weakness of the trade-union movement, development of non-standard forms of employment, differentiation of the income of the population, low interest of the government. The designated problems which are slowing down the process of transition of the social and labor relations to partner type are manifested both on federal, and on regional levels. To research the extent of development of collective contract regulation and identification of the problems which take place in the system of social partnership at the local level sociological survey of workers of a number of the Russian organizations was performed. As a result, it was found that collective contract regulation of the social and labor relations in the Russian Federation at the local level demands improvement. The main problems of system of social partnership at the local level are: weak knowledge of trade-union members concerning the activity of those organizations, especially at the sectoral, regional, and territorial levels; unwillingness to resolve the issues of social and labor regulation at the organizational level without governmental support and lack of the developed practice of conducting collective negotiations; passivity and weak motivation of trade-union members in protection of their labor rights; weak feasibility of practical implementation of the collective agreement provisions. The results of the theoretical and empirical researches allow to predict the trajectory of further development of social partnership consisting in strengthening of the social component due to the extension of the database concerning the problems of the social partners.