The article substantiates the relevance of research into precarious employment and the prevalence of its different forms among population. The authors show the causes that lead to an increase in demand for precarious work, they include the upgrading of technologies and workplaces, small business development, the desire of employers to minimize the costs of fulfilling social obligations and observance of labor rights. The article highlights forms of precarious employment, which include part-time work, temporary work for a certain period, and work outside employment, self-employment and others. Using official data in their dynamics and in territorial breakdown (by countries included in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), the authors analyze the prevalence of temporary, part-time employment and self-employment. The paper presents the dynamics of indicators that characterize employed people by type of employment contract and employed population by presence of additional work and readiness for secondary employment. It is shown that official estimates on the prevalence of precarious employment are lowered in comparison with the results obtained by some researchers, in particular, by O. V. Sinyavskaya. The authors reveal advantages and disadvantages of involving workers in precarious employment. The article pays much attention to the influence of various parameters of fluctuating employment (type of labor contract, number of days worked per month, participation in secondary employment) on the reproduction of labor potential of the population. The analysis carried out with the use of the data of the monitoring of labor potential quality in the Vologda Oblast has shown that those employed under the labor contract compared to those employed without it often go over the quota and perform high-quality work from the first presentation; tardiness, absenteeism, failures, wrong decision-making are less common in the former. In addition, the presence of “permanent” employment contract creates conditions for the formation of labor potential of higher quality, which positively affects the individual components of labor potential, in particular, creativity and cognitive potential
Keywords
employment potential, fluctuating employment, temporary employment, underemployment, self-employment, implementation of labor potential