In many sectors, the platform economy has led to the whitewashing of economic activity and has created opportunities for legal earnings and the generation of income for many groups that are traditionally vulnerable, for which occasional casual employment is important and there are low barriers for entry into this segment: these include young people, women with children, often in the case of remote employment, people with disabilities, and people of pre-retirement and retirement age, for whom there are often age stereotypes. If we look at the balance between benefits and costs, we will see that all players are interested in some sort of regulation — Oksana Sinyavskaya, Deputy Director of the Institute for Social Policy, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
We are clearly trying to enshrine attributes of traditional labour relations in the regulatory framework. We see that certain enterprises are withdrawing from traditional legal relations to self-employment in order to minimize costs. It’s clearly quite profitable at this stage. If we don’t create a regulatory tool that would not allow for abusing this right today and switching employees to self-employment at ordinary enterprises, we will reach the figure of 17–20 million, which is totally understandable. [...] If now, in 2021–2022, we don’t create an understandable and transparent regulatory and legal framework that governs relations with the correlation of relevant features to traditional labour relations, then, we believe this growth will be about 10–11 million by 2030 — Anton Kotyakov, Minister of Labour and Social Protection of the Russian Federation.
Certain agencies have big plans for regulation [of the activities of employment platforms]. Sometimes they are attributable to the need to maintain competition, but we are always trying to find a balance — Maksut Shadaev, Minister of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation.
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