Self-employment has become a taste – Newspaper Kommersant No. 25 (7470) dated 02/10/2023

By the end of 2023, the number of officially self-employed Russians may grow to 10 million people, follows from the forecast of the Nimix profile platform. This will be facilitated by both the increased interest in this format on the part of employees, and the preservation of the current desire of employers in the face of instability to hire employees for temporary projects. Now, according to the tax service, there are already 6.5 million self-employed people in the Russian Federation, and this number is growing steadily.

By the end of 2023, the number of self-employed in the Russian Federation may exceed 10 million people, analysts of the Nimix service believe. This will happen if companies continue to hire new workers mainly for temporary projects due to fears of expanding the staff of permanent employees in an unpredictable economic situation. In 2022, the number of self-employed, according to the statistics of the Federal Tax Service, increased by 1.7 times and reached 6.5 million people. The total revenue of the self-employed at the end of the year amounted to 125.8 billion rubles.

Representatives of other platforms for the self-employed, interviewed by Kommersant, generally agree with the forecast of colleagues from Nimix. According to the Ventra Go! poll, up to 70% of respondents are ready to try themselves in the new role of working for themselves. “We are seeing an increase in the number of active performers on our platform. Today, such a part-time job is chosen not only by students, young mothers and freelancers who need additional income, but also by those for whom the part-time format has actually replaced the main job, ”says the managing partner of Ventra and Ventra Go! Ekaterina Karabanova. This format attracts self-employed people with the opportunity to go to work at a convenient time and place (26%), getting quick pay (15%), independence from superiors and work schedule (12%). The high dynamics of the growth of self-employed people is also mentioned in the service for secure transactions between companies and freelancers Solar Staff – over the year, the number of its users has grown by 146%. According to the YouDo platform, the number of self-employed people registered there is growing by about 10% every month.

One of the sources of this growth was small and medium-sized businesses, for some of which the new simplified tax regime turned out to be more attractive, said Lilia Ovcharova, Vice-Rector of the Higher School of Economics. According to her, workers who are faced with a reduction in the working day at their main place may also show interest in part-time work as a self-employed person. Note that it is this way of saving the wage fund instead of layoffs that employers usually practice (see Kommersant dated December 27, 2022). An additional increase in the number of self-employed may also occur at the expense of emigrated citizens – let us explain, this status can be obtained without being in Russia, but providing services to Russian customers.

Some companies, for example, in the light industry, are experiencing a shortage of personnel, and, as Elina Klimenko, the operating director of Nimix, says, they may be interested in employees who are ready to legally earn extra money in parallel with their main job (see Kommersant on February 6). In addition, according to the personnel company ANCOR, up to 7% of employers (especially in the areas of real estate and construction, production of mass goods and resource extraction) plan to use temporary staff more often (see Kommersant of December 27, 2022). Now, as the head of the research center SuperJob Natalia Golovanova notes, every fifth Russian company (20%) already uses the services of the self-employed. Most often self-employed companies are involved in logistics (30%), construction (28%) and services (24%).

Anastasia Manuylova