Size does not matter – Newspaper Kommersant No. 38 (7483) dated 03/06/2023

Those working in a number of public sectors – in education, healthcare, science and culture – practically do not associate satisfaction from their work with the level of salary. This follows from a report prepared at the Higher School of Economics, which analyzes the dynamics of self-assessments of state employees and their salaries over the past 20 years. From this, in particular, it follows that government wage reforms in these sectors may not be effective in addressing the shortage of workers.

The size of the salary practically does not affect how public employees are satisfied with their work. This follows from the report “Not by Bread Alone: ​​Satisfaction with the Work of State Employees in Comparison with Private Sector Employees”, which was presented by Professor of the Faculty of Economic Sciences Elena Kotyrlo at the seminar of the Center for Labor Studies of the Higher School of Economics. The work is based on data from the Russian Monitoring of the Economic Situation and Health of the Population of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (RLMS HSE) for 2002–2021. Evaluation of job satisfaction and its components – satisfaction with working conditions, career growth and salary – is presented in the RLMS on a five-point scale from “completely satisfied” to “completely dissatisfied”. State employees in the work mean those employed in the fields of science and culture, education and healthcare in state institutions – those employed in state administration bodies, the military-industrial complex and law enforcement agencies are not included in the sample of work. In total, it included 41.4% of observations (126 thousand observations, 25 thousand people, the average observation period was five years). Thus, according to the concept of the work, its results are representative of several million people employed in the Russian Federation.

As follows from the results of the study, the dynamics of job satisfaction of state employees does not correlate with the dynamics of their salaries. For example, their growth in several periods was accompanied by a decrease in the level of satisfaction, for example, in 2003–2008. On the contrary, in the crisis years of 2009 and 2015, the decline in wages occurred in parallel with the growth of job satisfaction in general and the terms of the contract compared to the previous year. This, as noted by the author of the report, may be due to increased fears of losing a job. Also in 2018, against the backdrop of an 8.5% increase in wages, the level of satisfaction of state employees showed stagnation and decline rather than growth.

As the author of the work notes, despite the intersectoral gap in wages in absolute terms, the dynamics of satisfaction also indicates that those employed in the private and public sectors are equally satisfied with their work. The exceptions are the periods of 2009 and 2018, when state employees were more satisfied with career advancement than private employees. In 2020, state employees were also more satisfied with the size of the salary. Thus, the report notes, the gap in wages between sectors only in some indicators repeats the dynamics of the business cycle in the Russian Federation.

It should be noted that the results of this study, in particular, indicate the inefficiency of the impact of the state policy of increasing the wages of state employees on their subjective self-perception. Over the past 20 years, we recall, the government has made several attempts to increase their salaries – through the unification of the tariff scale in the mid-2000s, the implementation of the May 2012 presidential decrees and the introduction of allowances for certain industries, in particular for primary care physicians in the regions (more see Kommersant of January 16). However, as follows from the report, it is rather non-material incentives that can ensure the inflow of personnel to the public sector.

Anastasia Manuylova