REGIONAL DIFFERENCES OF INTERNAL LABOR MIGRATION 

Zhidkevich Natal'ya Nikolaevna, Postgraduate student, analyst, educational design laboratory of municipal
administration, National Research University “Higher School of Economics” (20 Myasnitskaya street, Moscow, Russia), natalia.zhidkevich@gmail.com

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Background. Nowadays a large part of Russian provincials are forced to leave home on regular basis to earn a living for their families by working in other regions. Despite the scale of this phenomenon, it is ignored both by the politicians and by the scientific community. We believe it is important to provide a general description of such labor migrants and outline their specific regional features. The goal of the study is to describe the regional differences of the contemporary regular forced internal labor migration (hereinafter – labor migration) and to identify the reasons underlying the diversity in the social and economic characteristics of such migrating workers (hereinafter – labor migrants).
Materials and methods. The Kostroma (traditional northern center of nonagricultural seasonal labor migration) and Saratov (southern region) regions were selected for comparison. They strongly differ in what concerns the types of labor migration and labor behavior characteristics. The results are obtained by observing the labor migrants at places where they permanently reside, and on the basis of 93 detailed interviews.
Results. The author evaluated the scale of labor migration in both regions; studied the labor activity specific for the labor migrants of the Kostroma and Saratov region; considered the reasons for regional differences in social and economic and motivational characteristics; identified two social types of labor migrants.
Conclusions. The description of labor migration and migrants’ behavior allows identifying the existence of social types of the northern and the southern labor migrants. They differ by a variety of features, including behavior, motivation, cultural and economic aspects.

labor migration, labor migrants, contemporary regular forced internal labor migration, regional differences in regular forced internal labor migration.

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