The Ministry of Labor is discussing with the professional community lowering the age limit for working in industrial enterprises – now the work of minors there is limited by the norms of the Labor Code as work in harmful and dangerous conditions. According to the head of the PPE Association Vladimir Kotov, the solution to this issue cannot be postponed – the shortage of personnel and the increasingly earlier start of interaction between companies and young employees will inevitably push the regulator and business to develop a new norm.
The share of young people in the labor market will grow while the total population of Russia, as well as the share of working-age middle-aged citizens, decreases. Experts came to this conclusion during the discussion “Teenagers on the Shop Floor,” which took place at the business forum “Occupational Safety and Health” and was dedicated to the relationship between youth and employers.
The most important trend in recent years is a shift in the starting point of interaction between companies and potential employees. If earlier HR departments hardly considered young candidates without seniority and experience, now employers begin communicating with them in schools, colleges and universities, offering students various formats of getting to know the company, such as internships, excursions and scholarships
Today, the popularity of blue-collar professions, due to high demand in the market and, as a consequence, high salaries, is experiencing a real renaissance. It is worth saying that, according to the same Rosstat, the number of college graduates in 2024 exceeded the total number of young people who graduated from a university or master’s degree by more than 34 thousand people. And this, if you are a responsible employer and care about replenishing the workforce at the enterprise, cannot be ignored: working with secondary vocational education institutions (SVE) becomes a necessity. Especially if you consider that, according to the forecast of the Center for International Relations, there will still be a shortage of college and college graduates in the economy – the authors of the report estimate their future deficit at 3.6 million people.
However, potential employees under 18 years of age, and in some cases up to 21 years of age, according to labor legislation, cannot work in places with harmful and dangerous production factors. And a whole host of questions immediately arises: how to provide enterprises with young people while complying with labor safety standards? Is it possible to rely on modern technology and make workplaces completely safe? How to survive the time gap between a young person’s graduation from college and the onset of a responsible age, where can one get a guarantee that the graduate will not go to work as a courier during this time and will remain there? It should be noted that, according to a study by the internship aggregator FutureToday, 42% of students who combine study and work have work activities that are not related to their chosen profession.
Even understanding where to look for a new source of labor, the industry is still afraid of working with minors and is extremely reluctant to do so, fearing liability both from the law and from trade unions. In addition, the list of professions for which young people under 18 can be recruited is very limited.
Work is currently underway to amend labor legislation regarding work with minors. In particular, it is proposed to transform the list of professions prohibited for teenagers into a list of specific types of work with harmful and dangerous factors, which cannot be performed by persons under 18 years of age. This work is painstaking and slow. Meanwhile, industrial enterprises are cautiously trying different formats of communication with students in order to keep them in their orbit. For example, the largest petrochemical company SIBUR has an entire department dedicated to working with young professionals and educational institutions. Beginning in 2024, the share of college and vocational school graduates hired here has surpassed the share of college graduates and continues to grow. Until young people reach adulthood, they are attracted to practice and internships – in processes that are not associated with physical labor and risks, while they work every day at the holding’s enterprises, saturated with its atmosphere, traditions and rituals. For such work, a whole range of formal actions is required in the form of developing regulations, namely:
identify safe areas for practice;
develop internal regulations and instructions for the reception of minors;
enter into an agreement with the educational institution;
provide instructions and training on labor protection and industrial safety;
limit the type and amount of work according to age standards;
appoint mentors and assign areas of responsibility;
ensure monitoring and control of practice conditions;
obtain parental consent and medical certificates.
However, experience shows that such efforts bring results and reduce costs without causing harm to the health of the new generation of workers. This path is one way or another for everyone involved in large-scale production, and the one who starts it first will be the winner.
