Legal regulation of self-employment: soviet experience and modern realities

Abstract

The Constitution of the USSR of 1936 and 1977, along with the general guarantee of the right to employment, allowed self-employment in the form of small private house holds, handicrafts and individual labor activity, thus enabling the creation of an adequate mechanism for its legal regulation in the established social relations. With the transition to the market, the emphasis in law making shifted to the regulation of employment and entrepreneurship. The 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation does not guarantee individual labor for the first time in the Russian history. The self-employed, having lost a legal status and falling out of the institutional environment, found themselves within the informal sector. The problem of formation of a new mechanism of legal regulation, which is urgent for a dozen and a half million of the Russian citizens, has been put up since 2015, but has not progressed beyond the inter-departmental discussions. A critical analysis of five currently available draft normative acts at different levels does not allow any of them to be taken as a basis. The current norm-setting on self-employment is not systemic, has no conceptual unity, is not based on any data on the regulatory object, does not take into account the traditions and opinion of the self-employed themselves. In this connection, it will be useful to update the unjustifiably ignored domestic experience in the development of special rules of 1936, 1949, 1958 and 1976, the 1986 Law “On Individual Labour Activity”, and especially the constitutional norm of 1977 which used for the first time a self-sufficient term “individual labor activity”. This wording does not require any further explanations and enables to distinguish between the personal labor, employment and entrepreneurial activity. Formalization of the concept “self-employed”, taking into account the Russian realities, updating and conceptualization of the individual labor activity, a standard-setting algorithm proposed in the article can impart an impulse and a systemic character to the sluggish process of regulating self-employment as a socially useful work. 

Keywords:

self-employment, individual labor activity, Constitution of the USSR, Constitution of the Russian Federation, handicraftsmen and artisans, personal property, individual entrepreneur