EMPLOYMENT IN A LARGE CITY: DISCOURSES AND REGULATORY PRACTICES

Abstract

The article considers labor activity as a part of the everyday life of the population of a large city, taking place in a multidimensional urban social space. A retrospective analysis and reinterpretation of the development of employment in St. Petersburg in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods in the socio-cultural coordinates of everyday life is carried out. Media discourses and practices of regulating the local labor market are considered from the point of view of their impact on the socio-structural and socio-cultural parameters of the urban population. The chronic imbalance in the structure of jobs and the demands of workers is manifested in St. Petersburg in an acute shortage of skilled industrial workers. An important factor in this shortage is the low prestige of working professions in a multifunctional metropolis, which prevents young citizens from choosing such professional trajectories. The need to increase this prestige turns out to be the leitmotif of power discourse, regardless of political and ideological transformations in the city, country and the world. The global trend of reindustrialization, associated with the reformatting of the global system of division of labor, gives special relevance to this problem. At the same time, the prospect of solving it depends on the efficiency of using available resources (both material and symbolic) at the level of a particular city.