ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the changing experience of class-based identities and inequalities amongst young workers in Russia, with a particular focus on their identifications with old and emerging forms of gendered employment. It explores how young men and women being channelled into 'poor work' in state and former state enterprises experience the material and the symbolic impoverishment of these transitions, and the alternative forms of employment and identification available to them elsewhere. The chapter then points to changes in the ways in which young people subjectively experience their own subordination in the labour market, which is increasingly felt as resulting from personal inadequacies and poor choices, rather than from rational choices supported by traditional forms of working-class identity. The chapter argues that both of these developments in post-Soviet Russia are connected to wider shifts towards more individualised forms of social inequality that can be seen in neo-liberal economies elsewhere in the world.
