The Phenomenon of Justice in the Labour Remuneration of Medical Workers

Abstract

Alexander Temnitsky — Candidate of Science in Sociology, Associate Professor, the Sociological Department, Moscow State Institute of International Relations. Address: bldg.76, Vernadsky Av., Moscow, 119454, Russian Federation. Email: taleksandr@list.ru

Citation: Temnitsky А. (2017) The Phenomenon of Justice in the Labour Remuneration of Medical Workers. Mir Rossii, vol. 26, no 3, pp. 64–89 (in Russian). DOI: 10.17323/1811-038Х-2017-26-3-64-89

This article investigates the role of justice in labour remuneration with regard to motivation at work and the implementation of ‘effective contracts’ for medical workers in public healthcare institutions. The empirical data comes from surveys conducted between 2007 and 2014.
Several studies have addressed the problem of justice in the remuneration of medical workers in Russia. They show that the problem became particularly acute in 2000s, when medical workers increasingly reported the weakening of the connection between earnings and effort. The article introduces the notions of paternalistic and liberal models of justice in labour remuneration, and reveals those models empirically. The paternalistic model is characteristic of approximately 33% of respondents and the liberal model accounts for 20%. What is highly specific to the notion of justice in the remuneration of medical workers is the contradiction between monetary motivation bolstered by ‘effective contracts’, on the one hand, and the social status, prestige and humanitarian role of the medical profession, on the other.
The study reveals that justice in remuneration is highly relevant for the proper incentivisation of all types of medical workers. It also shows that the correlation between earnings, effort investment and satisfaction with earnings forms a reliable index for measuring such justice.
It is shown that conservatism prevails in all of the revealed indicators of the justice phenomenon. The feeling of justice revealed in the labour payment of medical workers raises the level of conformist attitudes towards the introduction of effective contracts, but is not accompanied by an aspiration for raising the effectiveness of labour.

It is also shown that all of the indicators of the justice in the labour payment phenomenon coordinate with their conservative function towards labour behaviour indices and planned institutional innovations.