Corporate Citizenship in Demography As a New Element in Regional Models of the Welfare State in Russia

A population decrease and falling birth rates are a critical challenge in Russia. The negative trend persists despite the welfare state support to low-income families with children and a focus on the social sphere and measures to increase birth rate and multi-child parenting. Aggravated by staff shortage, the crisis urges employers across Russia to develop new forms of staff retention and recruitment. One of the new social policy directions in the business sphere is corporate demographic policies for employees and their families. The new context involves the following aspects: (1) By actively supporting families with children and promoting higher birth rates, the state changes the social agenda — it increases the value of the family and parenting among citizens, thus shaping a new agenda for business, which aims to support employees’ family responsibilities and provide additional measures for stimulating births. (2) Experiencing a tremendous staff shortage and competing for employees, businesses have to look for the new ways to retain and recruit staff. (3) Employees and graduates that consider family a priority in life form a certain opinion about the employer and the measures it offers to support family responsibilities. In 2024, we held a comprehensive sociological study (encompassing three federal districts) that allowed us to document this opinion and develop approaches to describing the regional model of the social welfare state, which includes a stance of Russian employees on the corporate citizenship and its role in mitigating pressing social problems that have to do with the negative demographic trends in fertility. The work has been supported by the Russian Science Foundation grant No. 24-18-00854.