Remuneration of teachers in Russia: Problem statement

Abstract

The subject of the study is two main models according to which the current systems of remuneration of teachers of general education organizations in Russia are built. The analysis of the norms revealed that federal legislation refers the issues of establishing wage systems to the competence of educational organizations. At the same time, there are no mandatory regulatory requirements for the salary amount, as well as for the composition and amount of surcharges and allowances of teachers as such. At the federal level, only a number of guarantees have been established to ensure the minimum wage for teachers, while the choice of specific mechanisms for its implementation is given to the level of subjects of the Russian Federation, local governments, educational organizations. The study of regional and municipal regulatory legal acts has shown that the absence in the salary system of centralized regulatory consolidation of restrictions on the structure of the salary fund at school, if many recommendations on the size and proportion of salaries are not followed, leads to a blurring of the salary structure, a large and unjustified regional differentiation of the base salary and its low level. A large gap in the amount of rates independently set in the subjects of the Russian Federation leads to different pay for work of equal value, which violates one of the basic principles of labor law — equal pay for work of equal value, and puts the material (and, as a consequence, social) position of teachers dependent not on the quality and quantity of their work, it depends on the level of economic development of the region. The article criticizes the idea of introducing a single federal salary as a measure aimed at increasing the total salary of a teacher. Among the possible ways to solve the problems, the authors point to the need to develop a set of federal recommendations: on the minimum share of the salary of teaching staff in the total amount of wages; on the grounds of establishing an increasing coefficient to the salary; on the grounds of establishing compensatory payments for the performance of work that goes beyond the labor function of the teacher; on the grounds of establishing incentive payments, in particular to reflect in the salary indicators the quality and effectiveness of pedagogical work.