В руската икономика липсват 2 млн. работници, наемат тийнейджъри и пенсионери – haroonabadvital.com
Russia’s unemployment rate should be the envy of any country, but instead it highlights how labor shortages fueled by the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 are making it difficult for companies to operate.
Russia’s unemployment rate, already at a record low, fell to 2.3 percent in October, the Federal Statistics Service said late Wednesday. This is ahead of Japan, which has traditionally enjoyed a low unemployment rate, and all other G7 countries.
“The Russian labor market is currently experiencing a rather difficult situation,” said Yevgeny Suvorov, chief economist for Russia at CentroCredit Bank. “There are several hundred thousand people who have left Russia and a fairly large influx of employees in sectors operating under government contracts.”
He added that wages rose by about 20 percent year on year. This creates a “significant inflation risk” in the country, with price growth so far this year close to 9%, according to Economy Ministry data.
Russia’s war in Ukraine caused the economy to overheat, which in turn exacerbated severe labor shortages in most industries. Competition for employees has driven up wages, driving up inflation, as civilian companies compete with the military — and with each other — for scarce talent. Labor shortages also acted as a drag on production, threatening to slow the growth of the war economy.
In the restaurant and retail sectors, demand for workers aged 16 to 18 has doubled, according to analysts at AvitoJobs, a Moscow-based classifieds service, Kommersant reported in October. According to Russian law, a person can be employed in limited work from the age of 14 with parental consent.
A small hotel in central Moscow was forced to hire high school students to clean rooms and wash dishes after it could not find enough maids even after monthly wages were dramatically increased, says the hotel manager, who wanted to remain anonymous.
But companies aren’t just looking for younger workers. In the past two years, the average age of skilled professionals has risen by three to six years, according to employment service SuperJob.
“We literally have to ask people to postpone their retirement because there is simply no one to replace them,” says Irina, a manager at a large construction company. The total number of employees in her company is 12,000 people, a third of whom are of retirement age and more than 60 years old.
Tatiana, 72, a lecturer at a medical school in a small town on the Volga River, says that 60 to 70 percent of teachers are working retirees. “Previously, older teachers had to retire to make room for younger ones,” she says. “Now they are asking us to stay.”
Some of the largest employers are having to look harder for new workers. Magnit, one of Russia’s largest grocery retail chains, said this month that it has started a recruitment program in Uzbekistan and plans to expand it to other countries.
There are five job vacancies for every unemployed Russian, according to estimates from FinExpertiza, one of Russia’s leading auditing firms. This is the largest gap in 19 years.
According to the audit firm, the Russian economy currently lacks two million workers.
The Bank of Russia reported in October that more than 80% of Russian companies suffer from some degree of staff shortages. A senior official in the Ministry of Labor in the Moscow City Council said that there are no unemployed people in the city with a population of 13 million, according to the RBK newspaper.
The owner of a Moscow restaurant chain said he has lost up to 30% of the workers he needs, a situation he has not seen in his 15 years in business, according to reports. Bloomberg TV Bulgaria.
In addition to having to compete with defense-related industries in terms of wages, Russian companies say the departure of migrant workers from the country has also affected the situation. Andrei Kladov, CEO of a platform that provides digital services to migrant workers in Russia, said in a television interview this week that about a million people left Russia in 2024 alone.
This leak comes at a time when Russia is tightening immigration rules following the terrorist attack that occurred last March on a concert hall outside Moscow. The weakness of the ruble against the dollar also made working in the country less attractive.
“The labor shortage problem is likely to persist next year,” said Olga Belinkaya, an economist at the Venam Foundation in Moscow. “But the demand for workers may not grow as quickly due to the expected slowdown in economic growth.”
However, some experts believe that the solution to the problem lies in increasing efficiency.
“The model based on low labor productivity and the attractiveness of cheap migrant labor is over,” says Alexei Zakharov, head of Superjob.ru. “It is time for active modernization. Let us finally increase labor productivity.
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