The Ministry of Labor of Russia proposed to pay 116,800 rubles to Russians from "labor-surplus" regions under the age of 35 for moving to work in an area where the number of vacancies exceeds the number of unemployed. Vedomosti writes about this with reference to a draft resolution on “support for labor migration of youth.”
It is proposed to include Dagestan, Ingushetia, Altai, Tyva, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia and Chechnya, where the highest unemployment rate was recorded in January-March 2022, as “labor surplus”. It is proposed to move from these regions to the regions in the North-West, the Urals, the Far East and Siberia: from the Leningrad to the Magadan region.
The explanatory note states that the payment can be received after the conclusion of an employment contract. At the same time, the provided payments can be spent only for those purposes that will be determined in the contract. Within a month after submitting an application to the employment center, Russians from these republics will be able to receive 42,800 rubles, and six months after submitting the application – another 74,000 rubles.
Nina Vishnevskaya, deputy director of the Center for Labor Studies at the Higher School of Economics, argues that the amount of "lifting" is not enough for a serious move. According to her, we need to start with improving the skills of people so that they are invited to other regions as valuable employees. At the same time, the proposed measure will be of interest to "a few dozen people." The initiative of the Ministry of Labor is "only one of the measures" to reduce the disproportion in the labor market, said Yaroslav Nilov (LDPR), chairman of the State Duma Labor Committee. In his opinion, such an amount will help a young specialist to rent housing and start working.
Earlier in June, Minister of Labor and Social Protection Anton Kotyakov publicly announced for the first time the official number of unemployed in Russia and acknowledged that tensions in the labor market were "starting to escalate." Until June, according to Kotyakov, the number of officially unemployed was in the range of 660-680 thousand people. The official connects the growth of unemployment with the departure of foreign companies, which, due to the war in Ukraine, have sharply reduced their presence in Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin regularly passed off low unemployment as economic success, and in early June he claimed that the number of unemployed was at an all-time low. However, the official unemployment rate is a weak indicator, which, as a rule, reacts to labor market trends with a time lag, as it captures only those citizens who have registered with the labor exchange.