Partial mobilization prevented seasonal rise in unemployment

Partial mobilization prevented seasonal rise in unemployment


This was announced by Alexei Zakharov, founder and president of the Superjob portal, during a press conference at DOS, the topic of which was the impact of partial mobilization on the Russian labor market.

NUST MISIS_A.  Salimon, co-author of the study, working with the material.jpg

According to him, earlier in the fall, the labor market always experienced a seasonal increase in registered unemployment:

“It was a normal situation. But yesterday I spoke with colleagues in the Ministry of Labor, and they noted that now there is no increase in registered unemployment. This is such an unexpected story. Someone, probably, instead of registering as unemployed, went to serve under a contract, someone was called up, and someone does not go to the Employment Center, waiting from day to day to receive a summons.

On the other hand, as Aleksey Zakharov noted, now the largest companies have already intensified recruitment, because it is necessary to replace those who left:

“Although this is not much (for the labor market, 300,000 is a relatively insignificant value on the scale of our country), but when everything happens very quickly, problems and tasks arise that need to be solved very quickly. Now this is being sorted out.”

According to him, the situation is complicated by the fact that the decision on partial mobilization was not provided with any regulations that would explain to organizations what to do in this situation, so now some regulatory acts are being adopted “from the wheels”. But, according to Alexei Zakharov, the labor market does not experience any special stresses associated with partial mobilization, at least so far:

“If we take, for comparison, the difficulties that the labor market suffered when covid lockdowns were announced, then at that time the stress was ten times stronger. It’s another matter that during the COVID-19, everything quickly resolved: then no one expected that after 3 months the labor market would almost completely recover quantitatively. Then it was a V-shaped movement (dramatically fell, sharply rose), although the structure of the market has changed a lot. And now it is clear that all this will not end quickly.”

Another participant in the press conference, former Minister of Labor and Social Development, Honored Economist of the Russian Federation Sergei Kalashnikov, also believes that partial mobilization cannot have a serious impact on the labor market:

“There are more than 70 million able-bodied people in Russia, about 65 million of them are employed. Mobilization (the figures that have been announced today) results in the removal of 0.5% of the population from the labor market, plus those who have left - about 1%. With our 4% unemployment, the withdrawal of 1% cannot affect the labor market in any way. In its pure form, the removal of a certain share of the labor force from the labor market is not a factor that determines the labor market. The factors that determine the labor market are the economic model and the state of the economy at the moment. We need to talk not so much about the impact of mobilization on the labor market, but about the impact on it of multi-vector, often opposite transformations.”

The only thing, according to him, that now it is possible to predict that abrupt changes in the Russian market are hardly possible:

“The labor market in the economic system of the Russian Federation is the most stable, the most rigid, and frozen. Therefore, until there are cardinal changes in the economy, nothing will happen to the labor market. That is, in other words, both the creation of new jobs and the formation of mass unemployment - both are being postponed.

Sergei Kalashnikov explained this rigidity of the labor market by the stability of the economic system, which has not changed for 25 years, and the innovations that the Russian government is trying to introduce into it practically do not work:

“Therefore, everything around can collapse, change, and the labor market will remain as it is to the last. It is clear that under the influence of economic processes, it will also change. But he will be the last to change.”

At the same time, as Sergei Kalashnikov clarified, one should not rejoice at such stability:

“Any stagnation, especially in an economic system that shows inefficiency, is bad. And our labor market shows inefficiencies that are obvious to everyone. Firstly, we have a fairly high unemployment - 4%, and at the same time we have a huge army of guest workers. Secondly, this is a completely strange wage system: in normal modern economies, the share of wages in the cost of production reaches 75%, and in the basic industries of the Russian Federation, wages in the cost of production is 7-11%. This is an indicator of the level of exploitation. I could give more examples, but, believe me, the number of such absurdities in our market is huge.

So, paraphrasing the well-known phrase of the poet, we can say that our labor market cannot be understood with the mind and cannot be measured with a common yardstick, and, having realized this atypicality of it, it remains only to believe in some changes for the better that must someday happen ...

Sergei Ishkov.

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