Seamstresses on the offensive – Newspaper Kommersant No. 209 (7410) dated 11/11/2022

According to experts at the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy, up to a third of Russian industrial enterprises may face a record shortage of personnel due to partial mobilization: this is the lowest indicator of the state of the labor market in this parameter over the past 30 years, since 1993. The assessment of the shortage of personnel in the light industry is a record one, but in the sectoral context, the shortage of workers is not uniform. In corporate HR departments, the problem is considered rather exaggerated, and a third of the companies surveyed by the Gaidar Institute believe that only more intensive search for new employees will be able to cope with the consequences.

After the end of partial mobilization in the Russian Federation, the Russian industry complained about a record shortage of personnel over the past 30 years. Such a conclusion can be drawn from the report of experts from the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy, which was presented yesterday at the institute’s scientific seminar by Sergey Tsukhlo, head of the organization’s market research laboratory.

As follows from the Gaidar Institute business survey data (the last of which was conducted in October), one of the industries that most recorded a noticeable shortage of workers after mobilization was Russian industry. Thus, the indicator of the balance of assessments of personnel sufficiency at the end of the month turned out to be in a “deep minus” (-30% in the balance of answers), which means that about a third of the industry faced this problem. The largest shortage of personnel, as the authors of the report point out, was recorded in light industry enterprises (-70%), in mechanical engineering (-35%) and food production (-25%). The previous drop in staffing adequacy scores (-26%) took place in February of this year. The authors of the report associate it with the optimism of enterprises regarding the way out of the “covid” crisis. Another drop in estimates was in 2007 (-27%). Thus, according to industry representatives, the current level of staffing in the industry turned out to be the lowest for the entire period of the institute’s market surveys, that is, for the last 30 years – since 1993.

Assessing the consequences of the shortage of personnel, industrialists named the impossibility of increasing the volume of output even in the face of a possible increase in demand as its main consequence. This was stated by 48% of the respondents, this figure increased by 15 percentage points over the year.

Another 30% said that the shortage of hands will affect the quality of their goods, 22% fear that in the near future they will have to reduce production even relative to the current level. However, 33% of those surveyed said that they see the need for a more intensive search for new employees as the main consequence of the shortage of personnel – and consider this task quite feasible.

At the same time, recruitment portals, the main platforms for finding blue-collar workers, disagreed about how realistic such self-assessment of the state of their production by industrialists is. Thus, Natalya Danina, head of the client efficiency department at hh.ru, notes that although the shortage of engineers of various specializations, as well as narrow production specialists, did not begin yesterday, now, according to the portal, there are “only two resumes. According to her, although now the level of demand for industrial personnel is lower than in February this year, it is growing.

The statistics of the Superjob portal show a different picture – as Natalya Golovanova, head of the organization’s research center, explains, the number of vacancies in the industry has slightly decreased over the past month (minus 4%). “The industry is evaluating the implications of mobilization. It is likely that the numbers presented in the study were influenced by an emotional component, since leaders, like the rest of us, are subject to stress, ”she says. The results of a survey of their member companies by the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP) also speak in favor of some exaggeration of the assessments of the consequences of mobilization: in mid-October, about 60% of companies did not notice the impact of mobilization on staffing, 40% did not expect changes in the situation in the future ( see Kommersant of November 2 for details).

The lack of information quite reliably explains the impossibility of somehow promptly adapting the very strategy for selecting mobilized people (see Kommersant-Online) – as Kommersant already wrote, in the conditions of the unclear operation of the booking mechanism, many companies tried to use not it, but public appeals to the government with requests for the introduction of other approaches. This did little to change the initial position of the Ministry of Defense – in response to some of these appeals from trade unions, the department replied that it would not mobilize more than a third of workers from one enterprise, but this mechanism was never developed in detail.

Anastasia Manuylova