The shortage of workers can be compensated only by hopes

The October review of the Bank of Russia “Monitoring of enterprises” records a frontal deterioration in assessments of the provision of Russian companies with employees in all industries – the indicator reached a minimum since the beginning of observations in 2020, when the Central Bank began publishing operational snapshots of the situation of enterprises due to the need for quick data due to the COVID pandemic -19. In industry comparisons, representatives of industrial and agricultural enterprises most often report a shortage of personnel in surveys (conducted in the first two weeks of October). The absolute leader of the “staff shortage” is manufacturing (see chart), while trade and services are the least affected by it – however, the trend towards a deterioration in companies’ assessment of the availability of workers after some stabilization in the winter of 2022–2023 is widespread.

What is happening may be a consequence of the slowdown in the growth of real wages discovered by the Center for MAKP in the October macro-review (up to the transition to a local decline in industry and agriculture) – which reduces their ability to attract new workers into the labor market: earlier Kommersant already noted, in particular, the loss of some competitiveness of ruble wages for migrant workers. “Despite the labor shortage, companies can no longer seem to raise wages fast enough. For now, of course, we can rather talk about a trend toward a stop in growth and a transition to temporary stagnation of real wages, nothing more,” the TsMAKP assumed.

Employers themselves, however, remain overly optimistic about their hiring plans. “The expectations of enterprises have become more positive, especially among construction, agriculture, and transportation and storage companies,” Bank of Russia analysts note. A month earlier, extremely high hiring plans were also noted by Sergei Tsukhlo from the IEP named after. Gaidar – at the same time, chronic dissatisfaction with their implementation had practically no impact on the plans themselves: for example, in September, in conditions of an already obvious personnel shortage, they decreased by only two points, and according to the Central Bank in October, in industry, for example, they returned to growth again. In general, the situation is apparently close to an equilibrium between demand causing overheating of the economy (see text next) and companies’ ability to increase supply, which has reached the limits (personnel, wages and investment), but they are not ready to admit this.

Oleg Sapozhkov