The wage race and competition for workers in industry are more popular than hiring migrants

According to the latest in a long series of studies by the IEP market research laboratory, January 2024 brought new records of personnel shortage to Russian industry – 53% of representatives of industrial enterprises already say that it limits output. At the same time, industrialists intend to compete with each other in the race of wages and conditions only for the working hands of Russians – hiring migrants, unlike the retail and logistics industries, remains their least popular way of filling worker vacancies.

The latest, 380th study of the market survey laboratory of the IEP, headed by Sergei Tsukhlo – yesterday he announced that the laboratory itself was being liquidated and staff were leaving, but surveys were likely to continue under a new brand – recorded new highs for the shortage of workers in industry, which has become the “most a common constraint on industrial growth according to enterprises in 2024,” in January it was mentioned by 53% of manufacturers, which was the historical maximum of its mentions since 1993. The second most important factor – “uncertainty of the situation and its prospects” – is gradually reducing the negative impact on the dynamics of industrial production (the local maximum occurred in the summer of 2022): in January it was cited by 42% of representatives of industrial enterprises, in third place – about 40% – in industry Now they see the weakness of domestic demand; the frequency of mentions of such output limiters as the weak ruble, export demand and lack of equipment has dropped below 30%.

The most popular way to solve personnel problems remains the wage race – 80% of enterprises plan to participate in it, while the detail of the survey demonstrates the diversification of employers’ strategies in the competitive struggle in the labor market. Thus, in industry, for which skilled workers are important, they intend to increase salaries primarily for personnel workers and give priority to “retaining existing workers at the enterprise, rather than searching for new ones, which, in conditions of record low unemployment and the degradation of the secondary specialized education system, is completely logical “, states Sergei Tsukhlo. According to the study, self-reliance is confirmed by the high prevalence in industry of retraining existing workers and the search for future qualified workers among graduates of secondary specialized institutions – “the high priority for establishing close contacts with them during their studies (73% of mentions) indicates that that enterprises are trying to bind students of these institutions to themselves even before graduation and avoid their free entry into the Russian labor market.” The next most popular method of filling vacancies was the search for workers in other regions of the Russian Federation and their relocation to the vicinity of enterprises, bypassing rotational hiring.

The scale of the personnel shortage is illustrated by the results of the next, 112th quarterly IEP measurement of the supply of industry with qualified workers: according to its data, the share of enterprises with an insufficient number of employees “due to expected changes in demand” reached 47% and broke the previous record of July 2023, when such estimates 45% were received, while at the stage of a decisive exit from the “Covid crisis” only 26% of enterprises reported a lack of personnel.

Moreover, all these measures are focused on hiring Russians: the use of migrants from both Central and Southeast Asia occupies the last two places in the list of strategies (16% and 11% of respondents, respectively), while Russian employers from retail and logistics and e-commerce, where specialized skills are not important, are already discussing measures to facilitate the massive hiring of potential employees from India, Pakistan and North Korea (see Kommersant on February 1).

Oleg Sapozhkov