Minister: Labor market’s situation serious, to stabilize in June

KHANTY-MANSIYSK/MOSCOW, May 19 (PRIME) – Russia’s current labor market situation is serious, but not catastrophic, and will start to stabilize in June, Labor and Social Protection Minister Anton Kotyakov said late on Monday in an interview to the Pozner TV show aired on the Channel One.

“I see the situation as rather serious for the Russian labor market, but I would not call it a catastrophy. … As of today, the figure of unemployed people registered with the services is high -- 1.6 million people. … According to our forecast, the amount of unemployed will continue growing in May–June,” he said.

“Our estimate shows that we are moving within a scenario … of 2.5 million registered unemployed people. This is not a large number for Russia taking into account the analysis of experiences of other states where unemployment is higher. I see no prerequisites for a social explosion, though there is tension in the form of unhappiness about the quarantine measures and necessity to stay home, but we see stabilization from the point of view of the amount of infected people.”

The situation should stabilize in a month, he said.

“I expect that the situation on the labor market will more or less stabilize and that companies will start working. We will have a clear and understandable amount of officially registered unemployed people,” he said, adding that the ministry will analyze the situation at the end of June to understand further steps it has to take.

It would be tough for the ministry to achieve the goal of halving Russia’s poverty until 2024, but it is not impossible.

“I will agree that it would be tough to achieve, but it is not impossible, and one simple reason for that is that we have a wide range of instruments that would allow us to do that,” he said.

The government has revised its social support measures seriously and prolonged the measures for six months due to the coronavirus. The budget also encompasses a mechanism of a social contract that should help families to weather dire situations. The government would spend 28 billion rubles on the mechanism next year. If the existing amount is not enough, the ministry will make more suggestions, he said.

The ministry also understands that the middle class families in Russia usually have no long-term savings.

Commenting on data that each fifth family in Russia has no rainy-day funds and Russians on average have savings that would last for no more than four months, he said, “This is a predictable situation. We understand that the families that are in the middle class today usually have no long-term savings.”

That is why the government focuses its support on the families with children, as they suffer most when one of the parents loses his job. Calculations show that families with two children aged two and seven will be able to receive more than 100,000 rubles in state support in three months if their father loses his job, he said.

(72.9798 rubles – U.S. $1)

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