By Jane Dillendorf
MOSCOW — According to statistics issued by the Russian Federal Employment Service at the end of January, there are now only 835,000 jobless people in the country — barely 1% of the work force.
However, statistics can be made to hide reality as well as to reveal it. In this case, the official statisticians have performed a masterwork, reducing the country's unemployment rate to around a tenth of its probable level.
Russia today is one of the world's centres of concealed unemployment. The mechanisms involved are simple. Enterprises which cannot maintain production at previous levels pay their employees a fraction of their usual wages and send them on forced vacations. The length of the stand-down and the payment are totally up to the enterprise management.
There are other types of concealed unemployment as well: shortened work weeks or workdays, or keeping employees at their workplaces but giving them almost nothing to do.
For the workers involved, this "pseudo-employment" is obviously better than outright joblessness. But the situation has a disturbing side, since it mystifies the reality and allows workers to avoid taking action to force changes.
Providing a firm estimate of the extent of concealed unemployment is difficult. The Russian State Committee on Statistics, however, cites a figure of "up to 12 million", which together with the officially registered unemployed suggests a total of about 13 million workers who do not have real full-time jobs.
This is about 18% of the work force — closer to what you would expect in a country gripped by catastrophic depression. The only reason the figure is not far higher is the continuing support of state and many privatised enterprises by the government. Cheap state credits are the only thing saving many firms from bankruptcy.
Of the people who lose their jobs, large numbers never register with an employment bureau. Part of the reason is suspicion of the new structures. In the "good old days" the system of labour bureaus provided something closer to compulsion than help. In the city of Saratov on the Volga, for example, two-thirds of unemployed women refused the help of the service's psychologists.
Many Russians simply do not know what employment services do, or where to find them. People are ignorant of their rights, set out in the Law on Employment of 1991, and often have no idea that this law exists.
The employment bureaus very often lack the money to pay all the registered jobless the tiny benefits that are available. For people who cannot survive without these sums, the situation means hours of standing in a queue, frequently in snow or rain.
Of the registered unemployed, no fewer than 75% are women, more than half of them with higher education. People aged from 16 to 29 make up 30% of the total jobless. Among unemployed youth, almost every third person has just graduated from an institution of higher or special education. Despite alarming forecasts, former military personnel and immigrants — often refugees from other countries of the former Soviet Union — have not made a major impact on the jobless figures.
The economic reasons underlying job cuts vary from region to region. The conversion of military to civilian production has been a major factor in the north-west of Russia and in the Urals. The severance of ties between former Soviet republics has had a drastic effect in central European Russia and in the north Caucasus.
The future prospects for employment depend heavily on the economic policies followed by the new government. Today as in the past the authorities have two choices. Should they keep aiding unprofitable enterprises, artificially increasing the amount of pseudo-employment? Or should they proceed to a new stage of reforms even if this creates a whole constellation of problems?
If the second option is chosen, the Federal Employment Service predicts that open unemployment will reach at least 5 million by the end of 1994. Until now only a handful of enterprises have been declared bankrupt, but economists predict that use of the bankruptcy legislation will become commonplace in the next six months.
If, as now seems likely, the new government continues providing cheap credits to cash-strapped industries, the rise in the number of jobless will not be so rapid. But the increase is unlikely to be halted; the steady worsening of the employment situation during 1993 can be expected to continue.
Another feature of the labour market in future years will be large numbers of chronically unemployed. This reflects the striking discrepancy between the skills of job seekers and the type of jobs on offer. Ninety per cent of vacancies today are for unskilled manual labour, while around half the unemployed have higher or specialised secondary education.
The peculiarities of the Russian propiska (residence permit) system make it difficult for people who are looking for jobs to move to other cities. Also, Russia suffers from an acute housing shortage, meaning that migrant job seekers often have no chance of finding accommodation.
Until now, many newly jobless people have been able to find employment — often highly unstable — in the new sector of private trade. But new taxes introduced in 1994 are expected to make a great deal of this activity unprofitable.
It is hard even to imagine what the employment services could do if they were faced with a 13-million-strong army of jobless. In 1993 they managed to help only 840,000 Russians.
Meanwhile, the official figure of "1% unemployed" stands as a symbol of the way the Russian authorities prefer to deny the problem rather than to seek ways of counteracting it.
[From KAS-KOR Labour Information, Education & Research Centre via Pegasus.]