Unemployment in Russia growing by 2% per week

Registered unemployment is growing in Russia by 2% per week, amid shrinking vacancies and more frequent moves to a four-day working week, Sergey Velmyaykin, First Deputy Minister of Labor and Social Security said at the Council of Federation on February 20.

“We observe about 2% weekly growth of the registered unemployment. I’d like to recall that unemployment accounts for 1.2% of the workforce. As of late January 2015, this indicator totaled 924,000 people. On February 10, it already reached 939,000 and on February 17 – 959,000 people i.e. plus 20,000 people per week,” he said.

He said the Labor Ministry has not registered any serious “outburst” on the labor market yet, but they are concerned over the growing number of companies moving to a four-day working week.

“This is a very common situation. Although these people are not unemployed yet, but we realize that they are potential jobseekers,” Velmyakin said.

Another alarming tendency is the shrinking vacancies in the labor market, he said. “The number of available jobs for late January 2015 totaled 1,310,000 versus 1,244,000 on February 17,” he said. The deputy minister said the ministry in cooperation with the government is developing anti-crisis measures in the field.

According to the Federal State Statistics Service, unemployment in the country accounted for 5.5% of the economically active population in Jan 2015 versus 5.6% in Dec 2014. According to the source, the number of economically active people who were unemployed by ILO standard totaled 4.2 million people. The state employment services registered 0.9 million unemployed people, including 0.7 million being on the dole. In Jan 2015, the number of the economically active population totaled 75.9 million people or 52% of the total population, by preliminary results of an employment survey.