Russia’s unemployment drops to all-time low – official

The number of jobless people has fallen by 50,000 since the start of the year

The unemployment level in Russia plunged to a new all-time low of 3.2% in May, Deputy Prime Minister for Social Policy Tatyana Golikova said on Friday.

According to the official, the number of jobless people recorded last month was 516,000, which is a 48,000 decline from the beginning of the year.

The figures coincide with the data provided by Russia’s statistics service, Rosstat, earlier this week. Unemployment in the country has now been below 4% for over a year, since May 2022.

Experts link the drop in unemployment to the shortage of qualified workers in the country. Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) last month, Golikova said most of those who are unemployed in Russia have educations that do not meet the current needs of the economy. The sectors with the most pressing need for qualified workers are manufacturing, industry and construction.

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According to Golikova, Russia needs about 1 million skilled workers to ensure its “technological sovereignty” over the next five years.

“No technological sovereignty is possible in the absence of human resources. And our global task today is to get these labor resources by all means available to us,” Golikova said.

According to Labor and Social Protection Minister Anton Kotyakov, the labor sector has been benefiting from the free retraining programs under the national project ‘Demography.’

Kotyakov said on Friday that more than 80,000 people across the country have begun training in professions that are in demand in the local labor markets, while over 22,000 have already completed such retraining.

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