Moscow City Struggling to Find Jobs for 200,000 Residents Losing Them as Foreign Firms Depart

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 18 – Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin says that the departure of some 300 foreign firms from the Russian Federation may cost 200,000 Muscovites their jobs, and he has announced a program to provide employment to some 58,000 of them, a shortfall that threatens to exacerbate the situation in the Russian capital.

            That is because many Muscovites who are losing their jobs are highly skilled and highly paid employees, and their loss of income will mean that they will have less money to spend on goods and services and that as a result many others will lose their jobs as well (sobyanin.ru/prodolzhaem-realizatsiyu-plana-povysheniya-ustoichivosti-stolichnoi-ekonomiki and newdaynews.ru/economy/756744.html).

            Sobyanin suggests that his government has some time to address this problem because there is a period between the moment foreign firms declare they are shutting down and departing and the time when their employees no longer get paid. “For several weeks or even months,” he says, they will continue to be paid by their former employers.

            According to the mayor, the city will provide temporary work for some 39,000 of those laid off and subsidies to companies which will employ some 12,500 others. But that program won’t help nearly three-quarters of those whose jobs have disappeared and will give the quarter it does help lower paying and less prestigious work than they had.

            All of these people are likely to be angry, and both the city and federal government are certain to try to deflect their feelings from the Kremlin which is the source of their problems to the West which has only responded at least this month to the crimes their current ruler is committing.