Paul Goble
Staunton, Nov. 2 – The Kremlin works hard to keep its official unemployment figures low whatever the economic situation in the country, but the Russian government’s labor ministry maintains a second figure which seldom gets much attention but may be a better indicator of the direction that country’s economy is headed.
That is the figure of what Russians refer to as “hidden unemployment,” a category that includes workers who are sent home early, transferred to part-time employment or included on lists of those likely to be laid off in the near future. Between January and October of this year, that figure jumped 150 percent (regionvoice.ru/skrytaya-bezrabotica-rvanula-vverkh-so/).
At the start of 2025, there were 98,000 Russian workers on this list; now, there are 254,000 with much of the increase coming in the last several months, Tsargrad TV reports citing labor ministry figures (ekb.tsargrad.tv/news/jeto-uzhe-ne-zvonochek-v-prostoj-otpravili-250-tysjach-chelovek_1426250).
Over this same period, official unemployment increased only a small amount, something that allowed Russian propagandists to insist that sanctions and other challenges were not hurting that country’s economy. But the hidden unemployment figures suggest the contrary and that in the coming months, the Russian economy is likely to decline still further.
Some firms are already shifting from five to four-day weeks, and more are likely to, although it is unknown at this point whether those who effectively lose fulltime jobs will be counted within the hidden employment listing. If they are, then the increase in that category will be even greater in the next several months than it has been since the start of 2025.
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