Paul Goble
Staunton, April 21 – That some Russian federal subjects are better off than others is a commonplace, but the ways in which this difference affects the wages of people in specific sectors and how those differences in pay rates generate shortages in those sectors often goes unrecognized.
That makes an article by Nikitia Svetlov, a Nakanune journalist, so important. He not only documents the differences in pay for doctors region by region but also points to the ways in which these differences are contributing to a shortage of medical personnel across the country as a whole (nakanune.ru/articles/124599/).
The most poorly paid doctors are found in the North Caucasus and in poorer and predominantly ethnic Russian regions outside of the major cities in the central part of the country, he shows, while the best paid are found in oil and gas producing regions and in the metropolises like Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Svetlov cites the conclusion of Andrey Konoval, co-chair of the Interregional Healthcare Workers Union that “the current remuneration system in healthcare is effectively decentralized, Following the abandonment of the unified wage scale, the regions gained broad autonomy to set rates, and federal regulation has been reduced to minimal guarantees.”
As a result, Konoval says, “each region forms its own wage arrangements based on its financial capabilities,” something that leads to radical differences sin pay but also to a shortage of personnel because jobs in the high-paying cities are hard to get while no one wants to work for the much lower pay in poorer areas.
For more than a decade, Russian officials from Putin on down have called for setting a single countrywide standard or at least indexing pay on the basis of the incomes of individual regions; but despite much talk, Svetlov say, there has been no progress – and the result has been a growing shortage of doctors in Russia as a whole.
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