Rising Hidden Unemployment Hitting Russia’s Industrial Regions Harder than Its More Agrarian Ones, Yakimov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 5 – To put the best face on things, Moscow counts as unemployed only those who register with the authorities as such and who have no jobs at all, ignoring the increasing number of workers who have seen their hours and thus their incomes slashed as the economy has deteriorated, Yaroslav Yakimov says.

            The Siberian economist says that real unemployment, which counts both those laid off and those who have seen their hours cut back significantly, is far higher than the two percent that Moscow likes to claim and is now rising rapidly in many of the federal subjects of Russia (sibmix.com/?doc=20656).

            (For background on this growth and even more figures than Yakimov provides, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/02/russias-hidden-unemployed-now-coming.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/01/hidden-unemployment-in-russia.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/11/hidden-unemployment-in-russia-up-150.html.)

            The Siberian economist notes that the regions “suffering the most from this ‘hidden unemployment’” are not the agrarian and often non-Russian ones as was the case earlier (On that, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/10/real-unemployment-may-now-be-40-percent.html.) but rather the industrialized and predominantly ethnic Russian ones.

            Among the sectors where such hidden unemployment is now most common and growing are manufacturing, construction, and the hospitality industry. In the last, a third of the employees – 33.9 percent – “have been shifted to art-time work,” and in manufacturing, the figure is 27 percent – 1.7 million people – and in construction – 22.7 percent or 271,000.

            According to Yakimov, “Enterprises that boosted production in 2023–2024 thanks to import substitution are now facing a decline in demand. Laying off staff means losing skilled personnel—talent that is virtually impossible to replace later on” while “shifting employees to part-time schedulesoffers a way to preserve this ‘professional core’ until better times return.”

“Given the simultaneous slump affecting the vast majority of industries,” the analyst says, “employees have nowhere else to turn. This is, of course, a troubling trend; strictly speaking, for an individual worker, the distinction between being laid off and being placed on part-time status is tenuous at best.”

And this trend has led to “a rapid surge in demand for side gigs and supplementary work—a trend that has grown by 10–11% nationwide over the past year, and by as much as a third in certain regions,” including Yaroslavl, Mari El and Astrakhan, to name just the leaders in this development.  

As a result, the economist continues, “the very concept of a "primary job" is becoming diluted. We are shifting toward a "portfolio employment" model, wherein an individual's income is derived from two or three distinct sources. This shift is partly a forced measure and partly a paradigm change” as young people choose this option.

 But the change for most is not voluntary. Most reflect “a structural realignment” in the economy with “human resources are being reallocated in favor of the military-industrial complex—at the expense of virtually every other sector. Civilian industries simply cannot compete with the wage levels offered by the defense sector.

The former are thus “losing skilled workers and are being forced to scale back production. Official unemployment figures will likely remain ‘low,’” Yakimov says; “but this will be solely because individuals are formally classified as employed—even if they are working only half-time or scraping by on sporadic odd jobs.”