Half a million Russian may lose jobs

MOSCOW - The total number of unemployed people in Russia may rise to 6.7 million as almost half a million people are in danger of losing their jobs, authorities said Wednesday.

Over 900,000 people have been dismissed since monitoring started Oct 1, 2008, and that 480,000 more could lose their jobs in the immediate future, Alexander Zhukov, a deputy premier, said at a news conference here.

According to Russia’s statistics service Rosstat, some 6.2 million Russians are currently unemployed, with the unemployment rate exceeding 8 percent, he said.

Official figures are much lower as many Russian do not collect unemployment benefits, which are generally very low.

Zhukov said the government intended to develop programmes to maintain Soviet-era single-industry towns, which have been hit hard by the global economic crisis as demand for their products has fallen.

“This year, the situation will be difficult, and the enterprises… are unlikely to resolve their problems themselves,” he said.

However, the deputy premier said the Russian authorities had managed to avert a dramatic increase in unemployment.

“The implementation of regional programmes allowed us not only to avoid large-scale cuts, but also to decrease the number of citizens registered as unemployed,” he said, adding that the government intended to allocate a total of 36.3 billion rubles (more than $1.2 billion) to stabilise the labor market in 2010.

–RIA Novosti