The Moscow government spoke up about the unemployment rate being almost zero

There is no longer anyone in Moscow who wants to be unemployed. This is the opinion of the First Deputy Director of the Moscow Department of Labor and Social Protection, Alexandra Alexandrova, RBC reported. “Now there are no people coming and we assign them unemployment status and have to pay benefits,” she said. There are maybe 10 thousand people in the whole city who need to be given this status, but rather as a kind of benefit.”

Alexandrova also said that she jokingly asked Mayor Sergei Sobyanin to close the employment service center because no one needed its services.

13 thousand people are officially recognized as unemployed in Moscow. How to process this data? Boleslav Kalensky, Deputy Director of Recruitment at UNITY, argues:

Boleslav Kalensky, Deputy Director of Personnel Selection at UNITY: “Unemployment is still present but at a record low. If we refer to Rosstat data, when conducting a sample, 7-10 thousand people are surveyed. Statistics are performed based on this data. Statistics show that people are unemployed and, accordingly, registered at the labor exchange. As we know from practice, not everyone immediately goes to the labor exchange, because they try on their own to pass competitions, interviews and find a job in the shortest possible time. It's hard not to find a job. Perhaps the conditions will be a little different, but continuing unemployment in the current situation is quite difficult. Low unemployment is not really a good thing. On the one hand, going back to the statistics, the unemployment rate is stable at 4-5%. In fact, anything below 4% is a labor shortage. And lack of labor means lack of personnel. And staff shortages entail salary increases, because they are trying to outbid employees, motivate them to work in a certain company, or to retain them. Salary increases automatically lead to inflation. Inflation entails an increase in base interest rates for credit conditions. So staffing shortages and record unemployment are not very good.”

According to the International Labor Organization, the unemployment rate in the capital is 0.9%. And the unemployment rate is registered even lower, 0.18%, writes, citing data from the Department of Labor and Social Protection of the Moscow Population. At the same time, there were more than 25 job offers for each candidate.