Translated material
Gastroybat
Moscow's new migration program is focused on the needs of the construction sector
Having recently announced their readiness to continue large-scale housing construction, the Moscow authorities decided to provide the city's construction companies with additional labor. In any case, the resolution adopted yesterday by the Moscow government “On the progress of the implementation of the Moscow city target migration program for 2008-2010,” providing for “organized recruitment” of personnel in construction specialties , clearly pleased the head of the capital’s construction complex, Vladimir Resin. And, apparently, it was no coincidence that it was the city’s chief builder who chaired yesterday’s meeting at Tverskaya, 13, while Mayor Yuri Luzhkov was dealing with transport issues in Sochi.According to Mr. Resin, Moscow builders were primarily affected by the liquidation of the secondary specialized education system in the country, and now mass construction in the regions is taking Russian specialists away from the capital. “Tambov has already recalled its masons, they prefer to work at home for the same money, in addition, we need finishers, monolithic workers and other specialists,” Mr. Resin worried and asked his colleagues not to be distracted by such general issues as national and migration city politics in general.
The fact is that the new city system for selecting foreign personnel, according to the head of the Committee for Interregional Relations and National Policy of Moscow, Alexei Alexandrov, will be used specifically for construction vacancies. “There are already agreements with Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan for 1 thousand vacancies in each country,” said Mr. Alexandrov, who is expecting the first foreign construction workers in June. At the same time, the capital’s personnel officers expect to make their task as easy as possible and shift most of the work on training specialists at the city’s request to donor countries. In particular, guest workers will undergo a medical examination in their homeland. In addition, as Mr. Alexandrov told Vremya Novostei, he is confident that most employers will not only guarantee the provision of decent wages and a social package to guest workers who come on the city’s order, but will also build so-called “temporary administrative and residential camps.” " “While the microdistrict is being built, it will be easy to place temporary houses for migrants there,” he explained.
The employment of newcomers, in turn, will be handled by a new city structure - the Moscow Single Migration Window (MEMO), which, according to the developers, will, by combining the city department of the Federal Migration Service and the Employment Service, distribute migrants, issue documents for them to stay in Russia and work permits . And to make it “comfortable” for the guest worker to communicate with the Moscow police, migrants will be offered to acquire an electronic “guest card” on a voluntary basis.
In the future, according to the idea of the authors of the experimental project, a similar system of providing Moscow with foreign personnel should be extended to enterprises in other industries of the city. Moscow City Duma deputy Ivan Novitsky and the head of the city’s housing and communal services complex, Pyotr Biryukov, for example, were worried about the public utilities sector. “You can’t lay off all the janitors,” Mr. Biryukov noted, in particular, “and Muscovites and Russians don’t do this low-skilled work.” And if everyone believed Mr. Alexandrov’s promises that the next request to Armenia would fill the capital’s vacant vacancies for cleaning local areas, then both officials and deputies loyal to the authorities doubted the ability of the new migration registration system to control the almost two million army of visitors. “These proposals concern the narrow construction industry, and they are acceptable, since the trade unions of Russian builders themselves tried to conclude agreements with the former Soviet republics back in 1994, but were unable to,” explained Sergei Chinov, deputy chairman of the Moscow Federation of Trade Unions. “However, the small business sector illegally attracts many foreign workers, and it is difficult to calculate its “capacity”.” In general, according to official data from the Federal Migration Service for the city of Moscow, 20-24 thousand enterprises in the city use the services of guest workers from countries with a visa-free regime.
It is also noteworthy that some city hall officials criticized Alexey Alexandrov for emphasizing “the protection of foreign citizens” to the detriment of “the interests of the titular nation.” The Russian Ambassador to Tajikistan, Ramazan Abdulatipov, who was invited to the discussion, accused the Moscow authorities of insufficient attention to national politics and the absence of clear programs for the adaptation of local and visiting populations to each other, which, according to him, leads to the fact that “migrants become marginal.”
In turn, Mr. Alexandrov forwarded this criticism to his federal colleagues, whose liberal policies towards foreign workers led to a “paradoxical imbalance” in the capital’s labor market. He recalled that in 2007, out of more than 1.7 million foreigners who registered their stay in the capital region, 640 thousand received work permits, and only about 300 thousand officially got jobs. “More than half were left out of official labor relations , - Alexey Alexandrov got excited. “In addition, this contingent for the most part does not have not only qualifications, but also basic language training.” Rostrud and the Ministry of Health and Social Development, according to him, are blocking all attempts by regional authorities to take control of the processes of labor migration.
However, apparently, the capital’s officials have already found allies among federal legislators. At least, as Ildar Gabdrakhmanov, First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Labor and Social Policy admitted yesterday, “we have created a system where foreign citizens are here legally, but we have not solved the main problem of legalizing labor relations.” In addition, according to him, the quota system for migrant workers created by the Ministry of Health and Social Development is “extremely clumsy” and is not beneficial for a responsible employer, who, by providing information about his company along with an application for foreign workers, has no guarantee that the labor resources will go to him.