Translated material
Ministers without a market
The government liked how Russia gets rid of migrants in markets
The government as a whole is pleased with the way it is establishing order in the areas of labor migration and retail trade in markets. This conclusion can be drawn based on the results of the cabinet meeting held last Friday. (The meeting was held a day later than the traditional Thursday in connection with the visit of Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov to Uzbekistan.) “We can say that we went through the initial stage well and in a fairly organized manner,” said Mr. Fradkov, assessing the first results of the implementation of government regulations in the field labor migration and the formation of a “new order” in Russian retail markets.Let us recall that the president set the government the task of streamlining the situation in these areas back in October last year. According to the head of state, migrants, given the labor shortage in Russia, should become a more effective tool for the country’s socio-economic development. And to do this, it is necessary to know as accurately as possible what areas need migrants, what specialties are most in demand. At the same time, labor migration should not become the cause of distortions in the labor market, which today is often expressed in understated wages and the quality of labor in a number of areas.
Fulfilling the “order” of Vladimir Putin, the Cabinet of Ministers, according to Mr. Fradkov, “immediately took practical measures , the basis of work was formed - legislative, regulatory and organizational.” Let us recall that last summer the laws “On Migration Registration of Foreign Citizens and Stateless Persons” and “On Amendments to the Federal Law “On the Legal Status of Foreign Citizens” were adopted, and in the fall a number of government decrees appeared. One of them for the first time determined a quota for issuing 6 million work permits to foreigners arriving from countries with which a visa-free regime has been established (primarily from the CIS countries, except Georgia and Turkmenistan). The other one established rules for working in retail trade for them. This category of migrants is prohibited from selling alcohol and medicines. Other goods can only be sold in markets, in tents, that is, outside stores. Moreover, such employees should be no more than 40% of the total number of employees of a given enterprise. The remaining retail spaces are given to Russians, including farmers. However, from April 1, 2007, only holders of Russian passports should trade in the markets (not a word was said at the government meeting about the postponement of this deadline, which was previously allowed by the Minister of Economic Development German Gref).
On April 11, a law comes into force that provides for the involvement of specialized management companies in managing markets, as well as increasing requirements for sanitary standards of market trade. Let us add that, according to the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, at the beginning of last year, about 6 thousand markets were registered in Russia, in which more than 1 million people traded. 15% of all food products and 23% of all non-food products were sold in markets. At the same time, from 20 to 60% of Russians go to markets, depending on the region.
Already when all these documents were adopted, fears arose that the proposed measures would devastate the markets. There will be no one to work, since the farmer will simply have no time to sell his harvest. There will be fewer goods, and prices will rise accordingly, which will fuel inflation. However, according to the head of the Ministry of Social Health Development, Mikhail Zurabov, who gave the main report on Friday, the fears turned out to be in vain. Monitoring, carried out every week on Wednesdays in 59 markets in 16 federal subjects, showed that “there was no significant reduction in jobs.” “The situation with commodity items is also stable. The dynamics of prices in retail trade in the first two months of the year turned out to be lower than inflation,” the minister reported.
If, judging by Mr. Zurabov’s words, the situation in the markets has not worsened, then in the area of control over labor migration, according to the minister, it has even improved. If in 2006 1 million 100 thousand foreigners from “visa-free” countries registered for migration, then in the first two months of this year already 713 thousand, 177 thousand people received work permits. “This is a sign that the situation in this area is normalizing,” says Mikhail Zurabov, admitting, however, that the volume of illegal migration is still very large.
According to the Federal Migration Service, due to changes in migration legislation in many regions, the number of foreigners applying for work permits has sharply increased. For example, in the Voronezh region there was a 30-fold increase, in the Bryansk region - 12.5 times, in the Saratov region - 9 times, in the Ulyanovsk region - 4 times. On average, about 1,300 labor migrants apply to the territorial bodies of the Federal Migration Service of Russia per working day. It is clear that the workload on service employees has increased. This gave rise to the question of increasing the staff of the Federal Migration Service. At a meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers, a representative of the service requested an additional 4.5 thousand staff units.
Oddly enough, there were no questions to Mikhail Zurabov. And there were no sharp speeches. Only German Gref reported that not everything in the markets is as good as it might seem: 30% of the places assigned to private producers and 60% given to farms are not used. At the same time, legal entities occupy 90% of the places allocated for them. “We wanted to create competition between traders and manufacturers, but it has not yet developed,” admitted German Gref. The remark of the head of the Ministry of Economic Development did not affect the general benign tone of the discussion.