Charter trains will be launched to bring foreign labor into Russia. This was announced on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) by the Deputy Head of the Ministry of Construction Nikita Stasishin.
According to him, next week the Ministry of Construction will discuss with Uzbekistan a new procedure for the import of migrants to work on construction sites. “We are planning to organize the selection and vaccination of foreign workers from Uzbekistan in a pilot mode so that they can be transported to Russia by train safely and centrally through the territory of Kazakhstan,” he said. Stasishin stressed that the pilot import of migrants is planned to be completed by the end of the year. Earlier, Russian Railways announced its readiness to provide such transportation. The train can carry about a thousand foreigners at a time.
Now even the growth of wages does not allow to make up for the deficit of builders so far. The demand for qualified labor from construction companies is now very large, Stasishin noted.
The professions of a driver, a courier, a waiter compete with the construction professions, Lilia Ovcharova, Vice-Rector of the Higher School of Economics, noted in her speech at the EEF. Builders lose to these areas primarily in terms of working conditions. In other countries, the working conditions of builders have already been significantly improved, significant changes are also noticeable at Russian construction sites, so the situation may soon improve, Ovcharova said.
Russia is now the world leader in attracting migrants, Ovcharova noted. At the same time, we are accustomed to the fact that migrants come to us who know Russian, with a fairly good education. However, after the pandemic, the composition of those who go to work in Russia has changed quite dramatically: more and more migrants who no longer speak Russian.
“Now Kazakhstan is closed, because of this, the entire mass of migrants from Central Asia can only get to us by air,” says Vadim Kozhenov, head of the Russian Federation of Migrants. - And these are two dozen flights a week, ticket prices start at 40 thousand rubles, although before the pandemic they were sold for 9 thousand rubles. Nevertheless, people come, all the planes are full. "
According to him, the idea of charter trains is not very successful; a much larger inflow will be given simply by opening the borders. Moreover, as with Kazakhstan, which will allow workers to arrive from Uzbekistan (in the past, they constituted the bulk of the foreign labor force), Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Then there will only be a problem with Turkmenistan, which does not yet allow its citizens to leave the country, Kozhenov added, but the flow from there has never been great.
“A huge problem with Ukraine and Moldova, labor migrants from these countries cannot legally get to Russia now, in principle,” Kozhenov said. In his opinion, a charter train for labor migrants could be useful for Belarus.
According to the Federation of Migrants of Russia, there are now about 10 million workers from other countries in the country, their number is about the same as it was before the pandemic.