Such proposals were voiced at a round table "Migration. Risk Zone", reports IA "Rosbalt". Otherwise, the meeting participants argued, within a few years both the city and the region will fully feel a catastrophic shortage of workers. It is proposed to solve the problem in the short term – and it will still have to be – largely through labor migration.
Despite the fact that the discussion with such an alarming title took place in one of the St. Petersburg restaurants on Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt, its participants were far from complacent. The employees of the St. Petersburg regional foundation "Golden Ten", who organized the meeting of representatives of the executive and legislative authorities of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, law enforcement agencies and national-cultural societies, relied on data from an all-Russian survey conducted by the Foundation in January-February this year. According to which migration issues are moving to one of the first (if not the first) places among the problems that especially concern Russians.
Without waiting for Moscow's decision...
Project head Natalya Dubrovskaya formulated the meeting's maximum task as follows: it is necessary to develop such legislative changes that would reconcile all parties. By the way, almost all meeting participants spoke about the imperfection of existing Russian legislation in the field of regulating migration processes.
According to Natalya Evdokimova, a deputy of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, the problem can be solved by introducing a declarative principle for migration quotas, and issues of regulating migration processes should be considered at the level of a constituent entity of the Federation, without waiting for Moscow to "get around to them". Since there is a state program for regulating migration until 2005, but no one seems to have heard about the preparation of a new one. And federal laws regulating relations in this sphere work poorly and have not yet formed a single coherent system.
Among the main problems faced by labor migrants – those who came to Russia from other CIS states – are their unclear status on the territory of the Russian Federation, unsettled relations with the employer and, accordingly, their complete lack of rights in the event of labor disputes. And indeed – life and work in horrific conditions.
However, the proposal to introduce a norm according to which illegal migrants could not be paid less than the subsistence minimum for work did not receive much support. The meeting participants agreed that no one would work for less than two thousand rubles anyway, and therefore the first priority should be to bring real wages out of the shadows. Which, of course, employers are not interested in.
Will St. Petersburg be empty?
During the discussion, the founder of the northern capital, Peter the Great, was also mentioned. Because it was he who personally invited labor migrants from Europe to the new city of St. Petersburg. According to the forecast made by Vladimir Blank, chairman of the Committee for Economic Development, Industrial Policy and Trade of the St. Petersburg administration, they will most likely have to invite again: by 2006 the city will face an acute shortage of personnel.
All will be needed – from bank managers and company executives to highly qualified workers and just workers. Moreover, the shortage of personnel is already felt today: with 20,000 officially registered unemployed people in the city, employers cannot find workers for 70,000 available vacancies.
According to Vladimir Blank, the city government may soon begin considering a program to attract qualified workers to St. Petersburg. It is planned to attract labor migrants, in particular, through a developing mortgage lending program for housing, the construction of which is expected to be carried out under guarantees from large industrial enterprises that need qualified personnel.
The city government, according to Blank, is also concerned about issues of professional training. In the near future – in the same 2006-2007 years, when those born in 1991-1992 enter working age – due to the city's demographic problems, the crisis will hit the vocational education system. There will simply be no one to study in vocational schools. To avoid losing this system entirely, the problem could be solved by attracting young people from other Russian regions and CIS countries who want to learn the secrets of working skills to St. Petersburg. But this requires maximum legalization and simplification of registration for this category of citizens, believes Vladimir Blank.
As for qualified personnel, the city intends to ask the federal authorities for a quota to invite 5,000-10,000 people annually.
By the way, Vladimir Blank himself also considers himself a labor migrant: he was invited to St. Petersburg to work in a bank a couple of years ago.
In the Leningrad Region, they are ready for any migration
He was supported by his city colleague and Vice-Governor of the Leningrad Region Grigory Dvas. According to him, the problem of providing personnel in the Leningrad Region is already today problem No. 1. The reason is a one-and-a-half-fold increase in industrial production compared to 1990 against the backdrop of a worsening demographic situation. As a result, a number of investment projects in the region are being held back only because they cannot be provided with workers, Dvas said.
For example, an Italian company producing water heating devices spent six months looking for 23 people in Vsevolozhsk to work at its enterprise. "Specific plans of specific enterprises for the implementation of specific projects run into the problem of personnel," complains Dvas. In addition, the vice-governor reported, by 2015 the population of the Leningrad Region will decrease – due to natural decline – by 145,000 people.
He also spoke about the growth in the number of people belonging to asocial strata, mentioning the problems of drug addiction, alcoholism, and the increase in the number of disabled people. “We agree to any migration,” says Grigory Dvas, without dividing it into the banking sector, construction, or, for example, markets. “Someone has to work at the markets too!”
According to the vice-governor, today at enterprises of the Leningrad region the ratio of legal migrants to “illegals” is approximately one to ten. At the same time, Dvas sees the main problem not in migration itself – it would simply be necessary to legalize it as much as possible – but in bringing migrants’ incomes out of the shadows.
Much was said at the meeting about the weak – to put it mildly – interest of employers in legalizing labor migrants. In accordance with the law, today an employer of a legal foreign worker must pay the state four thousand rubles, obtain a work permit for the worker or wait until he obtains it himself, which may take several months. And then pay him a salary – officially – not lower than the subsistence minimum. And provide social protection guarantees...
Dvas illustrated the problem of legalization – and the “aspiration” of employers in the Leningrad region to it – with figures: in the Leningrad region today there are about 12 thousand enterprises where the official salary of employees is less than 1,000 rubles. True, he noted, the situation is not everywhere unambiguous: for example, in the forestry industry, entrepreneurs themselves try to legalize their workers – otherwise they simply will not obtain licenses for logging.
By the way
According to law enforcement agencies, there are currently about 150 thousand illegal migrants in the territory of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region. Unresolved migration issues at the legislative level, among other things, led to the fact that in the past year foreign citizens committed three times more crimes in the city and region than were committed against foreigners. The vast majority of migrant criminals came to Russia from CIS countries.
As for the economic sectors attracting unregistered labor migrants, the most violations related to the use of illegal labor, according to the head of the Migration Affairs Department of the Main Internal Affairs Directorate of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, Alexander Babikov, are detected in construction and trade.