Sixty-five percent of all major companies working in Russia have raised their employees' salaries by an average of 10 percent since the peak of the recession, according to a survey released Thursday.
Only 6 percent of employers slashed salaries over the period, from April 2009 to April 2010, according to the survey conducted by human resources consultancy Kelly Services. By the end of the year, a full 80 percent of firms will have raised wages since the worst part of the crisis.
"This kind of increase in salaries suggests a dynamic of recovery but is only a good number compared with what we had during the crisis. In the boom years of 2006 and 2007, Russia's average salary increase was 25 percent to 27 percent," said Igor Polyakov, an expert at the Center of Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting.
Most firms are now focusing on keeping the existing staff happy through salary increases and plan to encourage those who have weathered the crisis by enlarging bonuses, reinforcing benefits and investing in education and training of their workers, the study says.
Despite the salary change dynamics, however, job losses have continued through 2010, with 37 percent of companies saying they cut staff (by 14 percent on average) between April 2009 and April 2010, while only 30 percent said they increased their number of jobs.
When hiring picks up toward the end of the year, many of the new jobs may be in different sectors from where the original layoffs occurred, Polyakov said.
President Dmitry Medvedev's modernization program may redirect the demand for specialists toward the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, as well as space research, he said.
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