Article Marina Naidovich in the magazine “Business Review”
Journal “Business Review” №2 (105) March 2013
Working hands in weight of gold
The trend in recent years of the outflow of labor resources from our country to neighboring countries puts our production enterprises in difficult economic conditions. There is an acute shortage of working specialties in various industries. The annual influx of economists and lawyers against the background of a shortage of tractor operators, seamstresses, masons leads to a distortion in the labor market. Because of the shortage of workers, the offer of employers on wages is several times higher than salaries for some specialists with higher education.
Today, a huge mass of young people graduated from the school does not have the relevant knowledge and skills and, as a rule, seeks to enter the university and get higher education. During their studies at the university, they hang around their parents’ necks, although they could already benefit the family. It turns out that the Soviet CPC gave a start in life, teaching high school students to working specialties. A young man after school could wait with a choice of the future profession and be identified with it not only during the graduating class.
For many boys, higher education is a salvation from military service, because they perceive the prospect of going into the army as “torn out of life.” Therefore, probably, we should think about the fact that the army could become not only a place of civil duty, but also an educational institution. To a year and a half service would pass not only in the constructions, but in obtaining civilian working specialties. The training of soldiers in building specialties will help, on the one hand, acquire certain skills; on the other hand, it will enable the Ministry of Defense to upgrade the material and technical base, and from the third, replace the task of loading the rank-and-file from the pointless trench digging “from fence to lunch”.
Strengthening vocational education against numerous universities (including Russian branches, often with poor quality of education) will redistribute in the near future specialists in the missing industries. To raise the prestige and quality of vocational training is a task for the state, youth organizations, schools and business.
Already, we have a problem of shortage of personnel, and if these rates of population emigration continue to Russia, Ukraine and the EU, in 10 years we will not be able to pay pensions. Of the 9.4 million inhabitants of Belarus, less than 50% of the able-bodied population. Gender equality should be brought into line when retiring. Given the early retirement of security forces, the content of the all-coming “army” of pensioners is becoming very tangible for the modest budget of our country.
In addition, the obligation of enterprises to pay a 34% contribution from the wage fund to the social security fund is a serious burden and encourages the transfer of payments to staff in the category of payments in envelopes. In this situation, it is necessary to introduce a regressive scale for payments to the Federal Tax Service, that is, the higher the payroll at the enterprise, the lower the payment. The shadow incomes of the population have reached colossal proportions and it is probably already time for tax inspectors to compare the incomes and expenses of citizens and their families more actively, rather than using contradictory legislation to punish existing enterprises.