Soviet Jobless Rate Is 27% in Some Areas, Pravda Says

Cutting bloated factory payrolls to comply with economic reform has put thousands of people out of work and the jobless rate is 27% in some areas, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda said Tuesday.

It said the time had come for unemployment insurance and retraining programs like those in the West.

The Kremlin has claimed for generations that the Soviet Union is a worker’s paradise and unemployment exists only in capitalist countries, which deliberately keep many people out of work so factory owners can dictate low wages.

Only last summer did Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov admit to serious unemployment in the Soviet Union, citing it as a cause of ethnic violence.

Pravda did not estimate total unemployment, but said a newly formed “Assn. of the Unemployed” claimed that 23 million people, 17% of all Soviet workers, did not have jobs.

Chiding a factory manager for the comment, “I wish I had a couple of jobless outside my gates,” Pravda said: “He meant, obviously, that at his enterprise, productivity would jump, quality of production would increase and discipline would strengthen.”

The paper called that a dubious conclusion because those who were working would have to support those who were not.

It quoted one reader as saying he did not want unemployment in the Soviet Union, and another who said: “Our indignation is in the fact that thousands of drunks, thieves and simple beggars who don’t want to work will receive unemployment benefits.”

Pravda said unemployment was at 27.6% in Azerbaijan, 25.7% in Tadzhikistan, 22.8% in Uzbekistan, 18.8% in Turkmenia, 18% in Armenia and 16.3% in Kirgizia. All are non-Russian republics along the southern Soviet border and all but Kirgizia have reported riots in the past six months.

Although those figures represent about 4.3 million people, Pravda said: “The real reserve of able-bodied workers who could be involved in industry in these regions amounts to about 3 million.”

That would put the overall jobless rate for those republics at roughly 15%.

Plenty of jobs are available, Pravda contended, but they either carry no prestige or are too far from population centers.

Meanwhile, the Soviet legislature approved a 1990 budget Tuesday that cuts the deficit in half, to the equivalent of about $100 billion, by reducing military spending and capital outlays. Members approved the budget 357-6 after a tie vote of 181-181 that in effect rejected a proposal for 10% reductions in the budgets of the government news agencies Tass and Novosti, and state radio and television.

Pravda said 3 million people had lost their jobs to restructuring and predicted that number would quintuple by the year 2005.

It acknowledged that the Communist tradition of job security “has a lowering effect on productivity” and added that “to simply find a place for everyone is both expensive and immoral.”