By Irina Glushchenko and Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW - As the Russian economy crumbles, unemployment is making a big comeback. And to an even greater extent than in the west, the first to suffer are women.
According to research by the Union of Russian Women, the typical unemployed Moscow worker is a woman aged between 36 and 45, with tertiary education, often in the engineering or technical field.
The General Director of the Moscow Labour Exchange was recently quoted as saying that of the people who had registered with his organisation, around 90% were women. Almost three quarters of them had higher education.
As enterprises and government ministries lay off workers, those who are considered most dispensable are middle-level administrative and research staff. Traditionally, most of the workers in these categories have been women.
Patriarchal attitudes have increased the readiness of managers to sack women first. The view remains widespread in Russia that women provide only a supplement to family income, and that their jobs can be dispensed with if necessary.
But in fact, one in five Russian women is the sole breadwinner for a family.
The heavy bias toward laying off women workers has been characteristic of the "first wave" of unemployment in Russia. At present, the general levels of joblessness are not high by western standards, and for skilled and semi-skilled trade workers, jobs are still reasonably abundant. According to figures issued by the Department of Labour and Employment of the Moscow city government, more than 72,000 jobs were unfilled in the Russian capital during February - considerably more than the number of registered unemployed.
However, 94% of these jobs were for manual workers. This suggests the difficulties faced by the highly educated women who make up most of today's job-seekers.
Within the next few months, the "second wave" of unemployment will hit. Of the products now being sent and received by Russian industrial enterprises, only a small proportion are actually being paid for. Large numbers of enterprises are technically bankrupt, and the number of shutdowns and mass sackings will soon begin rising steeply.
In its composition by sex and skills, the Russian job market will soon resemble its western counterparts much more closely, as huge numbers of manual workers lose their jobs.
Officials of the Russian government clearly have little idea of the scale that unemployment will assume. In an interview published early in April by the trade union newspaper Trud, the president of the Russian Committee on Employment predicted that eople - about 9% of the workforce - would approach the employment services during 1992.
However, western experience during the Great Depression of the 1930s - which was considerably milder than the current Russian collapse - indicates that a jobless figure of a third of the work force or even higher is not unlikely. An estimate prepared for the Russian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (FNPR) predicts a total of 25 to 30 million unemployed.
The resources the Yeltsin government has allotted to unemployment relief will not even make a dent in a catastrophe of this magnitude. And as FNPR leader Igor Klochkov has pointed out, "We are talking about the very survival of millions upon millions of people.".