Only "Old Men" Are Going Into Battle*: The country's defense factories cannot recruit workers

Yekaterina Maximova

Executive Director of JSC "NPK "Uralvagonzavod" (hereinafter - UVZ)

Vladimir Roshchupkin told Novye Izvestia that UVZ (which is the only tank manufacturer in the country) cannot even find unskilled workers.

"We lack specialized personnel. First of all, these are machine operators. But there are already not enough personnel without a specialty, that is, people whom we could train. We can't even recruit women without a specialty. At the moment we need 50 workers who are ready to be trained. Payment is piecework. There are no takers. But, basically, there are not enough men, of course", - said the top manager of UVZ.

The scale of the personnel shortage in the country's largest corporation is indicated by the fact that now the UVZ employs convicts for forced labor. Earlier, the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Sverdlovsk region announced that 250 convicted citizens who will work in working specialties will be sent to the UVZ.

Leonid Shalimov, the developer of the Soyuz-2 launch vehicle control system, Candidate of Technical Sciences, Academic adviser of the RA Rocket and Artillery Sciences, adds that the defense industry lacks machine operators, assembly fitters, turners and milling workers the most. Exactly the set of personnel that the state has not been engaged in training for years, if not decades.

"There is a very large deficit in these specialties. It has always been there, but now the problem has become extremely, catastrophically aggravated. The same machine operators were always in the pen. At one time, we had to organize almost our own courses at the enterprise in order to grow specialists for ourselves. You can teach how to perform primitive operations in three months. And it will take two years to train a normal machine operator. This is the minimum", - Shalimov says.

The TOP of the most in-demand specialists, if we evaluate the vacancies of defense plants, include an electronics engineer, a machine operator with PU, a turner, a boring turner, a milling cutter, a mechanic for mechanical assembly, a locksmith for instrumentation and automation, an electrician for electrical equipment maintenance.

Shalimov adds that before the start of its lack of personnel, although it was fixed, but it was not so critical. "Previously, it was possible not to take something, but to choose those orders for which there are clear competencies. And today it is impossible. You will no longer choose what competencies you have. Because today - we need this. And in order to organize this, we need machine operators, turners, welders", - adds Leonid Shalimov.

Novye Izvestia studied the statistics of Spark and job search sites. We state that the growth of vacancies at defense plants has doubled, at some it has increased significantly. Not all factories specify the number of employees they need to hire (they only indicate vacancies), but the military-industrial complex enterprises lack at least 40-50 thousand qualified specialists.

And as Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Yuri Borisov noted earlier, in the future, the shortage of personnel at the enterprises of the military-industrial complex may increase to 400 thousand people, including about 120 thousand personnel with higher education. The official said this last summer during a visit to the Tula region, where such large representatives of the defense industry as Tulamashzavod, Mashzavod Stamp, NPO Strela PJSC, Tula Plant PJSC, NPO Ganichev ALLOY JSC, JSCTulatochmash", JSC "KBP", etc.

Leonid Shalimov adds that defense workers now have no other choice but to poach employees - those who are skilled in the production of civilian products. "There is now one advantage for defense enterprises - employees do not fall under partial mobilization. To some extent, this helps to attract personnel. Not everyone leaves for Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan ... They also advise around - take pensioners. So all 60-year-olds have been returned to the machine for a long time," adds Shalimov.

But there are also endangered regions where there is simply no one to hunt. For example, the leading manufacturer of armored personnel carriers - Kurgan Machine-Building Plant - has sent vacancies to hundreds of employment centers across the country. In the Kurgan region, defense workers lure workers not only with promises to pay for housing, but also guarantee the employment of family members.

"The situation is very serious. Today, not to fulfill the state defense order - up to criminal liability. And to perform is to perform a feat. The main feat is to find people. We are raising salaries, but everything that was possible from the labor market has already been raked out. This did not solve the personnel problem," one of the experts who are part of the top management of a large defense enterprise in the Tula region commented on the condition of anonymity. As reported by NI, only in September 2022, when President Putin announced partial mobilization and gave direct instructions to immediately increase the production of weapons and ammunition, the number of vacancies in the defense industry, according to Salary.

ru, increased by 7%. The state budget for 2023 provides for 4.9 trillion rubles for the national defense industry (plus 1.2 trillion compared to 2022).

But, as previously noted by Joseph Diskin, Doctor of Economics, Professor at the Higher School of Economics, defense spending is a military secret. "These are closed budget items, the disclosure of which is a criminal offense". Trillions of rubles have been allocated directly to the defense industry in the federal budget, and we are talking about financing for updating the production base, expanding cooperation and much more. All these are different programs, including those on closed budget items.

* Only "Old Men" Are Going Into Battle (Russian: В бой идут одни «старики», romanized: V boy idut odni "stariki"; one of the meanings of the Russian idiom 'old man' is 'most experienced person') is an iconic 1973 Soviet war drama black-and-white film produced in the USSR about World War II fighter pilots, written and directed by Leonid Bykov, who also played the lead role as the squadron commander.