Like other countries, Russia suffers from a shortage of labor, which truck maker KAMAZ is enthusiastically looking for a solution. The CEO of the company, Sergei Kogozhin, presented the federal prison program: prisoners will work in factories.
For now, only feasibility is being checked, áToday, the concept is not very useful from a marketing point of view, even if the prison service states that the system is nothing like a Soviet-era gulag. Daimler, which owns 15 percent of the company, can still have an opinion because of the negative undertones, but it’s hard to argue with the 4,000 shortage. Lots of people are looking for a file Naberezhnye plants in Chelny, where now 24,000 people work. KAMAZ previously contracted workers from neighboring Uzbekistan, but many have left the country due to the coronavirus, and the manufacturer will need more workers in the future.
Daimler is not happy
According to Kogogin, the labor shortage was mainly caused by the coronavirus, as workers from neighboring countries returned to their homeland. However, it is likely that the main problem is not the epidemic, but the emergence of a demographic crisis in Russia. The population fell by a million in the past year and it looks like this trend will grow in the coming years. As a result, the Russian prison and KAMAZ came to the conclusion that prisoners should be employed in order to fulfill the orders of the truck manufacturer.
Daimler Truck AG, the second largest shareholder in Kamaz (15 percent), is not happy with the idea. That’s because Martin Dohm, chairman of the board of directors of Daimler’s commercial vehicle business, recently expressed concern that if Kamaz hired too many prisoners, the company wouldn’t guarantee proper quality production, and that could backfire later during warranty repairs.
This does not seem to be an unfounded concern, adults certainly remember that in Hungary, large socialist companies, including car manufacturers, such as Icarus, frequently used prisoners. Here, too, the lack of labor led to this, because the plan had to be implemented, it cost it. But in most cases, workers who were serving their sentences were more likely to delay rather than facilitate the completion of plans.
Christoph Kangel
via Reuters
