Amid pandemic, Ukraine’s unemployed grow by 36,000 people in one week

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many people out of their jobs around the world. Unsurprisingly, it has also led to a sharp spike in unemployment in Ukraine.

During the last full working week, April 6–10, an average of 7,000 citizens were registered as unemployed each day, according to the State Employment Service. Within one week, 36,200 new people were officially without work.

As of April 13, 388,000 Ukrainians are now without a job, which is 22% higher than during the same period in 2019. The most critical situation has been registered in five Ukrainian oblasts – Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava and Zaporizhia.

According to the Cabinet of Ministers, the working age population of Ukraine was 25.3 million people as of January 2020. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, less than half of them were officially employed.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s state agency can offer only 55,000 vacancies, one-third less than last year, according to Olena Kozyreva, the head of the labor market analysis department at the State Employment Service.

Kozyreva, however, says it is still too early to say that this tendency is “mass unemployment caused by the coronavirus.”

While there’s a shortage of many positions in general, Kozyreva sees that demand for some professions has grown: medical workers, delivery service employees and sales specialists for grocery stores — all of which are in industries not forbidden under the quarantine measures imposed across Ukraine.

“Employers started to look for more nurses, paramedics, social workers and laboratory assistants,” Kozyreva told TV channel Ukraine 24, Interfax-Ukraine reports. “The demand for drivers, postal workers, police officers and security guards has also increased.”

At the same time, officially registered unemployed citizens are only the tip of the iceberg in the country of over 37 million people, according to Lydia Tkachenko, a leading researcher at the Institute of Demography and Social Studies. She believes that nearly 2 million people in Ukraine are temporarily without any financial support due to unpaid leave from work. As a result, many workers are waiting for the quarantine to end so they can return to their workplaces. They do not report their status to the state employment centers, and the state does not count them for any statistics.

The unemployment figures “might be even higher because of the high level of unofficial employment (in Ukraine),” Tkachenko said.

“When people lose their income abruptly and this lasts for two months without additional support, it can become a major social disaster,” she said.

In addition, the Ukrainian labor market will be affected by workers who have returned from abroad. In March alone, more than 270,000 seasonal workers returned to the country.

“Those who left their work in Europe will continue to look for vacancies (in Ukraine) where they can earn money,” said Sergiy Marchenko, former development director at Work.ua, Ukraine’s largest employment website.

With an increased demand for jobs, “this will make the Ukrainian labor market even more pro-employer,” Marchenko said. “Employers will dictate their conditions because they will have more options to choose from.”

In order to prevent the Ukrainian economy from experiencing vast unemployment, the Cabinet of Ministers plans to create 500,000 jobs in May, according to Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmygal.

“We forecast a production decline, a decrease of gross domestic product and, of course, we understand that something needs to be done about all this,” Shmygal stated on the Ukraina television channel’s talk show “Svoboda Slova with Savik Shuster” on April 10.

The prime minister didn’t specify how exactly the state would provide 500,000 new jobs, but said a detailed strategy would come out soon.