Ayrat Farrakhov on hourly wage: “This will allow employers to make redundancies”

The offer: 150 rubles instead of 89 rubles

Deputies of the LDPR faction Yaroslav Nilov, Igor Lebedev, Aleksey Didenko, Andrey Svintsov and Senator Sergey Leonov have prepared a draft bill, according to which for those who work under fixed-term contracts and part-time, the minimum hourly wage should be set at 150 rubles per hour. Now it is determined taking into account the minimum wage: in the next three months, the payment is in the range of 89,85 to 65,92 rubles per hour. The authors of the amendments claim that this is too low hourly pay and employers “profit from Russians”.

According to the authors of the bill, employers save on deductions to the Social Insurance Fund, Pension Fund, Federal Compulsory Medical Insurance Fund, and personal income tax — and all this at the expense of low-paid employees. The document proposes to index the minimum hourly rate once a year and adopt the new norm from January 1, 2021.

Ayrat Farrakhov: “I do not support this draft bill”

Ayrat Farrakhov, a State Duma Deputy from Tatarstan, told Realnoe Vremya about why he does not support the bill proposed by his colleagues and revealed what dangers lurk in it:

“I support the very idea of gradual introduction of hourly pay. And in almost all developed countries, it exists, and they gradually moved to it in this version. But this does not mean that I support this draft bill directly. In other words, while I support the idea of developing an hourly wage and switching to it, I do not support this bill for the following reasons.

First, according to the draft bill, the amount of hourly pay is doubled. And we must understand that this is an additional burden on the employer. If in most regions of the Russian Federation the employer is state-funded, then we must pay additional wages, and these revenues must be provided for, including in the budget.

Second, the very rationale for the draft bill, which my colleagues have introduced, is “to increase the incomes of citizens in the face of the pandemic”. The bill requires the coming into force in 2021, I hope, by the time the pandemic will be be gone and goals will be different. But now we see that many people are out of work, on unpaid leave, with a high risk of dismissal. The tension on the labour market is growing. But, in my opinion, in this format, the draft bill will not achieve the stated goal. The adoption of the draft bill will introduce a serious imbalance in the existing labour relations and will allow employers to abuse them, give them the right to make redundancies, including in budget institutions, with the motivation to improve efficiency. And we will only make the situation worse. If tomorrow the employer gets the right to transfer employees to hourly pay — how many of them will be dismissed? How many people will get an offer to switch to reduced pay?

And third, today's fixed-term employment contract, no matter how we discuss it, carries very large guarantees for the person who works under it. The employment contract protects the rights of a citizen, you can't just dismiss him or her or reduce the income. In my opinion, the adoption of the draft bill only in this format will do more harm to people than the achievements stated in its text.

Let me reiterate: I'm for discussing the issue and setting the goal to establish an hourly rate, we will come to this in the end. We have developed special tax regimes — self-employment and others — for a reason. But at the same time, it is necessary to develop citizens' labour rights and guarantees of these rights in parallel, and this issue should be resolved in the complex!”