Metallist has already announced that forty-nine people are to be made redundant; in fact, only 225 people had still been employed by March 31, 2009. The company says the personnel cuts have to do with restructuring and the hard times the business is going through. Metallist happens to depend directly on the orders placed by Severouralsk bauxite mine (SUBR), and there are no orders at all at the moment. SUBR, in its turn, is planning to have six people leave the enterprise, Severouralskiy Employment Center reports.

‘All the people who’ve lost their jobs naturally get registered with the employment center, but we currently have nothing to offer them. All we’ve got is a dozen vacancies, while the number of the unemployed has already reached 1,551 people. This comes to 5.2% of the working-age population in the region,’ the center reports.