‘VSMPO-Avisma Corporation’s employees keep working fewer hours a week, and I don’t think the situation will change any time before the summer. The corporation employs 21,000 people at the moment, 5,000 of whom are working a short week. These figures do not include the workers of our daughter enterprises. All in all, a little under 6,000 people had to switch to shorter hours; the measure was directly related to the actual amount of work available at the enterprise,’ VSMPO-Avisma Corporation’s General Director Mikhail Voyevodin said in his interview to Kommersant.
‘The first changes were introduced in the summer of 2009. We had three options to choose among: redundancies, fewer hours, and layoffs. The latter was seen as inefficient and even harmful: once the employees have been laid off with two-thirds of their pay still guaranteed to them, it’s difficult to motivate them to go back to work in the normal way. Some colleagues of mine who have chosen this option have already been faced with the fact that their people are not willing to work. So we really had only two options altogether and we proposed these options to our trade union at the end of August 2009. They had a month to make up their mind. Early in October, the corporation’s management held a meeting with the trade union representatives, who decided to have a shorter working week. I was surprised, but this was actually a pleasant surprise,’ Mikhail Voyevodin explained.