Russia will use prison labor to offset lack of immigrants

RUSSIA / FSU POLITICS - In Brief 07 Jun 2021 by Alex Teddy

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Since March 2020 there has been an outflow of guestworkers from former Soviet states. They mostly come from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Armenia.Prisoners shall be used to complete the Baikal Amur Mainline Railroad. 600 prisoners will start work in June 2021. BAM had 15,000 laborers before the pandemic. Many of them were foreigners. There are now only 75,000 laborers on the project. BAM is supposed to be an arterial export route for coal etc...There are 438,000 prisoners. The government says that 188,000 could be used for construction work. Those who work would be volunteers. Their sentences could be cut as an incentive.Oppositionists say this is the return of the gulag. The gulag was the infamous system of brutal and often fatal forced labor for dissidents, religious believers and ethnic minorities. The government has even said that the gulag was doing the prisoners a favor in that it taught them skills. The Prison Service already has prisoners do work such as sewing uniforms, making car parts and farming equipment. In 2019 it made a USD 96 million profit from this. Private companies pay the prison service for the work. Prisoners are paid a tiny amount for their work. The prison service is considering sending prisoners to clean up contamination in the Arctic. Russia lifted travel restrictions on migrant laborers from the former USSR in early 2021. However, not many have returned. People from Turkmenistan now prefer to work in Kazakhstan despite lower wages. That is because the cost of living is lower in Kazakhstan and they do not experience the racism that they face in Russia. Kazakh companies often pay for the guest workers' travel but Russian companies seldom do. The ...