From 2022 the Minimum Wage in Russia will exceed 13.6 thousand rubles

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin announced an increase in the minimum wage in 2022 to over 13.6 thousand rubles per month. Thus, the wages of 3 million Russians will increase next year. Mishustin spoke about this during the Cabinet of Ministers meeting via videoconference, writes TASS.

"It is proposed to set the minimum wage at a level over 13,600 rubles, starting next year. This decision will increase the wages of almost three million people." - Russian polititian said.

We'll remind that in December last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law on a new method for calculating the minimum wage and living wage from the 1st of January 2021. Note that now the calculation of the indicator is based on the median income (half of the employed receive more than this value, half - less), and not the consumer basket.

Earlier, a group of State Duma deputies from the LDPR faction intended to submit to the State Duma a new bill on increasing the minimum wage from the 1st of January 2022.

The authors of the initiative believe that the new mechanism use for the minimum wage calculation did not allow its significant increase. “The reason is, firstly, the selected ratio with the median salary of 42%, which is lower than in the EU countries where they use the same indicator, and the specified ratio is set at no less than 50%,” the LDPR parliamentarians noted. The second reason they named is the low level of the median salary itself, which differs from the average pay in the country (42,263 rubles per month) due to the unacceptably high differentiation of the population incomes.

Parliamentarians emphasise that in most countries of the world, the minimum wage is fixed at 40-60% of the average income of citizens. If we apply this approach in Russian realities, then, according to the Liberal Democrats' calculations, the minimum wage of 40-50% would be over 20 thousand rubles, since the average wage in the country was 51 352 rubles per month in 2020.

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