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Prime Minister Vladimir Putin held a meeting with Mikhail Shmakov, Chairman of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia

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Transcript of the beginning of the meeting:

Vladimir Putin: Mr Shmakov, how do you assess the work of the trilateral commission? And another issue I would like to discuss with you is assessment of the situation on the labour market.

Mikhail Shmakov: I think right now is a crucial period when the budgeting process is in progress - amendments are being made between the first and second readings. And the trilateral commission has been discussing all of these issues. They are not all completely agreed upon. We count on reaching agreement on a number of issues by the second reading. But on the whole the process is proceeding constructively. There were some glitches, presumably because of the heavy workload of some cabinet members, officials involved in the budgeting process and the Finance Ministry. But now a more constructive dialogue has been aligned. The next session will be held on Friday, and at that session, we will consider many important issues, including those connected with the budget.

We continue our monitoring of the labour market, and we have represented our findings in a graph (shows printout), which I would like to give you. We are concerned that there is renewed growth in the number of problem companies. This graph shows problem companies that are in our union databases. I have to say that this is not an absolute figure because we do not monitor all companies; we investigate only those that have primary trade union organisation. Of course, the statistics from the Federal State Statistics Service and Ministry of Healthcare and Social Development are more complete, but the trends generally coincide. But the main thing is that all the economists' calculations show that the labour market will come out of the recession last.

Even when financial markets and other economic parameters are on the rise, the labour market, unfortunately, tends to lag behind. Because of this, the trilateral commission will have to refine the programme for supporting the labour market, which had worked well for us at the initial stage. This can be seen here (points to graph). Here we had a surge in the number of problem companies followed by some stabilisation. Here, we still have something we need to work on together. As a matter of fact, I have a number of proposals I would like to discuss with you.

Vladimir Putin: Mr Shmakov, you took part in the preparation of this programme yourself at the beginning of the year. And as a whole we resolved to continue this programme to support the labour market in 2010 as well. So let's discuss the details and parameters.

Mikhail Shmakov: Of course. And I support your assertion that we need to create gainful employment. Because creating ordinary jobs is the easiest fix. But these are low-qualification, dead-end jobs. We need to create highly effective jobs and retrain people specifically for these jobs.

Vladimir Putin: In order for the work to be better and the salaries, higher.

Mikhail Shmakov: Exactly. And the main thing is that this would really be progress in the economy, in upgrading production.

Vladimir Putin: The structure of the labour market reflects the structure of production itself, so we will strive towards this. Let's discuss it in detail.