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Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official<\/a>.<\/p>\n The agency identified six companies, many of them industrial titans, which have curtailed their working week in order to slash costs without boosting unemployment.<\/p>\n It comes as the Russian economy encounters strain due to falling oil prices<\/a>, budget constraints, and rising corporate debt. The situation is also complicated by a weak national currency and high interest rates.<\/p>\n Companies have been urged to cut costs and delay investments as access to financing tightens and demand continues to slow. Many are scaling back production schedules, freezing new projects, and reducing working hours to avoid mass layoffs.<\/p>\n Cemros, Russia\u02bcs largest cement producer with 13,000 employees and 18 plants within Russia, has moved to a four-day week until the end of the year.<\/p>\n The company says it wants to avoid layoffs amid a construction slump and rising imports from China, Iran, and Belarus. It expects national cement consumption to fall below 60 million tonnes this year \u2013 the lowest since the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n Russian Railways, with 700,000 employees, has asked office workers to take three unpaid days off per month as freight volumes decline.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Other Topics of Interest<\/p>\n How to Spot a \u2018Russophobe\u2019 \u2013 According to Moscow<\/a><\/p>\n In Russian political vocabulary, \u201cRussophobe\u201d and \u201cNazi\u201d are almost interchangeable labels for anyone who refuses to accept Russian dominance.<\/p>\n Vehicle makers GAZ, Kamaz, and Avtovaz have all reduced working hours in response to falling sales, though GAZ later returned to a full schedule, Reuters reported.<\/p>\n Alrosa, the world\u2019s largest producer of rough diamonds, has cut its payroll for all non-mining staff levels by 10% and suspended operations at less profitable sites. It also paused operations at less profitable deposits in spring and summer.<\/p>\n Sveza, one of Russia\u2019s leading timber and paper companies, closed a plywood plant in Tyumen, leaving more than 300 people out of work.<\/p>\n Russia\u2019s coal sector faces one of the sharpest downturns, squeezed by shrinking export markets and mounting financial pressure on producers, the agency reported.<\/p>\n Thirty coal enterprises employing about 15,000 people face bankruptcy. In the Kuzbass region \u2013 Siberia\u2019s main coal-mining area \u2013 18 out of 151 operations have already shut down this year, and nearly 19,000 workers have lost their jobs, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said in April.<\/p>\n Russia\u2019s steel sector, one of the largest in the world, faces \u201cquiet cutbacks,\u201d as plants trim auxiliary staff to avoid more drastic measures. Officials are reportedly mulling a moratorium on bankruptcies in the metals industry.<\/p>\n In 2022, the year the full-scale war began, Russia\u2019s economy shrank by 1.4%. It rebounded afterward, outpacing the G7 average with growth of 4.1% in 2023 and 4.3% in 2024.<\/p>\n This year, the Economy Ministry projects that growth will slow sharply to just 1.0%, though Russian President Vladimir Putin described this as \u201cdeliberate.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Russia is running out of the resources that have provided its economic growth for the past two years following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the head of the Central Bank of Russia, Elvira Nabiullina, said during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 19<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russia\u2019s heavy industries are cutting jobs and shortening work weeks as the country\u2019s economy weakens in the fourth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71912,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-71911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"How](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/c97612eb2c0a4a4fc7c386b7af8cd7ca.jpg\")
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