BBC: What would you do if your income was slashed by 80% because of the continuing downturn?
What choice would you make if your bosses asked you and your colleagues to agree either to a 50% salary cut or to reducing the firm's workforce by half?
Such a choice might seem unreal to a lot of professionals in the West, whose rights are protected by laws and unions, as well as by history itself, as these rights have been in place for decades or even centuries.
But these questions are now a reality for some people in crisis-hit Russia as it comes to the end of a decade-long boom, the first time in its existence that this has happened in a free-market economy.
The problem is that many Russians still get the bigger part of their salaries "in envelopes", even despite a flat 13% rate of income tax. Their official salaries may be no more than a couple of hundred dollars.
It all seemed fine to them when they did not have to worry about their jobs. But now it leaves them unprotected.
Their bosses do not need to fear the cost of making them redundant, as the severance money, calculated as the sum of several official monthly salaries, would be tiny in comparison even with an employee's real one-month salary.
That is why many professionals, who have had to agree to a 30% salary cut, consider themselves relatively lucky. >>> By Konstantin Rozhnov, Business reporter, BBC News | Tuesday, January 20, 2009
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