Russia’s automobile sector is going through its worst crisis for fifteen years. According to the Association of European Businesses (AEB), new vehicles sales plunged by more than a third in 2015. In that year the state injected financial aid for the industry of 43 billion rubles (€516 million), but this has proved insufficient. Employers, including Renault-Nissan and PSA Peugeot Citroën are taking drastic measures to weather what is a third consecutive year of falling sales.
On 18 January 2016, 45,000 employees at AvtoVAZ in Togliatti, Russia’s leading automaker, under the control of Renault-Nissan, came back from their winter holidays to be greeted with the news that they would be working just a four day week as of 15 February 2016, and so they can look forward to roughly 20% lower wages. This measure nevertheless means no jobs will be lost whilst collective redundancies are prohibited by law during this period, noted Sergueï Zaïtsev, president of the AvtoVAZ trad
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