They are people like Valentyn, who is living his dream. The 41-year-old man has nothing to worry about. He has half of a private house in one of the district centers in Khmelnytska Oblast. All he has to do to make his ends meet is to regularly visit his bank, where he has a deposit. The amount of money Valentyn has saved allows him to monthly receive interest that is half of the official average salary in the area. In reality, it’s a little more than citizens of his city actually earn on average. So he hasn’t been working for quite a long time.
According to recent data published by State Statistics Service of Ukraine, almost 12 million people from 15 to 70 years old in the 45-million member nation are inactive. It means that roughly 27 percent of Ukraine’s population can’t or don’t want to work and do nothing to find any job at all.
Some of these people are, of course, students (less than a million), pensioners (up to seven million) and people with disabilities who can’t work. But the rest of them – perhaps 10 percent of the population – are inactive during the prime of lives.
Valentyn is an intelligent person who has read hundreds, if not thousands, of books. He is able to discuss with solid arguments almost every topic in the world. Nevertheless he doesn’t want to find any job.
“Why should I work?” asks Valentyn, who dropped out of his university in the early 1990s and went to work in the street market. “I have enough money to pay the bills.”
He spends most of his money on drinking. He doesn’t want to build a career, improve his well-being and change his life. “I like the way I live. Of course, I want to have more money. But I don’t want to do anything more then I do at the moment. So why should I?” Valentyn explains.
There are a few reasons why Ukrainians like Valentyn don’t want to make an effort.
In many cases, the benefits they would get from a job won’t cover all the efforts people make. Salaries usually are small, working conditions are bad, the workload is huge and there are often few opportunities for career growth. Nepotism runs high, with relatives or friends of business owners getting promoted.
At the end of the day, employees come home tired and angry with a small amount of money. Going to work for them is more like a habit or a necessity. But there is only a small chance to change your future. So if they could afford it, they wouldn’t work at all.
Another explanation is that nowadays some Ukrainians are simply lazy.
When his father died, Oleksandr from Kyiv inherited an apartment near the center of the capital. It has been rented for years and currently helps his family to pay the bills. During the 29-year-old’s life, Oleksandr has worked for about three or four years. He lives with his wife, two daughters and his mother – a pensioner – who works full-time and brings the rest of the family income. Indeed, he’s a good example of being lazy.
A survey made by the Institute for Demography and Social Studies of The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in late 2009 showed that even those who work have little or no intentions of working hard.
According to its results, only 11 percent of Ukrainians from 30 to 49 years old who had any kind of job were willing to find additional part-time job. The rest of the people didn’t want to increase their incomes even though the survey was taken in the middle of the crisis, when salaries were cut across all industries and regions.
Ukrainians are fed up to the teeth with poor local-style management practices and inadequate business owners and their families. They are dreaming about their own businesses. According to a poll made last summer among 700 registered users of hh.ua online recruitment agency, 82 percent of Ukrainians have been thinking about running their own business. Almost 67 percent are attracted to the idea of owning a business. However, only 15 percent of those who have been thinking about becoming business owners have actually tried to start them. Ukrainians don’t like to be managed, but can’t manage to become their own bosses.
Oleksandr is willing to start a business as well. He’s dreaming about opening a small food shop, but reluctant to act.
“I want to earn good money, buy a good car and a house in Crimea. But all these circumstances are against me,” he explains. He would probably succeed if someone did the start-up for him and left him to manage it, since he’s really smart and educated. But, unfortunately for Oleksandr, this is not the way that life works.
As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Regarding Oleksandr and many others like him, a man can have all the opportunities in the world, but you can’t make him use them. So Oleksandr prefers to be an apathetic human being and a henpecked husband.
What life could be better for him?
Andriy Kravets is a freelance writer in Kyiv.
