"Bus number seven was not running this morning," Olga Slatina wrote on social media from the Sverdlovsk region in Russia's Ural Mountains. "The dispatcher said it wouldn't be there as there was no one to work."
Slatina's bus driver in the city of Kamensk-Uralsky may have simply called in sick on that day in late October. But a growing labor shortage is affecting all areas of life since Moscow sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022, companies, workers, recruitment agencies and officials say.
Heavy recruitment by the armed forces and defense industries has drawn workers away from civilian enterprises, as has emigration, pushing unemployment to a record low of 2.3%, data from the Rosstat statistics service showed on Wednesday.
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