Bug in your hands: there is a shadow market of workers' dormitories in the country
There is an active shadow business in Russia, organizing hostels for hypermarket employees who come here to work. In the capital, Izvestia visited about a dozen such illegal places of residence. They are located next to large shopping malls and chain stores, sometimes in the same buildings as retail outlets. But employees to whom the employer promised to provide housing are placed in unsanitary conditions, while the networks themselves disown such dormitories. About who and how creates "bedbugs" for migrants in the capital — in the material of Izvestia.
How do grocery store employees live
Bedbugs, cockroaches and dozens of rooms for 12-18 people each — this is what hostels of federal food chains look like today, where employees live, Izvestia found out during its own investigation.
So, the hostel, which is occupied by employees of the Auchan, Atak and Metro retail chains, looks like a large furniture store, but behind the "Furniture store" sign hides a "dorm". Several floors, dozens of rooms, unsanitary conditions, cramped conditions.
One of these aggregators, MK Expert LLC, has been on the market since 2013. According to the SPARK database, the company's revenues for 2024 amounted to 593 million rubles, and its net profit was 27.8 million rubles.
Another hostel near the Babushkinskaya metro station was opened right in the building of the farmers' market. There is dirt on the floor and walls, there are no bedbugs, but there are cockroaches. After spending the night in such a hostel, a morning shower will not help, complete disinfection will be required, and it is from here that store employees go to work.
Presumably, nonresident employees of the Myasnitsky Ryad grocery chain live in one of the dormitories on Entuziastov Street. It's more or less clean here, but even here residents complain about cockroaches.
And the hostel of the Bim grocery chain is completely organized in an apartment building, again there is no signboard.
Izvestia sent a request to all the mentioned networks and asked Rospotrebnadzor to check these dormitories.
There is also a loophole in the scheme: retail chains do not settle their employees in such dormitories directly, but through special aggregators. This makes it possible to say that "the hostel is not ours."
According to the regulations established by the government, a hostel is a non—residential building with a ceiling of at least 2.7 m, whose activities should be included in the OKVED, lawyer Victoria Khoroshevskaya told Izvestia.
— That is, these are not basements or attic rooms, and they must be equipped with a bathroom and utility rooms and meet the requirements of fire safety and sanitary regulations, — said the lawyer. — There should be no more than 12 beds in the room. A mandatory requirement is that the hostel must keep migration records, which is not always the case.
Administrative liability is provided for violation of migration registration under Part 4 of Article 18.9 of the Administrative Code. Fines for officials amount to 40-50 thousand rubles, for legal entities — 400-500 thousand rubles.
— During the checks, not one migrant is identified, but dozens, — said the lawyer. — A protocol is drawn up for each one. In other words, fines are quite significant for a business that is trying to avoid unnecessary expenses when organizing the process. The owner and the tenant are responsible until the suspension of operations.
Migration registration is also important from the point of view of preventing terrorist attacks, the lawyer said. The danger of such crimes increases in the presence of illegal places of temporary residence of citizens who are not registered and are not accounted for in any way.
"There are no insects"
In April, Izvestia wrote about one such store chain, Magnolia, which offers its nonresident employees accommodation in Moscow. Network employees who interact with food products live among bedbugs and unsanitary conditions, in rooms with violations of fire safety standards.
Nikolai, one of the employees of Magnolia, then said that after spending the night "hugging" bedbugs in such a hostel on Castanayevskaya Street, he was diagnosed with allergic dermatitis.
Magnolia's response to Izvestia's request states that "the retail chain does not provide hostel services or dormitories."
"However, we are interested in ensuring that our employees have the most comfortable accommodation and comfortable lifestyle, because it is well known that a person who gets a good rest works well," the response says.
It also says that after the story and the publication of Izvestia, the network conducted its own check and found no insects in any of the dormitories. And the residents provided only good reviews and "words of gratitude for decent living conditions."
"The fact that our company's employees can live in a hotel, hostel, or dormitory does not confirm that the hostel is organized by Magnolia," the response says.
They also made it clear that the information published by Izvestia was "not confirmed by anything."
However, here is an example: a two-story low-rise building on Castanayevskaya Street, the entire ground floor is occupied by a Magnolia and a pharmacy. Next to it is a completely inconspicuous gray door, followed by a staircase leading to the second floor, to the hostel.
The Undercover Hostel
Judging by the event plan hanging on the wall, this is the Alpha Hostel, but the information board is decorated in the style of Magnolia stores. The same logos are shown here, and the company's website is even listed. There are only no identification marks and signs that this room is a hostel.
It is not listed in the list of organizations, but some aggregator sites indicate that there is a student dormitory in the house. However, there is no contact or legal information.
The dormitory commandant kicked out the Izvestia film crew with a shout, but thanks to one of the guests, the correspondent still got into the room. Inside is a classic dormitory. There are 19 rooms on the second floor, and 8-10 beds in the larger ones. A work uniform with store logos is visible everywhere.
Some of the guests have been staying at this hostel for years. They say the employer settled it.
On the official website of Magnolia, potential employees are promised help with accommodation, and the commandants do not let new tenants through without a check-in referral certified by the official seal of the company. Izvestia has one of these settlement documents with the seal of Magnolia.
In another hostel on Generala Dorokhova Street, workers from workshops for the manufacture of their own products live in small rooms. There are 18 people in each room.
And in the hostel on Nizhny Novgorod, they offer a window instead of an evacuation exit.
Magnolia is far from the only chain store that accommodates its employees in such dormitories. Many well-known retail chains operate according to a similar scheme. They organize hostels in basements and even apartment buildings. The signs of the hostels are small, unsightly, and hide behind nearby large signs for cover.
The grey area
Today, hostels are still a gray area, including in matters of migration and registration, said Sergey Gruzd, deputy head of the Subcommittee on Integrated and Fire Safety of the National Association of Designers.
— A hostel is a place of mass gathering of people, which means that security measures should be appropriate, — said the expert.
The most difficult thing in organizing a hostel is to comply with fire safety standards and conditions for a separate entrance and parking, Konstantin Krokhin, chairman of the Union of Housing Organizations in Moscow, told Izvestia.
"Almost every hostel, and not only in the capital region, has a lot of violations," he said. — In addition, hostels as cheap accommodation facilities remain a mechanism for legalizing illegal migrants. It is in the hostel that it is easiest to get a fictitious registration.
The danger of such living conditions for staff is that they entail the risk of contamination of food products, Konstantin Derevskov, CEO of the Start Quality consulting company, told Izvestia.
— These are all kinds of bacteria of E. coli, salmonella, staphylococcus and so on, — the expert explained. — A person can bring these bacteria into production, which contaminates food products.
According to experts, due to the current moratorium on inspections, Rospotrebnadzor and employees of other departments often cannot get into such a dormitory and do not know what is happening inside. So, in response to a request from Izvestia, Rospotrebnadzor replied that, in particular, there are "no dormitories or hostels" on Castanaevskaya Street, where the Magnolia store is located.
"In accordance with the government decree of March 10, 2022, until 2030, unscheduled control and supervisory measures are carried out exclusively in relation to extremely high and high-risk facilities," the agency said in a response.
They clarified that hostels do not belong to such categories of facilities.
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