7

Perestroika:

What happens
to the jobs?

As Soviet industry plunges into an era of
economic restructuring and accelerated
technological and scientific growth, the
Society has suddenly found itself forced to
contemplate new difficulties both ‘unex-
pected and perplexing. Prominent among
these: how to deal with the estimated 16
million workers who are almost certain to
be displaced from their traditional jobs over
the coming decade?

The last labour exchange in the Soviet
Union was shut down in 1930, and several
generations have grown up thinking of
unemployment as a thing of the past.
Indeed, as a social guarantee, the right toa
job is enshrined in the Soviet constitution
and, with the exception of people briefly
between jobs, there has been nothing that
could be described as unemployment in the
USSR for the past 60 years.

Nor, according to the country’s leading
bodies, will there be in future. A joint state-
ment issued last January by the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (CPSU), the USSR Council of
Ministers and the Central Council of Soviet

' Trade Unions made it plain that “the right

to work is a major gain of the people and an
indisputable advantage of socialism,” which
must not be eroded. However, the state-
ment went on, vast changes in the structure
of the workforce and the country’s eco-
nomic infrastructure cannot be avoided,
and a concerted society-wide program will
have to be set in place to deal with them.
It is important to recognize the difference
between the political right to a job and the

‘full and efficient social utilization of labour,

notes Vladimir Lubitsky, a Pravda journal-
ist specializing in economic sociology.

“We have had a somewhat dogmatic
understanding of the ‘right to work’ in the
Past, often seeing it as the right to hold a
particular job forever,” he says. “In conse-
quence, although everyone has been occu-
pied in a paying position, many, many
people have been receiving wages for per-
forming unproductive work. :

“In a strictly economic sense, we could
call this ‘hidden unemployment’. We failed
to see that this hurts both the society and the
interests of the individual worker in the long
run.”

The economic reforms now underway
have transferred the bulk of Soviet industry
onto the “hozraschot” system of cost
accounting and self-management — a new
set of rules that gives enterprises an imme-
diate incentive to shed excess workers. Over
a longer period of time, a much more rapid
rate of technological upgrading can be
expected to keep the workforce in a state of
flux and turnover such as it has never expe-
rienced.

At least three million jobs will become
redundant in industry by 1990, if plans for
economic renovation are fully realized.

Even more drastic cuts are scheduled to
hit the Soviet Union’s swollen bureaucratic
apparatus. Present intentions are to slash
central staff by 40 per cent, and functionar-
ies employed by the republics by a full 50
per cent. Only the local or community
administrated services will experience mod-
erate growth.

As with any process, this mass disloca-
tion of workers has two sides to it. On one
hand, say economists, it is to be welcomed
for its effect of liberating people from
menial work — almost 50 per cent of

6 e Pacific Tribune, September 7, 1988

Soviet workers still perform essentially
manual labour — and for the immense
growth in productivity and social wealth
that will accompany it.

On the other hand, as Novosti Press eco-
nomic observer Vitali Dymarski points out,
“displacement can be a difficult and painful
experience for any person, despite all possi-
ble measures of protection. Our Soviet
workers are not accustomed to changing
jobs, although all indications are that in
future people will have to get used to doing
so five or six times in a lifetime.”

So, what are the measures, both long-
term and short-term, that are being pre-
pared to deal with this, probably the biggest
upheaval in the structure and consciousness
of the Soviet workforce since the country
underwent rapid industrialization in the
1930s?

Before going into this, economists take
care to stress that just now the question of
creating new jobs is not a burning issue. The
Soviet economy suffers from a perennial
labour shortage: at this moment there are
about one million jobs looking for appli-
cants.

Over the longer haul, they say, there are
many reasons to believe that with conscious

and well-considered economic policies jobs ..

will continue to appear faster than they are
eliminated.

First, while great numbers of Positions
are going to be phased out in industry, poli-
cies of horizontal expansion may keep a
large proportion of those displacements
localized within a given industry, or even a
given enterprise. Vocational training pro-
grams are being upgraded and expanded to
retrain workers before they lose their jobs to
meet the more skilled and demanding types
of work they will encounter in the factories
of the future.

Investment in consumer industry has
been dramatically stepped up following a

ROBOTS AT WORK ... upgrading Soviet industry presents new challenges for

perestroika.

goods and services, they are expected to
increase up to an optimum 25 per cent.

Third, the USSR is the world’s largest
country — by far — and it is blessed with
vast stretches of territory as yet undeve-
loped. It is part of ongoing Soviet policy to

- Open up these areas, not just to economic

exploitation, but to modern, comfortable
human habitation.

However, notes Lubitsky, there is a right
way and a wrong way to accomplish this.
“A good example of a distorted approach
was the construction of BAM (the Baikal-
Amur railway) in Eastern Siberia during the
1970s. There all of the priorities were
accorded to production, and not to building
up human facilities such as schools, roads,
housing, commercial networks, hospitals,

Fred Weir

CPSU decision in August, and henceforth
even defence and heavy industrial enter-
prises will be obliged to expand into produc-
tion of household items and everyday
commodities. This will absorb a good deal
of displaced labour (notes Lubitsky) as will
the addition of afternoon and night shifts
across many sectors of Soviet industry —
which at present averages only 1+ shifts per
factory.

Second, there is an enormous unsatisfied
demand in the tertiary sector of the Soviet
economy, where the traditional labour
shortage is also most acute. Here millions of
future jobs can be expected to open up.
Furthermore, notes Dymarski, this will
occur not only because of the present signif-
icant growth in state expenditures for
health, education, child care and so on, but
also through the less structured, grassroots
expansion of consumer co-operatives and
individual labour projects. While these lat-
ter forms currently account for barely one
per cent of the Soviet economy’s output of

FROM MOSCOW

etc. So now the railroad exists, but there is
little life ....

“We need to put human needs in the
foreground, and develop our vast territories
by providing incentives of all kinds for peo-
ple to go there. We have to make new places
into good places for people to live.”

Fourth, and most important, there will
be tremendous expansion — which will
become increasingly significant over time
— in the social sphere. For instance, the
Soviet educational system is presently in the
midst of a painful restructuring that will
broaden its facilities, become far more flexi-
ble in its approaches, and respond creatively
to the fast-paced demands of the scientific
and technological revolution.

“Nowadays we need to think in terms of
a continuous cradle-to-grave educational
process,” says Dymarski. “A far greater
proportion of the workforce will have to
have higher education. Keeping people in
school longer will naturally reduce the
quantity of people looking for work while

increasing their quality.”

A number of other social measures will
have a similar effect, economists say. These
include early retirement for women and
some types of workers, longer vacations,
lengthened maternity leaves, and a shorter
work week — already being introduced
into some industries, such as coal mining.

“Marx said that a society’s well-being can
be measured by the amount and quality of
leisure time it affords its people,” says
Dymarski. “Though this is looking into the
longer perspective for us, we need to begin
to build into our education system and
social life a consciousness of this principle,
and teach people to use leisure creatively as
well as work.”

In the immediate term, being displaced
from a job can bea jarring experience, anda
number of provisions have already been put
into place to try to ease the transition for
individual workers.

“Those released from jobs will receive
one month’s severance pay, plus two
months’ full salary for the time required to
secure a new position. This can be extended
as necessary,” says Lubitsky.

“Responsibility for finding the new job
lies not with the worker himself — though
he/she may search on his own — but first
with the employer who is dismissing him,
and second with the new, ramified system of
employment exchanges that is being set up.
These will be clearing houses for informa-
tion, designed to match workers with job
openings or retraining courses. They will be
managed by local Soviets, which is to say
they will be under democratic community
control,” Lubitsky points out.

How all of this will function when the
stresses and strains of restructuring really
start coming fast and furious remains to be
seen. Yet most Soviet economists scoff at
the idea that the USSR is likely to feel the
pressure of any labour surplus, at least in
this century.

“Tt’s clear that any particular individual
might be unemployed ai some particular
time,” says Lubitsky. “But unemployment
as a social phenomenon cannot appear. We
have too many things to do. Our restructur- ~
ing itself has pointed to a vast constellation
of tasks we have to perform — as long as
health and energy hold out.”