claim that Soviet enterprises are over-staffed and that economic redistribution and hence mobility of labour. On the other hand, Soviet workers have come to see the de facto job security that existed under the "command system" as an acquired right.
It has therefore been officially recognized that the removal of this right under the market reform requires the establishment of guarantees that dismissals will be made for economically justified reaand with due consideration social concerns, that those dismissed will not suffer unduly as a result of the transition to a new job, and that the reform will not lead to structural unemployment. But concrete policy has not so far made good these fine words. An analysis of the reasons for this sheds light on the social nature of perestroika. Official estimates of millions of redundancies
Under the economic reform, which is only in its first stages and whose ultimate destination is unforeseeable, it has been officially estimated that at least 16 million workers and white-collar employees (out of an active population of 131 million) will be made redundant by the end of the century.! In 1988, one million jobs were cut in institutions and enterprises.?
So far, most of the cuts have been made through natural wastage - the elimination of posts already vacant. But as the effects of the "cost-accounting" (khosraschot) regime make themselves increasingly felt, the situation will change dramatically. According to one report, many factory directors would be prepared to fire from one quarter to a third of their staff, if they could distribute the savings among the rest.3
Being forced to leave one's factory, and possibly one's town and region, and to retrain in a new profession is not a pleasant experience in any circumstances. Soviet workers clearly do not like this even though being made redundant is still distant for
In a survey of 55 enterprises conducted in 1986-7, less than 15% of the respondents were prepared to entertain the prospect of moving to another enterprise, and then only if they could keep the same trade and income. Only 5% expressed readiness to move to another town. Commenting on letters in reaction to an article on employment, the director of the State Planning Commission's Research Institute concluded sadly that "we have a simplified understanding of guarantees: to get work in the same profession and same enterprise"S The authorities readily admit that the staff reductions will cause "emotional turmoil and disappointment" and that a "serious psychological restructuring is necessary and unavoidable"6
This should not be taken to mean that
Soviet workers are inherently conservative, determined to hold onto their "privileges" even at the expense of economic and social progress. All the evidence shows that the workers are as fed up with the old system as any group. But attitudes toward the present reform - and to the loss of job security in particular -are strongly influenced by the question of social guarantees.
A joint party-government-trade union resolution published on January 20 last year states that staff reductions must be decided on a democratic basis, with the participation of labour collectives in an atmosphere of openness. The worker must be given two month's notice and if she cannot be found a job in the same enterprise, or refuses one, s/he is eligible for two and possibly three months pay. Thus unemployment benefits are being restored almost 60 years after they were abolished along with the official elimination of unemployment. also provides for the establishment for the first time of a nationwide system of job placement, retraining and vocational
Workers' interests are further guaranteed, at least in theory, by the new Law on the Socialist Enterprise, which provides for election of managerial personnel and the establishment of elected labour-collective councils with powers of control and participation in management. Also, a new draft law on trade unions emphasizes their primary role as defenders of workers' interests, a role that the trade-union press has also been trying to resurrect.
But the sad fact is that four years into perestroika none of these guarantees yet exist. Democratization of enterprise management and of trade unions has, with very few exceptions, not happened. As for measures of retraining and placement, they too remain within the realm of good intentions. As one worker from Pavlograd put it: "In our job placement bureaus, pompously called "centres', the information is old, and the bureaus have no authority. As a result, there is no one to help you find a job"!
No alternatives to official proposals
It is also worth noting that none of these new laws and policy decisions were taken in a genuinely democratic manner. While some public discussion generally has occurred - and this is progress — the discussion has centred on draft laws or policy proposals formulated and handed down from above. There have been no alternative proposals. As a result the discussion, at best, results in changes of detail. And once the discussion ends, the final decision remains with the bureaucratic authorities. But this is
USSR the case for the economic reform as a whole - except for details, it has never been the subject of a public debate confronting different alternatives which are then put to a vote. A careful reading of the Soviet press leaves no doubt that, in the absence of genuine control by the workers, abuses abound in the process of reducing staff. Decisions are often made behind closed doors without the workers being consulted. Over the past two years, managers have begun to indiscriminately fire people of pension age, many of whom had chosen to continue working to supplement their meager pensions. 1°
Women and the elderly are often first targets
Similarly, workers close to pensionable age are being fired or "pushed out" early. In the above-cited survey, 50% of those affected by staff reductions had been working for 20 years or more." Many complaints come from the handicapped and women with small children, have the legal right to be away from work to tend sick children. "It seems that questions of staff reduction are being resolved with increasing frequency at the expense of women," writes Rabotnitsa
Worker].!? These may or may not be illegal, but Soviet specialists agree that the pressures created by the "cost-accounting regime" to get rid of less productive workers will affect these categories of workers. 13
An abuse which has become widespread with the new wage reform is the arbitrary demotion of workers to lower skill categories. This is an illegal, but convenient, way for management to meet the requirements of the wage reform that calls for basic wage rates to be raised through economies in the enterprise. Management merely claims enterprise does not have jobs requiring high skills, and the workers are forced to
When questions asked, the standard answer is "we are reorganizing" 14
The workers have no institutionalized 1. Sovetskaya Rossiya, January 21, 1988. 2. Trud, January 20, 1989. 3. Pravda, July 18, 1987. 4. I.E. Zaslavskaya and M.V. Moskvina, "Kto ostanetsa po porogom prokhodnoi?" ("Who will remain on the threshold?"), Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya 1, 1989, p.40. 5. V. Kostakov, Kommunist 14, 1987, p.24. 6. Trud, January 28, 1988. 7. Pravda, January 20, 1989. 8. See D. Seppo, "Massive Rise in Labour Conflicts", IV 160; and D. Mandel, ""Revolutionary reform in Soviet Factories", Socialist Register 1989, London, Merlin Press, 1989. 9. Sobesednik 20, May 1989, p.5. 10. Trud, May 9, 1989. 11. Zaslavskaya and Moskvina, ibid., p.38 12. Rabotnitsa 12, 1988, p.16. 11 13. Zaslavskaya and Moskvina, ibid., p.42 14. Trud, January 20 and May 14, 1989. July 31, 1989 • #168 International Viewpoint
USSR means of defense against unjust dismissals. A press report of a conference organized by the Central Council of Trade
Unions (CTUC) in January 1989 concluded that "just as before, no dependable mechanism for defending people exists on the state level"!5 Similarly, the working group on employment of the
CTUC and State Committee on Labour reported in mid-May that there were numerous abuses involving staff reductions, and, in an understatement, com-
'often do not find support in their trade union committees" 16
On the other hand, the bureaucratic apparatus, which is supposed to be the prime target of reductions, has been able to profit from the situation. Ministries that claim to have reduced staff through natural wastage, upon closer inspection, are found to have included in their calculations not only their own personnel but that of their subordinate enterprises. As a result, in some cases the bureaucratic apparatus has actually grown. The State
Committee for Supply, for example, increased its personnel by 4,000.!7
The savings from perdisproportionately bene-
If filled management.
nominal the average wage for workers rose by around 10% in 1988
(with inflation running about 8%), that of at managerial personnel has risen 20-30%. The
CTUC-State Committee
Labour working group concluded that the salaries of inflated managerial staffs in enterprises are being paid at the expense of reduclions in worker personnel" 18
As for the retraining and job placement measures, no one at the January CTUC conference had any idea of how many people would have to be retrained, over what period, and what training facilities are available. The figures are not there because a year and a half after the resolution was passed there is still no national body responsible for collecting information for retraining.
In 1988 there were 1,240 local functioning job placement bureaus, and their number is supposed to double in 1989
But enterprises are not obliged to report job openings to them, nor are they obliged to hire workers sent by the bureaus, which, anyway, are not known
, for their zeal. As before, the vast majori-
12 on their own,
• ty of people find jobs
International Viewpoint #168 • July 31, 1989 through notices on gates or by word of mouth. 19 Moreover, they must do this, according to the labour code, within three weeks or else risk losing important benefits that depend upon a continuous
Indeed, the failure to revise the labour code to provide guarantees, at least on paper, only adds to the threat felt by the workers at the loss of traditional job security. At present, the size of the wage, the allocation of housing, subsidized vacations, payments from the enterprisdepend to a large extent on length of service at the given enterprise.?0
"Long-forgotten times are repeating themselves"
One of the proposed means for dealing with staff reductions in industry is to shift workers to professions and sectors that are short of labour: construction, services, loading. Of course, practically none of the employees of Moscow's bureaucracies who have lost their jobs have moved to the service sector. Wages and conditions there are very bad, and prestige extremely low. Transfer of excess labour to regions of labour shortage, another solution often cited, comes up against similar problems: people do not willingly move to areas where social conditions - food supply, housing, health care — are poorer than where they currently live. New immigrants to Siberia, a region of acute labour shortage, find shacks instead of houses waiting for them.
The report of the January CTUC con-
"The developing labour resource situation, if we underestimate it, is pregnant with the most serious social consequences. And in time is working against us" 2 These concerns are echoed in workers' letters. "It looks as if long-forgotten repeating themselves" writes one Muscovite.22 "Layoffs, cost-accounting — these words ring with increasing women's letters", Rabotnitsa notes.2
In the absence of guarantees, loss of security is bound to be very disturbing, even if, as noted, most workers do not yet feel a direct threat to their jobs. This is not just a question of compassion for those dismissed. Even those affected. The their jobs are materially market reform, the loss of job security and the spectre of structural unemployment necessarily change the balance of forces in the enterprise, providing management with powerful new means and incentives for intensifying its exploitation.
Is this perhaps the reason have not materialized?
which the government that workers' most in the reformers' forces that have shaped it: the bureaucracy (at sighted, dynamic elements) a part of the intelligentsia haps, in the short run,
The working ing the reform reflects the regime's fears that emerge as a political force.
The final results of the reform process will depend on the correlation of forces both within the bureaucracy and between the bureaucracy and the working class. But the logic of this market reform itself is clear: it requires a real labour market - enterprise manage-
15. Ibid., January 20, 1989.
16. Ibid., May 14, 1989.
17. Ibid., January 20, 1989.
18. Ibid., January 20 and May 14, 1989.
19. Ibid., January 20, 1989.
20. Zaslavskaya and Moskvina, ibid., p.39; Sobesednik
5, 1989, p.5.
21. Trud, January 20, 1989.
22. Pravda, January 21, 1989.
23. Rabotnitsa 12, 1988, p.16
ment must have the flexibility to hire and fire in response to market stimuli. At the same time, in the logic of the reform, some measure of unemployment is a good thing (if one can get away with it politically), since it provides the missing negative incentive, the "stick", to labour productivity and discipline. Moreover, for unemployment to play this role, life in the reserve army must not be too comfortable.
Even if the regime's discourse rejects this, one has to admit that its practice so far fits this logic well. The report on the January CTUC conference
"How many times have we heard and read in official documents the just words that it is impermissible to allow 'even the slightest hint of unemployment, to allow the person to be kicked out onto the street? But are there really guarantees that nothing of the sort will happen?"
Some members of the intelligentsia, unlike official spokespeople, have openly called for a "little unemployment" as an incentive to better work. Shmelev, a well-known advocate of radical market reform, has openly called for a "small reserve army of labour", hastening to add "that the state, of course, would not leave [it] to the whims of fate". And he explains this by the need for a stick with which to discipline the workers.
"Let us not close our eyes to the economic harm caused by our parasitical certainty in guaranteed work. Today it seems that everyone understands that we owe our lack of discipline, drunkenness and slipshod work very much to excessively full employment....The real threat of losing one's job is not at all a bad medicine for laziness, drunkenness, irresponsibility."24 (Gorbachev has praised this article, while distancing himself explicitly from this passage).
"Inevitable incentives to jettison surplus manpower"
The sociologist T. Zaslavskaya is only somewhat less brutal: "The changeover of enterprises to the system of selffinancing inevitably creates incentives to jettison surplus manpower. The question is: which workers will an enterprise release first? Obviously, not the best ones, but the worst, the least capable, such as those who have a drinking problem orthose whose discipline is not beyond reproach".
Zaslavskaya, like Shmelev, adds that "we must find a solution and make sure these people are put to work" 25 If such statements, which date from 1987, were once seen as provocative, lately sociologists seem to take it for granted that unemployment will be a familiar element of the social landscape.26
Experience with the market reform outside the Soviet Union confirms this logic. This year, the Hungarians have taken the final plunge: after moving cautiously, but steadily, over undermine the idea of job security as a right, the regime has announced, along with the introduction of unemployment benefits, major economic changes that, by conservative estimates, will eliminate 50,000 to 100,000 jobs in state enterprises that are not making profits.??
In Yugoslavia, where large-scale unemployment has existed for many years, enterprise self-management has meant that those already working could safeguard their jobs. But now, following the same logic as Hungary, the regime has decided the only thing it could - that Yugoslavia's crisis is due to an insufficient use of the market. It is, accordingly, moving to undermine self-management in order to establish a real labour market. As the prime minister states recently: "It is necessary to deregulate all those areas that do not require state regulation and have to do with the market in goods, capital and labour. I foresee problems. Social tensions may serve as the basis for all conservative [sic] forces to rally....against the new system" 28
Bureaucracy's answer to "command economy" crisis
Employment is only one area, albeit a one, affected by the economic reform. But our analysis of this question leaves no doubt that this is the bureaucracy's reform (which does not mean that a certain part of the bureaucracy and some of its old methods of rule will not have to be sacrificed - hence the resistance from this quarter). It is the bureaucracy's answer to the crisis of the "command economy". In contrast, any working class response would place democracy at the centre of the economic system, making social solidarity, based upon social decision-making and a concern for social justice increasingly prominent as motivation for economic actors.
This working class appeared in the public debate mostly in the form of veiled criticism by a handful of Marxist economists of the regime's reform.29 Although these ideas are still marginal and generally dismissed as utopian, as they surely must seem from an administrator's point of view, they wil surely cease to be so once the working score grounds for optimism on hie class mobilizes politically. There are 24. Novyi Mir, June 1987, p.149. 25. Soviet Economy 3, 1987, p.315.
"Zabastovki v SSSR: novaya real'nost", Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya 1, 1989, p.30. 27. New York Times, February 9, 1989, A-14. 28. Montreal Gazette, March 17, 1989, F-4. 29. See for example, D. Mandel, "La perestroika et la ¿lasse ouvrière" in L'homme et la societé 2-3, 1988 pp. 134-7; and the article by Iu. Soukhotine in Interventions (Montreal), Summer 1989. 30. D. Seppo and D. Mandel, ibid.
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