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Czechoslovakia Agricultural Workers
Rural society in the 1980s was a combination of cooperatives
(approximately 73 percent of the agricultural labor force), state
farms (18 percent), and private farms (9 percent). This
represented a dramatic change from the First Republic with its
politically active middle-sized farmers, small landholders, and
differentiated labor force. Collectivized agriculture has not
lacked occupational specialists, but there is no doubt that the
socialist regime has streamlined rural society. Differences have
persisted, but a dramatic leveling has taken place. Workers on
state farms were salaried. Cooperative members' earnings
reflected their cooperatives' production, and they supplemented
these with sales from small family garden plots. Private farmers,
a declining portion of the agricultural population, augmented
their limited agricultural earnings with off-farm employment. The
dichotomy between relatively prosperous Bohemia and Moravia and
less-developed Slovakia has added to the complexity of
contemporary rural society.
Collectivization began in 1949 with the Unified Agricultural
Cooperatives Act. The KSC pushed collectivization efforts early
in the 1950s and again later in the decade. Large landholders
unwilling to join cooperatives and unwise enough to demur were
condemned as "kulaks" and evicted without compensation.
Subsequent criticism was muted. By 1960, when collectivization
was essentially complete, 90 percent of all agricultural land was
in the state sector--a proportion that slowly increased to 95
percent in 1985. During the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, the
number of cooperatives declined. Land was not returned to private
cultivation, but rather the cooperative enterprises themselves
were consolidated.
Farmers suffered through the 1950s: compulsory
collectivization took their property, and the 1953 currency
reform eradicated their savings. By the early 1960s, farm
laborers worked longer than their nonagricultural counterparts
and earned an average of 15 percent less. Not surprisingly, those
who had other alternatives took them. Young men found work in the
expanding industrial sector; women and the elderly remained. The
proportion of the agricultural labor force over 60 years of age
rose from 14 percent in 1955 to 20 percent in 1969 and then fell
to 11 percent in 1983. By 1960 women accounted for nearly 60
percent of agricultural labor; that figure declined to 42 percent
in 1983, many women having found work in industry or the service
sector.
During the late 1960s and 1970s, agricultural earnings rose
rapidly. Since the mid-1970s, the incomes of cooperative farm
members and industrial workers have been comparable. So dramatic
was the improvement that in a 1968 poll more than two-thirds of
cooperative farm members preferred collectivized agricultural
production to private farming. Their consensus was that
cooperative farming reduced not only the work burden but also the
risks that small to medium-sized landholders faced. Farmers'
grievances during the reform era focused on the injustices
suffered during collectivization. They wanted those who had been
victimized during the 1950s to be rehabilitated and compensated.
The disparity between urban and rural living conditions
narrowed in the 1970s. Government planners focused on improving
rural day-care facilities; bringing cooperative and state-farm
pensions to parity with those of other workers; and increasing
the medical, educational, and shopping facilities available to
rural dwellers. There was significant construction and renovation
of rural housing. The number of new housing units available to
cooperative members rose dramatically in the 1960s and then
leveled off, although the number fluctuated from year to year.
The general improvement in the amenities did not benefit
agricultural workers alone; in the early 1970s, over 40 percent
of all industrial workers lived in the countryside
(see Urbanization and Migration
, this ch.).
One result of increased incomes and improved rural living
conditions was a rise in the educational level of the
agricultural labor force. The percentage of cooperative members
with a secondary-school education increased eleven fold from 1960
to the end of 1978, and that of members with a university degree
increased thirteen fold.
Data as of August 1987
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