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East Germany LABOR FORCE
The population, and therefore the labor force, of East
Germany, has always been comparatively small. Prior to the 1960s,
when birthrates were relatively high, over 2.5 million people
left East Germany for the West. Perhaps half of these individuals
were twenty-five years of age or younger. Subsequently the
birthrate fell, and during the 1970s East Germany, alone among
European countries, witnessed a continuing population decline. By
the late 1970s, the situation prompted government efforts to
promote large families
(see Population
, ch. 2). According to
official East German figures, after World War II the total
population fell from around 18.5 million in 1946 to 16.7 million
in 1986. The decline occurred despite the fact that in the
postwar years some Germans had had to be resettled from the
territories in Eastern Europe that had been part of the Third
Reich but that subsequently had fallen within the boundaries of
Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union.
Beginning in the late 1940s, the East German leadership moved
to expand the labor force. First, the government initiated a
program to socialize agriculture, reducing the number of people
employed in the agricultural sector from 2.2 million in 1949 to
less than 1 million in 1970 and to only 874,000 in 1977. In
subsequent years, the number of agricultural workers increased
slightly, reaching 922,000 in 1985. As a result of the
government's policy, well over 1 million persons became available
for employment in other sectors of the economy.
Second, and more important, the state effectively mobilized
women and brought them into the ranks of the gainfully employed.
Whereas in 1949 women had constituted about 40 percent of the
labor force, by 1985 that proportion had risen to 49 percent,
giving East Germany one of the highest rates of female employment
in the world.
As a result of this mobilization, by 1985 the East German
labor force was a comparatively large segment of the country's
total population, standing at about 51 percent. (According to
official figures, 64.8 percent of the population was of working
age; about 79 percent of these individuals were employed.) In
1975 the proportion of the retirement-age population was 19.8
percent. According to East German statistics, in 1985 this
proportion of the population had dropped to 16.6 percent.
Nevertheless, in the mid-1980s the country continued to suffer
from a labor shortage. The government was attempting to solve the
problem through a more efficient use of labor and through the
replacement of workers by robots. In the early 1980s, increasing
labor productivity was a major priority in economic planning.
In 1985 the socialist sector employed 98 percent of the work
force. Industry accounted for more than one-third of the total
work force, the "nonproductive" sector (such as service
industries and the state bureaucracy) employed one-fifth of the
work force, and agriculture and trade accounted for one-tenth
each. The East German Constitution guarantees to all citizens the
right to work, and officially there was no unemployment in East
Germany. The country's leaders acknowledge, however, that
temporary unemployment could occur as a result of rationalization
and restructuring.
Although the government was intent upon mobilizing the
available labor reserves, it was not insensitive to popular
sentiments favoring a shorter workweek. The standard workweek for
all workers was reduced to forty-three and three-quarter hours in
1967. In 197, it was further reduced to forty hours for women and
forty to forty-two hours for those working shifts. In conjunction
with the government's efforts to raise the birthrate, women
received substantial opportunities to work part time and
increasingly liberal maternal benefits, including extended leave
with pay and further reduction in the workweek
(see Population Structure and Dynamics
, ch. 2).
Data as of July 1987
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