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MongoliaWork Collectives
For modern Mongolians, the primary social units were based on
occupation rather than locality. Employers, such as state-owned
factories or government departments, commonly provided housing,
meals in unit cafeterias, day-care facilities for workers'
children, and sports and recreational activities. Trade unions in
enterprises offered group holidays or week-long stays at special
resorts or spas. Much emphasis was placed on the mutual ties and
family-like relations among members of the collective. In cities
fellow workers were guests and providers of gifts at weddings,
and older members of work collectives often were described as
taking a paternal or maternal interest in the performance of
newly hired young workers. The process by which workers secured,
or were assigned to, jobs was not clearly spelled out in
Mongolian sources, but it evidently combined administrative
direction with some degree of personal choice. The general
shortage of labor meant that individuals had no problems finding
jobs. However, the jobs they obtained may not have been those
they most wanted. Although it was possible to change jobs or to
be reassigned by the government, such changes were not common,
and individuals usually expected to spend many years, if not
their entire working lives, in one enterprise and one housing
collective.
The organization of work units reflected Soviet models, and
if there was a distinctively Mongolian character to such units,
it was not captured in official accounts. As in the Soviet Union,
there was a strong emphasis on the solidarity of the collective
and its priority in the lives of the workers, as well as on the
use of such managerial techniques as the designation of heroes of
labor, the use of socialist emulation and socialist competition
to spur production, and the promotion of "shock battalions" and
"shock days" to meet or surpass quotas. These techniques were
attempts to motivate a work force through the use of non-material
incentives and through manipulation of group pressures. Students
of Soviet and Chinese industrial relations refer to a distinctive
pattern of "clientalist bureaucracy" and "neo-traditionalist"
forms of patronage and dependency in the factories of those
countries. Both the force of the Soviet example and inherited
traditional Mongolian attitudes, toward hierarchy and broadly
defined relations of subordination and dependence, made such
patterns likely in Mongolia.
Data as of June 1989
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