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Soviet Union [USSR] The Labor Force and Perestroika
The nature of the work force has a direct impact on industrial
policy. In 1985 nearly 75 percent of the nonagricultural work force
was making material goods, and that percentage was shrinking very
slowly as nonmanufacturing service occupations expanded. The rate
of the shift away from manufacturing actually was decreasing during
the 1980s. Meanwhile, one-third of industrial workers remained in
low-skilled, manual jobs through the 1980s, and slow population
growth was limiting the growth of the work force. Nevertheless,
significant groups of workers were better educated and more
comfortable with mechanized and automated manufacturing than the
previous generation. In the late 1980s, labor shortages were
expected to stimulate faster automation of some industries.
Official modernization plans called for eliminating 5 million
manual jobs by the year 1990 and 20 million by the year 2000, and
reductions were targeted for specific industries. Reductions in the
labor force could not always be planned for areas where available
labor was decreasing naturally. This situation meant that job
elimination could bring unemployment in some places--especially
since most of the jobs eliminated would be those requiring the
least skill. Because unemployment theoretically cannot exist in a
socialist (see Glossary) state, that prospect was a potentially
traumatic repercussion of the effort at industrial streamlining.
Poor labor ethics have traditionally undermined Soviet
industrial programs. Gorbachev's perestroika made individual
productivity a major target in the drive to streamline industry in
the late 1980s. But the goal met substantial resistance among
ordinary workers because it called for pegging wages directly to
productivity and eliminating guaranteed wage levels and bonuses.
Thus, the Soviet Union possessed a vast labor base that was
very uneven in quality. In economic plans for the last decade of
the twentieth century, planners placed top priority on
redistributing all resources--human and material--to take advantage
of their strengths. The drive for redistribution coincided with an
attempt to streamline the organization of the industrial system.
Data as of May 1989
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