Politics and labour in the USSR: A case study in policy making

Completed

Not Energy Related
Other Cross-Cutting Technologies or Research(Environmental, social and economic impacts)

Basic and strategic applied research

SOCIAL SCIENCES (Politics and International Studies)
SOCIAL SCIENCES (Sociology)
AREA STUDIES (Asian Studies)

Not Cross-cutting
Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Other sociological economical and environmental impact of energy)

Dr N Lampert
University of Birmingham

Standard

ESRC

01 October 1984

31 December 1986

27 months

£33,970

No relevance to Underpinning Sectors

West Midlands

ESRC Coal

Dr N Lampert, University of Birmingham

Objectives not supplied

Economic prosperity in the USSR today is threatened by serious shortfalls in the growth of the working population as a result of birth rate declines in the 1960s. The labour shortage that has resulted is further exacerbated by the traditional labour-intensive methods of Soviet industry and the tendency for enterprise managers to hoard labour. In the current period of political transition since the death of Brezhnev in 1982, a lively debate is proceeding about the contours of a far-reaching reform of the Soviet economy. This project will look at one important aspect of economic reform - policy toward the allocation of labour among enterprises. Since the early 1950s the Soviet workforce has, in the main, found its jobs by methods familiar to workers outside the state socialist economies: advertisements at the factory gate, in newspapers, by word of mouth. The Soviet worker is free to choose his/her job and change jobs at will according to how they see their individual interests and inclinations. But this labour market has resulted in scarcities for the least desirable jobs and regions (even despite generous wage incentives not enough people want to be coal miners in Siberia). At the same time natural resource depletion is necessitating rapid development of Siberian energy and raw material sources. How are the workers to be encouraged to go where their labour is most needed. Apart from the significance of the labour shortage, the researchers at CREES think that a study oflabour policy-making will contribute to our knowledge of how policy is formed in the USSR, how priorities are determined, by whom, and how the various interest groups (the Communist Party, the government bureaucracy, the economic ministries, factory managers and workers themselves) view labour problems and the solutions proposed to alleviate them. The labour shortage in the USSR has been forecast by demographers now for nearly two decades. It has been suggested that the Soviet political processproduces tendencies for problems to be faced too late and for decision-makers then to push too fast and too far paying little heed to the impact of their decisions in other realms. This project will help us to confirm or reject this hypothesis.

03/11/11