The Communist Unemployed

A month ago, chuckling gleefully over the U.S. recession, Russia's Nikita Khrushchev trotted out a timeworn Communist taunt: "Unemployment is the inevitable companion of capitalism." Last week, in the "workers' paradise" constructed by the Reds in Poland, laboring men were learning that unemployment can be a companion of Communism too.

Hewing religiously to Moscow blueprints, the Polish Communists had tried to industrialize Poland overnight. To staff new factories, they drew hundreds of thousands of unskilled peasants off the land, padded the payrolls with thousands of Poland's aged who were unable' to live on their pensions. Before long, state-owned enterprises employed 6,800,000 workers--about 1,500,000 more than they could use efficiently. This did not bother the planners. "In the past," concedes a functionary of the Nowa Huta steelworks, "our managers thought that the more workers we had. the more steel we would produce."

As any capitalist could have warned, things did not turn out that way. At the Zeran auto plant, 8,000 workers are currently building 15,000 cars a year (U.S. auto workers in a good year produce ten cars or more per man). At Nowa Huta, 18,000 workers last year turned out 984,000 tons of steel. Shrugs one Polish Red: "We might as well admit it--in Poland the average worker produced less than 55 tons of steel last year; in West Germany he produced 140 tons."

Irreverent Remedy. At the Eleventh Plenum of Poland's Communist United Worker's Party two months ago, tough-minded Wladyslaw Gomulka, who rose to power partially on the strength of his outspoken criticism of his predecessors' economic bungling, argued that impoverished Poland could no longer afford such inefficiency. His remedy: mass dismissal of surplus, lazy and unskilled workmen. In effect, he tacitly confessed that the price of Communist full employment is intolerably low productivity and a uniform level of poverty. A handful of hardcore Stalinists who have never reconciled themselves to Gomulka's lack of reverence for Russian economic and political practice fought the proposal bitterly, but in the end Gomulka carried the day. At Nowa Huta 800 men have already been fired, and another 3,200 will be laid off during the next year. Hundreds of other Polish factories plan similar cuts.

Putting the best possible face on the firings, Poland's economic bosses emphasize that there are fields in which labor is short in Poland--coal mining, construction, public transport. These will provide jobs for some of the displaced workers; others will probably return to the farm or find work in the devastated and unpopular western provinces that Poland got from Germany at the end of World War II. But the cold fact remains that the government apparently plans the dismissal of 200,000 to 300,000 workers for whom there will be no other jobs anywhere.

"Is It Fitting?" Sense-making as it may be economically, Gomulka's new policy is full of political bear traps. Unlike most satellite rulers. Gomulka holds power not because the Russians support him, but because the Polish people do: he is the most independent Communist the Poles can hope for. Unless he paces his firings carefully, his attempt to run Polish industry on a rational basis may well cost him much of his domestic popularity. Last week on the walls of Nowa Huta appeared the scrawled slogan: "Workers against dismissal!" In a letter to the editor of the party paper Slowo Ludu, one worker plaintively inquired: "Is it fitting to discharge workers? Does one act this way in a Socialist system?"

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