Nonworkers of the World, Unite!

EASTERN EUROPE

Radio Bucharest last week played a tune that is becoming all too familiar in Eastern Europe. In scolding tones, it took Rumania's factory and office workers to task for "unexpected absences, temporary disappearances from the job, late starting and early finishing, too many conferences during working hours, and too much time spent on social activities on the job." At about the same time, Poland's Communist daily, Trybuna Ludu, warned Polish workers to lay off card playing and vodka drinking during working hours--practices that it charged are widespread. Reporting the "agony" of watching workers standing around idly, smoking cigarettes and chatting, Hungary's weekly Szabad FOeld recently described the country's labor situation as "desperate and terrible."

And so it is. Though Eastern Europe continues to hymn the glories of "worker" states and exhort its able-bodied to "work together to build a better life under socialism," the unsocialist truth is that its workers have become just about the world's biggest goof-offs. In Rumania, they cost industry $75 million in wasted time during the first four months of this year. Bulgaria lost 25 million man-days last year because of absenteeism. When Polish factory workers show up at all, says the Communist trade-union paper Glos Pracy, they "work only about 70% of their normal eight-hour day."

Planned Life. The problem is that the workers simply have little incentive to work longer. With the state running their lives and assuming the responsibilities normally reserved to the individual in other societies, the worker knows full well that the government will take care of him. Problems of organizational confusion, massive featherbedding, and a shoulder-shrugging bureaucracy stifle whatever little initiative might remain. Most of all, of course, there is a lack of pay incentive. Under socialism, there is little difference between the wages of skilled and unskilled workers, and almost no difference in pay between the worker who sweats over his machine and the nonworker who would rather flirt with shop girls, chat with colleagues, or take innumerable breaks for coffee, tea, snacks --or rest. Many workers even have their morning papers delivered to the factory, where they can read them with more leisure than at home.

In a society in which everyone gets paid roughly the same whether he works hard or loafs, it requires a person of stern morality indeed to opt for hard work. "Whether you sit or stand, you make two grand," goes the favorite slogan (in free translation) of the Polish working class, whose base salary is 2,000 zlotys (roughly $80) monthly. Some neither sit nor stand, but disappear out the factory gate at the first chance. "If you flew over Poland in a helicopter," says Jerzy Putrament, Polish author and member of the Commu nist Party Central Committee, "you would find more people fishing during working hours than in any other country in Europe." In Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Bulgaria, the nonworkers flock downtown on errands. On such forays, they are "attending a meeting" or "going to the Bureau of Statistics." Czechoslovakia's daily Zemedelske Noviny estimates that the 450 inhabitants of one village that it studied spent more than 15,000 working hours yearly at so-called "meetings."

To complicate matters, Eastern European workers have never really adjusted to socialism's 7 a.m. starting time, when everyone is supposed to be on the job. In Budapest and Bucharest, where the summer nights are long and lingering, everyone tends to eat late and drink still later. At 3 in the morning, the visitor can still hear the builders of socialism singing as they weave down the Lenin KOerut or Boulevard Magheru. Besides, says a Czech auto technician, "it is uncivilized to get to the plant at 7 in the morning. Particularly when you know the material will not be there, and if it is there, the machine won't be working, or your manager will have changed his mind and want the job done another way."

Two-Year Adjustment. Eastern Europe's nirvana of nonwork, of course, is the price Communism pays for full employment. Because of the nonwork mentality, Westerners do not look for any quick adoption of modified free enterprise or state capitalism in Eastern Europe; the area simply lacks enough efficient workers to make it work. Their hope is that a gradual shift to economic liberalism would provide workers and managers with enough incentives so that the desire for material gains would grow stronger than the tendency to goof off. Managers would also have to fire at least 30% to 40% of their workers, and spend years re-educating the others to the disciplines of modern, efficient production.

Istvan Nagy, a trained engineer who escaped from Hungary three years ago and settled in West Germany, learned just how difficult that adjustment could be. "It took more than two years," he recalls, "and during that time I often thought of returning to that soft, easy life where everything is thrown at you from above. I almost did. But now that I am involved again in work, I couldn't ever do it."

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