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.TREATMENT AND RESULTSWorkers and managers bore some responsibility for not regulating laborutilization effectively.Visiting the United States in 1930, the designer A.N.Tupolev (cited by Kerber 1999: 50) was astonished not just by the Americanfactories technological level but also by the American workers attitudes toworking time.  Their factories [give] a surprising impression you walk fromone workshop to another and you never see a single idle person.I gave PetrIonovich [Baranov] a nudge: I bet you re waiting like me to find some workersstanding behind this door having a smoke.But there weren t we saw nobodysmoking or chatting! This is not what Tupolev was used to in the Soviet Union.Tupolev thoughtdiscipline could be best improved not by penalizing cigarette breaks moreseverely but by enhancing working conditions.He inspected factories reg-ularly and not infrequently made scandalous discoveries: once he found afishbone in a glass of fruit juice; another time he marched a factory director tothe workers toilet and lectured him on the relation between filth and productquality (Kerber 1999: 53).The general level of working culture was not particularly high, however,even in the leading factories.A report on factory no.1 notes:   Labor disciplinelow.The workers drink, a great deal at times, and turn up drunk, especiallyafter being paid.The factory is severely lacking in higher and middletechnical personnel and skilled workers.  " A serious bottleneck was the lowproportion of working time that was used productively.In a lecture on   Mod-ern Aircraft Abroad  (cited by Ivanov 1995: 150 51) the designer N.N.Pol-ikarpov lamented:Reading our newspapers we see that in a number of branches we find thephenomenon of so-called storming (shturmovshchina) when 50 to 60 percentof the production program is completed in the last week of the month, but[only] 2 or 3 percent in the first week.I am always amazed by the planningand discipline that exist abroad.You arrive at the factory and you see that noone is in a rush, everyone is working calmly.If they see you, even if they take a break, it doesn t break into their work.The Market for Labor in the 1930s 185You think: working like that, how can they get first-class results? It turns outthat of the eight or nine hours that they spend at work each day they areactually working eight or nine hours; meanwhile we are rushing around,doing something or other, but actually working two or three hours a day andwe have no idea how we spend the rest of the time without making an input.Even if he exaggerated for effect, for two to three hours of real work per shift issurely too little, Polikarpov s overall judgment is supported by other evidence.The party central committee s industrial department, for example, investi-gated aircraft factories no.24 and no.29 in connection with their successfulcompletion of the 1936 annual plan.The audit established that in the first tenmonths of the year only 57 percent of the aircraft plan had been completed,and 76 percent of the aircraft engine plan." The lag of reality behind the planthat gave rise to the need for storming had accumulated not only within eachmonth but also across the months of the year.In short, Polikarpov s bitterwords were hardly news for the industry s leaders.The investigation definedthe industry s management problems in the mid-1930s precisely as follows:Managers rely on storming instead of production improvement.In the firstnine months of 1936 in just seven factories (no.1, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, and 29)there were 3,156,000 hours of downtime and 5,676,000 hours of overtime.Substandard goods made up 31.4 percent of the value of commodity outputof factory no.29 and 15 percent for factory no.24.The current Sovnarkomdecree on factories material accountability for substandard goods is not nor-mally enforced.Chief Brandt of no.2 machinery workshop, factory no.24,claims:   We are afraid to fine shoddy workers since even without that we areexperiencing a labor shortage.  A very large proportion of substandard workis the consequence of unpunished violations of production processes andweak labor and technological discipline.Those who violate labor disci-pline are often leading factory employees.As a rule the workshop chiefs atfactory no.22 go home at midnight or 1 a.m.; at least five times a month thedirector holds meetings with the workshop chiefs that begin not earlier than11 p.m.and finish at 3 or 4 a.m.Because of this the workshop chiefs areusually late to work.When the [overall] program is not completed the great majority of workers[still] overfulfill their [individual] work norms.At factory no.1 only 4 percentof the workers have not fulfilled their norms.Factory no.22 has fulfilled [only]40 percent of the annual program, but less than 7 percent of workers have notfulfilled their norms.Factory no.31 has fulfilled 18 percent of the program, butonly 28 workers have not fulfilled their norms.A huge quantity of work time isspent on substandard work, repairs, and remedial work.There is colossallabor turnover, 25 percent in total across the aircraft industry."186 Mikhail MukhinIn some respects the aircraft industry came out ahead of other high-technologysectors.It led, for example, in its approach to pay and incentives.In 1930, forexample, 65 percent of the employees of factory no.1 were on piece ratescompared with only 42 percent at another technologically advanced enter-prise, the Moscow Elektrozavod.À But this lead was not maintained.In 1938and 1939 fewer than 62 percent of the total working time in the aircraftindustry was paid by piece rates, and this was less than the 63 percent recordedin 1932.+" One explanation may be that factory no.1 was atypical; it was oneof the oldest plants not just in the industry but in the country.It was beyondthe capacity of the newer factories, often scattered far from the establishedindustrial centers and plagued by recruitment difficulties, to catch up in thisregard.The Stakhanov movement did not pass by the aircraft industry.In 1936 nofewer than 1,758 of the 8,452 employees of factory no.19 were registeredStakhanovites.© This certainly gave some striking results.Before Stakhanov-ism it took two workers per shift to produce seven or eight rear engine covers.Using Stakhanovite methods two workers, Fedineev and Tot, raised the rate to18.Their earnings per shift also rose from 10 or 11 rubles to 25 to 30 rubles.This was a real achievement.But it could not be generalized to all lines of workor all factories (Mukhin 2003).The Aviation Workforce: Some TrendsPRODUCTIVITY AND PAYWe will now compare the position of workers in the aircraft industrywith that in other defense branches.The aircraft industry was to some extentgathering weight at this time, its employment share in the ministry of defenseindustry rising from 17 percent in 1933 to 19 percent in 1936."`" Figure 7 [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]