It’s generally considered common wisdom in the US that one of the features of life in places like the USSR and East Germany was that you were pretty much guaranteed a job, with the corresponding meager, but good enough to not starve, pay. Of course, this is in contrast with life in the US where jobs are in short supply and people go begging for a job, any job.
Was this actually true of any Communist country?
How did job assignments work? For example, how much say did one typically have in their assignment? Obviously, they couldn’t accommodate everyone’s wishes and expect to retain a viable economy (lol), but did they generally respect reasonable requests or did they ignore you and put you wherever they wanted to? Were there skills assessments that determined if you should be a miner, iron worker, farmhand, truck driver, border guard, Army soldier, or whatever? Did people get sent all over the country or could you ask for a job in Dresden or wherever you wanted to live?
IIRC the constitution of the USSR guaranteed everyone a job. This was also true in China.
This actually led to backlash in China, when the reforms post-Mao started opening up economic opportunities. One of the big groups of people who weren’t occupied with jobs and were available to start these new ventures were former convicts. Their subsequent success was a source of tremendous annoyance for the educated class that still labored under the same old wages, and this was one of the big causes that sparked the Tiananmen protests. People forget that a significant amount of the anger in China at the time was because of what was seen as a betrayal of the ideology.
People went through the education systems and were kind of guided to their future careers with some choice on their part. Even the miners and farmhands were expected to be literate, so there was some opportunity to guide your path yourself, but it was limited. At times the governments could also draft people for work or military service. If you wanted to change jobs, you had to go through a lot of red tape. Where you lived was also difficult to change. Your household registration tied you to an area and it was very very hard to find the means to survive outside of it by yourself long-term. In China, even the coupons used to buy food were differentiated by place and you couldn’t buy food in Beijing with Shanghai coupons. Permanent movement was possible for creative types though, using strategies such as studying or marriage.
It varied. When I was in Ceausescu’s Romania in 1968, most people had pretty much any job they were qualified for and wanted, and people could change jobs. For unskilled labor, people were often just assigned to whatever job needed to be done. But for most people with high school education and a diploma, their schooling was often channeled according to their aptitude, and had their choice of several job opportunities as they arose. Obviously, who you knew had some influence in being able to get posted to desirable jobs.
Ordinarily, people were not just rounded up and hauled across the country and put to work in fields or mines. Manpower was kept local, and workers would be able to at leastl live at home and commute to work daily.
I was under the impression that was more ore leas the way it was in Poland and Hungary as well, but I was less familiar there than with Romania.
In Romania, Romanys appeared to enjoy a special status, remaining in their culture, and working fields in which they had considerable autonomy, and went into towns and sold their produce, technically illegally, but with impunity. This was early in the Ceausescu regime, and no doubt it became somewhat more rigid later on, when I was not there to observe it…
My stepdad is from Macedonia (Former Yugoslav Republic). What little I’ve gleaned from him includes that, while he excelled in math and sciences and dreamed of being a doctor, the state sponsored standardized tests placed him in school for mining engineering.
As has been stated, he didn’t get paid exceptionally well but he did okay for himself until the fall of communism in his country. Afterward, life got a bit more difficult for him but not exceedingly so. Once he came to the US, most of his engineering college credits transferred here, excepting only a few math courses that he retook to “finish” his degree. This speaks favorably of the schooling he recieved, I suppose.
One interesting thing to note is that Chinese career paths can start really young. So recruiters for China’s basketball program or their ballet program go around to various elementary schools and check the children for natural aptitude. Then they give the ones who make the cut the chance to go to a specialized elementary school, followed by specialized high school, specialized college, etc. as long as they keep making the cut for the next level.
My wife was checked for gymnastics aptitude and dancing aptitude as a young girl, but she didn’t make the cut. A former co-worker of mine was checked for ping pong talent at age 5 or 6, but she didn’t have what it takes.
One anecdote: I asked two students of an engineering university in (in Kazan’, IIRRC) on a visit in the mid-1980s how they got a job after graduation.
They told us the procedure was: plants registered the number of engineers they needed to hire in five years’ time with an educational administration; on graduation the graduates were ranked by grade and got to pick their employer, the best graduate having first pick and the worst graduate taking the one job that was still open.
There were small business sectors, accommodating privately-owned and run small businesses, in all the Soviet bloc countries - tightly regulated, heavily taxed, but nevertheless there. And, as certain economic commentators never tire of telling us, small businesses are the engine of job growth.
Small businesses hired who they wanted (and who they could attract). The result is that for many people there was an alternative to employment in the state sector, which meant that employment in the state sector had to be attractive enough that people would want to take it. Of course, the more highly-qualified you were, and the more your qualifications and experience made you a good fit with a large and well-resourced organisation, the less feasible was it to find a private-sector job. But for entry-level or unskilled or semi-skilled positions, there was quite a lot going.
I’m imagining changing jobs was not a lot unlike changing departments in a large corporation. If you were qualified in some way, and could get the destination to say they wanted you, and your current job to agree to let you go, then off you went. Nepotism and pull always count for something.
One complaint was that joining the party was a good way to get the necessary pull to help advance your career - but also allowed ass-kissers to be promoted beyond their level of competence (much like modern western corporations).
The forums software directed me here instead of creating a new thread, so thank you to everyone who answered the original thread. Some follow-on questions:
did all of the USSR operate on a similar principle to Mops’ Anecdote? Was there a labor assignment agency?
Did any countries operate with a system where students could submit a preference for the job allocators to consider?
Did the system described in jtur88’s post last until the fall of Ceausescu?
Does China still operate any kind of assigned labour system?
A small comment here: It’s not that the pay was meager; the problem was that many things that you might have wanted to buy with your pay were unavailable. Most citizens in socialist countries saved up a considerable part of their salaries: Basic essentials such as housing and groceries were subsidised and hence cheap; luxury items (and that included things such as cars and imported groceries such as coffee or tropical fruit) were either not available at all, or only intermittently available, or (in case of cars) you had to wait for years on a pre-order list to get them. But once an opportunity arose to get them, they were affordable. In a central planning economy, money doesn’t even remotely have the same importance for the allocation of goods as in capitalism.
I recall a few comments at the time about life in Communist bloc countries - the old joke was “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” People saved up a lot of money because there was not much to purchase in the stores. Consumer goods, and fancier foods, were hard to come by (there were plety of jokes about line-ups). For example, birth control pills and condoms were alomost impossible to find whereas medical treatment was free - so some women had had multiple abortions before they were ready to raise a family. One anecdote - when it started to rain, people pulled over and put on their windshield wipers - you don’t leave them on or someone would steal them. Pay was adequate but not great. It could take up to 10 years between the time you paid for a car and when you got delivery.
The state apparently also assigned you housing, so there was (as usual) a wait list and you got what you were assigned. This would also make it difficult to move to get a job, as alluded to above, because - unless you had connections or friends, where were you going to live?
Similarly, with guaranteed jobs for everyone, there were often too many workers, and with little motivation productivity was fairly low.
(Another joke about life in Romania near the end of communism:
Q: “What did Romanians use for light before they had candles?”
A: “Electricity.”)