Planning Labour: Time and the Foundations of Industrial Socialism in Romania by Alina-Sandra Cucu

Author:Alina-Sandra Cucu [Cucu, Alina-Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Labor, Europe, Labor & Industrial Relations, Eastern, Political Science, History, General, Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781789201864
Google: PeV1DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 44038472
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2019-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Table 3.2 Average monthly income (Romanian Lei).

Although slightly decreasing, the disparity between retail prices in urban and rural areas was maintained for the whole period. In the mid-1980s, retail prices in the countryside were still 10 per cent higher on average than in the cities. The ‘alliance between peasantry and the working class’ was built around the impossibility of the former to become workers themselves on the collective farms. Pensions for collective farmers were introduced as late as 1971, while individual farmers got access to pensions in 1977. Both were much lower than for industrial workers.31 Allocations for children in the villages were also introduced later but were approximately two-thirds of those in the cities.

With life in the villages under increasing pressure, wage work did become a safety net for young workers and for their families. But the planners were ‘anxious to avoid the heavy costs to families forced to move into urban growth centres in conditions frequently unsatisfactory, and considered such levels of inter-regional migration undesirable’.32 Commuting and not transforming peasants into urban workers came to be considered the strategy for covering the necessary workforce, for keeping labour cheap and for solving the housing problem.33 It met with peasants’ historically produced ‘stubbornness’ to reproduce their lives qua peasants – not through the so much commented upon conservative thinking and resistance to change but through the incorporation of new resources and possibilities into a life they knew.

It was thus a sign of success that migration as a whole indeed declined sharply, from 20.9 per thousand inhabitants in 1956 to 14.5 in 1964, short-distance migration routes became prevalent, and commuting became the preferred way to bring workers from the rural population into the factories.34 Cities like Cluj, which were administratively ‘closed’ because of the paralysing lack of housing, were following this trend from the beginning. The solution adopted by people from other regions who wanted to work in Cluj was to settle in the villages surrounding the city and commute daily from there. A suburban belt was created, one that offered people the possibility to live in individual houses, grow vegetables in their gardens, and raise animals in addition to their factory work. It was an explicit attempt to ‘enable rural dwellers to combine the advantages of cooperative farm membership and rural amenity with a salary derived from industrial employment, and also enable the state to limit its urban housing programme’.35

This strategy that connected territory, population, capital investment and employment in specific ways represents the background against which the fundamental acts of primitive socialist accumulation – the nationalization of the factories and the collectivization of land – unfolded on the ground. The labour regime produced within this nexus was dependent on the gradual ‘shrinking of life’ in the villages, which preceded and accompanied collectivization of land for more than a decade. As the rest of the chapter will show, this labour regime brought together on the shop floor experienced industrial workers, former artisans and craftsmen, newcomers to the city who had

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