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DER SPIEGEL said:There is still hardly an industrial plant in the GDR that doesn´t herald before its factory gates on large panels that workers of all kinds are searched "from the non-working population". To poach staff from other firms by references to such rarities as guaranteed holiday pitches at the Baltic Sea or a free company housing is prohibited to socialist managers for years with punishment.
Like no other industrial country in the world the GDR has systematically tapped its labor force potential to the last man and the last woman. Although the population between the Baltic Sea and the Erz Mountains shrank by more than one and a half million people in the time from 1951 to 1981, in the same period the number of employed people, apprentices included, rose by more than a million from 7.7 to 8.8 million.
By far the largest share of this remarkable growth have the GDR women. Their mass occupation, as a key argument for the equality vaunted in the GDR, compensated not only the migration of 2.7 million East Germans to the west up to the wall bulding in 1961, but saved entire economy sectors from the imminent collapse due to workforce shortage.
In mobilizing women the GDR economy has now reached the end of the story by own opinion. Other labor reserves, such as the further-employment of age pensioners are also fully utilized. And foreign workers from other socialist countries, the East Berlin economy designers had never liked to count on.
Although up to 50 000 Poles and Hungarians were emplyed in the GDR industry towards the end of the seventies, this guest worker proportion never made ​​more than a maximum of one half of one percent of all employees. More recent figures are not available, but there is much evidence that the Polish contingent has been reduced considerably in the past two years by political reasons.
Central Comittee member Reinhold:
"The extensive sources of growth are substantially depleted. Neither are additional raw materials like fuels nor additional workforce available."
Anxiously, SED General Secretary Erich Honecker declared late last year that "in many industrial combines, labor productivity grows more slowly than production and is by thirty percent too low compared with the Federal Republic." (= West Germany).
Therefore rationalization and intensification are the magic words of the economic diet program, by which the East German industry is supposed to slim down in two directions: on the one hand, more economical and more effective use of material, on the other hand, savings and release of labor forces for new industries, such as microelectronics, as well as for long-time underserved areas such as service companies.
How this can look like in a centrally managed industrial society, which neither knows the economic sanction of dismissal and unemployment nor the bankruptcy of uneconomic companies, demonstrates the Petrochemical Combine (PCK) (and others of course) in Schwedt at the Oder, largest oil processing plant in the GDR, for several years. "At the end of the seventies", describes PCK general director Werner Frohn the situation, "we have been faced with the decision to continue to operate new facilites with the existing people or restrict the further development of the company."
Within four years, 2400 workers were released in the parent company, of which every fifth from the administration, retrained at the cost of the company and employed in new production facilities. The result: the bureaucratic share of the total workforce shrank from 28.5 percent to 22.3 percent and labor productivity rose faster than the production of goods for the first time in the plant.
However, the workers struggle with the "new-prussian" work ethic, for which the SED constantly beats the drum. But the millions of cases of absenteeism and tardiness, which economic officials repeatedly add together to impressive economic losses, are rarely an expression of political refractoriness, but rather a natural effect of the total labor society: Where the work takes so much of the life of the individual, life necessarily must also take place during the working time.
One highlight was the EC 1835 Personal Computer, one of the last results of the GDR computer developemnet and manufacturing.The GDR produced some fine goods !
