The main function of the union is to select and prepare future Party members. It is also required by the Party to control all Pioneer organizations, which embrace all children from seven to fourteen years of age; to see to it that all Party directives and policies are implemented by the country's youth, especially in schools and in military units; and to mobilize the youth into so-called voluntary labor brigades to work on production projects. The Party often gives the union special storm trooper or Red Guard types of missions to perform. For example, in February 1967 Enver Hoxha assigned to the organization the mission of shutting down all places of worship in the country; within a period of a few months, the union had accomplished its mission.
The Democratic Front, successor to the National Liberation Front, was defined by Enver Hoxha, who has headed it since 1945 and was still its president in 1970, as the greatest political revolutionary organization of the Albanian people and as a powerful weapon of the Party for the political union of the people. In 1970 the Democratic Front continued to be a key element in the Party's control mechanism. Considered officially as the broadest mass organization, it was supposed to give expression to the political views of the entire population and to serve as a school for mass political education.
The tasks and objectives of the Democratic Front, as set forth in its statute and as constantly reiterated by Party leaders, include the strengthening of political unity among the people and the mobilizing of the people for the implementation of Party policies. The spreading of the Marxist-Leninist ideology is also a task of the front, as is the purging of any attitudes that are considered backward and reactionary. In essence, the front is an instrument of the Party, expressly designed for the political control of the entire population. Enver Hoxha declared in a speech to the Fourth Congress of the Democratic Front in 1967 that all citizens over age eighteen were members of the front, including Party members and members of all other mass organizations.
The Union of Albanian Women is also referred to as a powerful weapon of the Party. The union, headed in 1970 by Vito Kapo, wife of Secretary of the Party Central Committee Hysni Kapo, controls and supervises the political and social activities of the country's women, handles their ideological training, and spearheads the Party's campaign for the emancipation of women. The campaign was launched by Hoxha in June 1967 and renewed in October 1969 in a Hoxha speech to the Party Central Committee.
The Union of Albanian Women, according to reports by visitors has a good record of assistance to the Party in making legal, economic, and social equality for women a reality. By 1970 women shared responsibility in the government at all levels, had entered all the professions, and worked side by side with men for equal pay in most occupations.
By 1967 the union was able to boast that more than 284,000 women took part in production in some way, mostly in industrial plants and agricultural collectives. In the same year there were about 40 women, out of a total of 240 deputies, in the People's Assembly; 1,878 women in the people's councils; and 1,170 in the people's courts.
Since 1967 task forces of women from the cities have been dispatched to tour backward regions, particularly the highlands, explaining the Party's line on the emancipation of Albanian women. Reforms such as giving women equal rights to inherit property, an equal voice in the people's councils, and equal political rights, however, have created considerable hostility in a country where man has traditionally been the master of the family.
The tasks of the United Trade Unions are similar to those of the Democratic Front, albeit on a more limited scale. During ceremonies in February 1970 marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the trade unions, it was stated that they were created by the Party, that they had since struggled to implement the Party line, and that they recognized the Party leadership as the "decisive factor of their force and vitality." It was stated further that they were created jointly with the dictatorship of the proletariat for its consolidation and defense and as an important component part of this dictatorship.
In a conference in Tirana on February 10, 1970, Gogo Nushi, then president of the trade unions, boasted that they had become powerful levers of the Party in implementing the Party line among all the country's workers, who had grown from some 30,000 in February 1945 to about 400,000 in February 1970. At the same conference Politburo member Adil Carcani, in a speech dealing with the functions of the trade unions, attributed to them the task of exercising control over all workers.
Other duties and responsibilities of the trade unions in 1970, according to Tonin Jakova, General Secretary of the General Council of the United Trade Unions of Albania, were to carry out the political and ideological education of the workers; to influence all the other strata of the population so that the class ideology should gradually become the sole ideology of the society; to broaden their control and sphere of action in all fields of life—political, ideological, cultural, artistic, social, economic, and educational; to increase labor productivity by increasing work norms; and to struggle against old traditions and backward customs, with emphasis on religious beliefs. In listing the duties and responsibilities of the trade unions not a word was said about their safeguarding the interests of the workers, such as improving their living and bargaining with the management.