Although economic development is still in its infancy, growing concern has been officially expressed about the adequacy of the labor force to meet the needs of industrialization and of expanding social services without adversely affecting agricultural production. The main cause of the incipient labor shortage is low productivity owing to a lack of industrial experience, a low level of mechanization, and the survival of backward traditional methods in agriculture. Officially, low productivity has been ascribed to poor labor discipline and inefficient management arising from an inadequately developed sense of political and social responsibility. It has also been blamed on a failure of manpower planning and on the relaxation of central controls over enterprise funds.
At the end of 1969 the Central Committee of the Party adopted a decision on means for correcting this situation. An important element of the program is the education and political indoctrination of the workers. This task is a major function of the trade unions, which are primarily a political arm of the Party for the control of labor, without any significant responsibilities in the field of labor relations ([see ch. 6], Government Structure and Political System).
In 1967, the last year for which official employment data are available, the working-age population comprised 932,000 persons, 739,200 of whom were actually employed. The number of employed did not include roughly 6,000 peasants working on the private holdings still remaining in that year. Including these peasants, the participation rate in the labor force was 80 percent.
Two-thirds of the labor force was employed in agriculture, the remainder in a variety of nonagricultural pursuits, chief among which were industry, construction, trade, and education. Apart from the peasants working their own land, farm labor included about 427,000 persons on collective farms and 64,000 on state farms. The industrial labor force of 105,300 accounted for 14.1 percent of total employment, and 40,000 construction workers, for 5.4 percent. The nearly 32,000 workers in trade and 25,000 workers in education constituted, respectively, 4.2 and 3.4 percent of the employed manpower.
The officially reported labor force, which comprises nonagricultural labor and state farm workers only, increased by 53 percent between 1960 and 1967, from 203,800 to 312,400 persons. The increase represents an annual growth rate of 6.3 percent. At this rate, the labor force in 1970 would be about 375,000 persons. It has been informally reported as 400,000. Collective farm employment rose, in round numbers, from 282,000 in 1960 to 336,000 in 1966 and to 427,000 in 1967. The unusually large increase in 1967 resulted from an intensive drive to collectivize the remaining privately owned farms and also from a government policy of reversing the population flow from the farms to the cities. With the major reservoir of individual farms exhausted, the number of collective farm workers could increase up to 1970 by roughly 45,000 to 50,000 through natural population growth. Absence of data on rural-urban population shifts precludes any firm estimate of the size of the collective farm labor force in 1970.
According to preliminary estimates by the planning authorities, an increase of between 120,000 and 130,000 workers outside the collective farm sector would be needed to implement the industrial and social programs of the five-year plan for the 1971-75 period if productivity remained at the level of the 1965-69 period. The natural growth of the able-bodied urban population during this period was estimated not to exceed 29,000 persons. An outflow of up to 100,000 persons from the rural areas would therefore be necessary to meet the estimated manpower needs. Such a contingency could not be countenanced because of the severe damage it would inflict on the rural economy. Attainment of a higher rate of participation in the labor force and of a substantial increase in labor productivity has therefore been considered by the Party leadership of utmost urgency to ensure sustained economic development.
The latest evidence of the leadership's profound concern about these basic labor problems was provided by the Party's Central Committee plenum held at the end of December 1969, devoted to a discussion of means for raising productivity and tightening labor discipline. In its report delivered to the plenum, the Political Bureau (Politburo) of the Central Committee expressed strong dissatisfaction with what it considered an unsatisfactory rate of participation in employment by the collective farm population. It placed the blame for this situation on local government organs, which had become reconciled to the backward traditional concepts that keep homemakers and some young girls in the home and that require a member of the family to look after the family's privately owned livestock and thus be unable to seek outside work.
The Party's report also called attention to the prevalence of a petty bourgeois attitude among many families of workers, employees, and servicemen that keeps their members from accepting employment. To facilitate the employment of women, the Party urged more widespread provision of amenities, such as nurseries and dining halls, that would free them from household duties.
Meaningful information on labor productivity is not available because statistics on this subject have not been published and because essential details of the methods used in calculating the percentage rates of increase in productivity that appear from time to time in official public statements are not sufficiently known. Based on physical output and labor data, Western observers believe that the published data overstate the actual advance achieved.
According to the Politburo report, productivity in industry rose 2.2 times between 1950 and 1968, and this growth accounted for 60 percent of the increase in industrial production during that period. In agriculture 67 percent of the increase in output during those years was attributed to the growth of productivity. These figures indicate a slightly faster advance in agricultural productivity, but in absolute terms productivity in agriculture has been very much lower than in industry.