WHAT ABOUT THE WORKERS?

Sarah Traxler on how

perestroika pinches for the ordinary Russian

Moscow TOWARDS the south-west edge of Mos- cow on a good day you can find several dozen Soviet-style entrepreneurs doing business at an outdoor flea market. A far cry from Portobello Road or the Porte de Clignancourt, their trestle tables nonethe- less display the ultimate in radical chic for those aspiring to vogue in a world capital of dubious taste. Their pink Donald Duck sweatshirts, flashy hand-crafted earrings, star-spangled black slit skirts and modishly long patterned jumpers are cheaper than the grim selection on sale at state fashion warehouses such as GUM, where a jersey can easily cost half the monthly wage. Police keep dispassionate watch as the tradesmen exploit the first material fruits of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms.

These happy beneficiaries of a slight easing of state control over the market have obtained licences to sell goods pro- duced theoretically in their spare time. Licence has also been granted to writers, theatre people and intellectuals to air a measure of their discontent with the absur- dities of the system. The expanded market in ideas has produced hope among some members of the intellectual elite that the withering away of creative endeavour which began with Lenin might be arrested if the reform process continues. But what about the soul of the working man under Gorbachev's socialism?

The prevailing wisdom at the factory gates is that reform means. trouble. No- body likes it. There is no new thinking. Faced with the prospect of price rises for food, pay cuts for poor-quality work and, God forbid, losing his job, the Soviet worker infinitely prefers the status quo. There are no more jokes that the only change since Gorbachev took over is the length of the vodka queues, for this is serious business.

Resentment takes various forms. Some, like the rough, drink-sodden crowd which packs the Smolensk Square 'Gastronome' liquor department at opening time, still seek solace in vodka. A brave few have dared to flout socialist legality by going on strike. A bus driver in the town of Chekhov, south of Moscow, explained his comrades' work stoppage last month as a protest against new quality controls which resulted in lower wages if the buses did not move on schedule. 'But how can we fulfil the plan if most of our buses look like tanks after a battle and their average age is the same as my grandmother's?' the driver not unreasonably complained.

His perplexity was reflected in blank stares from the audience when Gorbachev told a gathering of prominent citizens in Murmansk this month that trimming an `excessive workforce' would not mean un- employment, and higher prices for bread and meat would not cut standards of living. The 15 per cent of the Soviet workforce employed in the state bureaucracy could hardly have been pleased when Gorbachev declared that 'the bloated administrative apparatus' would have to be streamlined in order for his switch to more rational management methods to work.

Glasnost has provided Gorbachev with a convenient weapon in his battle for public support. Ending decades of concealment of just how poorly the country is doing, he and his team of economic advisers have decided to let the cat out of the bag, apparently in the hope that a dose of reality will jar the numbed narod into action.

Gorbachev's latest admissions — that bread is so undervalued ,that children kick loaves around as footballs, that new televi- sion sets stop working the day after purch- ase, that the 62 kilos of meat consumed annually by the average Soviet citizen cost the same as a pair of women's boots would seem to confirm what Western critics have maintained all along: that communism doesn't work. Not at all, he retorts. The problem is that we have failed to exploit the system's potential. By 'we', he of course means his Kremlin predeces- sors. To show where they went wrong, he has allowed the release of an astonishing array of statistics.

Thus we learn that Soviet citizens squan- der eight billion working days a year looking for goods in short supply. This is no news to the Soviet housewife, who besides hunting for products perennially in short supply, from coffee to toilet paper, now faces queues of up to one kilometre long for sugar, which is being rationed to prevent home brewing.

We learn that rent has not increased in the Soviet Union since 1928, the price of bread since 1954, of meat and dairy pro- ducts since 1962. But while official com- mentators formerly pointed to the low cost of living as one of the chief benefits of communist society, it now appears that the Soviet state has been extorting money from its workers by over-pricing manufactured goods to compensate for subsidies amount- ing to nearly 60 billion roubles a year for food alone. Thus, a small car costs 7,000 roubles, or three years' salary for the average worker. And not only that — the products don't work, because, it seems, within the vast bureaucratic reaches of USSR Inc., nobody gives a damn.

Gorbachev, who clearly does give a damn, has said his reforms will improve the quality of life without undermining com- munism's promise of security for all through guaranteed work, housing, food and health care. Like a doctor warning his patient that the jab might hurt a little bit, but it's good for you, he has informed his fellow-citizens that the going will be tough before they begin to see better days.

For workers in industries where quality control was introduced at the start of the year, this is already abundantly clear. Ten per cent of their goods were rejected as unfit for purchase in the first six months of 1987. As a result, the assembly line inspec- tors cut their wages by up to 50 roubles a month where the average monthly wage is 200 roubles.

But it is just the beginning. All the factories, farms, mines, service branches, research institutes and shops in the country are to be converted to 'self-financing' by 1989, in principle becoming fully responsi- ble for their own profits and losses — if the concept of profit and loss means anything at all in a communist economy. The guaranteed state market for what they produce will be cut. Some firms which can't make ends meet will be allowed to go bankrupt.

Gorbachev insists the result will be a healthier economy. But how does this affect the common man? One of my acquaintances manages a clothing shop in one of the newly built-up residential areas on the outskirts of Moscow. An outdoor type with a passion for sail-boarding, he used to receive a state salary high enough to maintain a comfortable, if modest, lifestyle and finance his sports activities. Now the shop has been made self-financing and his fixed salary has disappeared. He is meant to pay himself and his staff from the proceeds of sales of the same drab coats and trousers. Forced to rely on supplies from a state garment industry using antiqu- ated equipment to churn out clothing nobody wants, he has seen his income decline drastically. His sales girls now earn just 80 roubles a month.

'No one is thinking about any of this,' he remarks. 'To switch to self-financing we need a base which guarantees we get clothes of decent quality so we can sell them. But this base doesn't exist. Imagine you have an old house and you want to rebuild it. You start by buying new mate- rials — otherwise you can't rebuild.'

This is a problem facing the bulk of the population as Gorbachev's economic re- construction programme, perestroika in Russian, takes hold. It's a Catch-22 situa- tion. Workers are being told to work harder or face punishment in the form of lower pay. But with all the will in the world, the most industrious worker can't perform well if he is crippled by inadequate means of production.

Meanwhile economists have informed people that they may be paying twice as much for bread, meat, milk and energy when the price rises take effect in 1990. Rents will go up. To stave off unemploy- ment, the state plans to launch retraining schemes and redeploy workers to far-flung areas where their new skills are needed. One economist has suggest this could affect 18 million people.

Appearing on television the other day, Abel Aganbegyan, an economic adviser to Gorbachev viewed as a co-architect of his reforms, spoke of the need for 'psycholo- gical perestroika' to make workers take more interest in achieving better results. But it is far from evident that the Russian masses are ready to have their minds reconstructed on orders of the latest Krem- lin tsar. Gorbachev may have captured the imagination of an intelligentsia eager for change. His reforms are undoubtedly pro- fiting a handful of artisans and former black-marketeers who can now operate legally. But the thinking working man has other things on his mind these days. In his unreconstructed way, he is worrying about how he will feed his family when the full weight of reform comes down.