Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2017 number

Using a microhistorical approach the article examines the process of labor rate setting and the mechanism of its toughening in the industry of Altai region in 1940s- 1980s as an aspect of the industrial labor motivation problem in the Soviet Union, which analysis is closely related to discussions about causes of the Soviet socialism model crisis and collapse. A methodological approach established in the modern historical science is used, it proposes to distinguish three groups of work incentives: coercion, compensation and commitment. They are also different due to the motivation purpose: incentives to attract employees to an enterprise, and incentives promoting productive and intensive labor. The state of rationing is a factor determining the piecework system effectiveness as a compensatory (financial) incentive to increase productivity, and the mechanism of standards toughening is an independent way of employees’ labor coercive intensifications. The paper analyzes large engineering enterprises created on the basis of Kharkov and Stalingrad tractor plants in the early1940s after their evacuation: Altai Tractor Plant (ATP) in Rubtsovsk and Transport Engineering Plant («Transmash») in Barnaul. The article describes the state policy evolution on the matter of labor rationing, shows decreasing a coercive component in the mechanism for raising standards, which occurred simultaneously with the transferring the regulation control to the plant administration in the second half of the 1950s. The author has reconstructed the actions by masters and foremen of the selected plants and analyzed the dynamics of performing norms by piece-workers, which led to the conclusion about underestimated labor norms in the plants, a widespread practice of additions to the workers’ real production and a general lack of demands to toughen norms by plant managers as a motivation tool due to the need to provide a guaranteed level of workers’ income under conditions of a high staff turnover typical for the analyzed period.