Annette Wilczek. Einkommen--Karriere--Versorgung: Das DDR-Kombinat und die Lebenslage seiner Beschäftigten. Berlin: Metropol, 2004. 280 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography. EUR 19.00 (paper), ISBN 3-936411-45-X.
Reviewed by: Thilo Schimmel, Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Published by: H-German (July, 2005)
Negotiating Company Life in East Germany
Two seemingly contradictory paradigms thrive in recent historiography on the GDR. While the repressive and controlling powers exerted by the SED through the MfS have been at the forefront of studies reviving the totalitarian approach, social historical investigations, by contrast, have illuminated the party's need to negotiate when instituting policies on the ground level.[1] Wilczek's comparative investigation of two DDR-Kombinate belongs to the latter category. The author stresses that processes of negotiation employed by informal networks, rather than state repression, lay at the heart of company life in the GDR. Indeed, infractions of existing GDR law went unpunished or were even retroactively sanctioned by state authorities on the company level. This study indicates the complexity of East German society, in which the multiplicity of interests of the state party, local authorities, and company organizations, as well as groups of employees and workers, intersected and were negotiated at the micro-level of companies. But it also demonstrates the difficulties of incorporating the complexity of multiple, informal networks into a conceptual framework for a historical study.
The goal of Wilczek's examination of two East German Kombinate from the 1960s to the late 1980s, submitted as a dissertation at the Institute of Economics at the University of Mannheim in 2002, is to examine what the author terms, somewhat vaguely, the Lebenslage of East German workers and employees by means of a solely economically defined living standard. As the unreliable East German data does not allow for a quantitative analysis, this study employs qualitative indicators of the living standard, such as the ability of receiving a desired place of work, monetary income, access to the distribution of consumer goods through the company, and work satisfaction as methodological approximations. Wilczek chose the Stammbetriebe of VEB Elektrogertewerk Suhl (EGS) and Werkzeugmaschinenkombinat Fritz Heckert, which were fairly typical in size for East German companies, as sites for her case study. They are thus representative of the work environment of the majority of East German employees, but differentiated by the fact that Heckert was a state-favored Schwerpunktbetrieb. Focusing on the strategies used by employees, company leadership, and state and local authorities in negotiations over income, commodities, and services, the study aims to compare and contrast the full spectrum of life situations in both companies, to insert these findings into the historiography on the East German economy in general, and speak to the conditions of everyday life in Kombinaten.
In the first analytic chapter of her study, Wilczek focuses on hiring and retention strategies employed by East German Kombinate to stem the tide of worker fluctuation as well as employee counter-strategies. She argues that the ability to switch employment, legally guaranteed in the GDR, provided workers and employees with a significant means of altering their life situation through acquiring better access to company-provided goods and services. It would have been interesting, though, to investigate other possible factors for worker fluctuation, such as socialist rationalization measures, the introduction of shift work or Neuerermethoden mentioned elsewhere in the study, which might have been given a more prominent place throughout to test whether work conditions did not factor into this fluctuation as well. Overall, the hiring process was marked by a lack of transparency. To prevent workers from leaving the company, employers preferred, initially, to refuse to hand out cadre files, without which it was impossible to obtain a position elsewhere. In the intervening period, the leadership of both companies aimed to persuade the hiring company and even the SED to refrain from targeting its workers in state-sponsored projects, as well as to persuade or pressure the employee into staying in conversation. Consequently, workers and employees remained secretive as long as possible about their desire to vacate their position and renegotiated their work situation only after. This practice meant that the hiring company remained in the dark about the specific qualification of the person targeted. This lack of transparency can account, for instance, for companies' failure to hire according to state-formulated qualification requirements.
Next to the ability to choose one's place of employment, Wilczek uses monetary income as a restricted indicator of the life situation in the DDR-Kombinat, though she cautions that money did not automatically mean access to goods in a planned economy. In particular, she investigates the relationship between the implementation of income policies from above and the ability of different groups within companies to negotiate their wages and salaries on the ground. The author argues that wage experiments for workers were doomed to fail, as the conundrum of tying wages to performance while simultaneously having to compensate workers for periods of waiting, due to the irregular nature of planned production, was never overcome. Ironically, wage experiments increased the incomprehensibility of wage schemes and thus increased the conflicts between workers on one side and foremen and technologists on the other, and actually strengthened workers' positions in these negotiations. While groups of workers--but not workers as a class--were able to exert pressure to secure steadily rising incomes, employees with higher salaries negotiated their incomes on an individual basis with company directors. Kombinat directors often awarded their favored employees higher incomes, occasionally illegally, which in several instances were retroactively sanctioned by state authorities. These actions, however, created a financial spiral downwards, as the dependency of mid-level functionaries and company directors alike on production workers exerted pressure to extend such favors downward.[2] Varying informal networks thus prevented the implementation of wage policies according to the principle of equal wages for equal work, which, in turn, mitigated the importance of income as a performance stimulant.
As a third indicator of workers and employees' Lebenslagen in the DDR-Kombinat, Wilczek investigates access to goods and services, such as food, housing, or vacation spots, that were distributed within companies. The sources did not allow the author to establish the exact criteria for the distribution of everyday goods--many goods in both companies were handed out informally by unions and brigades without a written record, a fact which in itself highlights the importance of negotiations within such group networks. Despite the narrow source base, however, Wilczek is able to conclude that access to goods at Heckert was not only better because it was a Schwerpunktbetrieb, but also as a result of regional variation. Heckert was situated in an industrial district, which prevented major conflicts about the distribution of goods. In contrast to EGS, there was a sufficient amount of goods for both the general population and company members. This was not the case, however, in housing, which consistently failed to function as a tool for creating the desired Stammbelegschaft, as targeted workers could not be provided with housing. Thus, Wilczek concludes that the distribution of goods and services through the company failed to function as extrinsic motivators for increased performance, as the negotiated nature of their distribution made the entire process appear inherently unfair, thus mitigating their importance.
In the final section of the study, Wilczek interjects into her mainly economic analysis the notion of work satisfaction for more highly qualified employees. Here, she challenges the view that industrial managers in the GDR focused on the success of the company while simultaneously attempting to further the cooperation among the different social groups within the company, a stance which led managers to neglect their individual careers. Instead, Wilczek argues that managers, similar to foremen who had to negotiate the wages of workers painstakingly, were frustrated by demands from the political authorities as well as constant criticism from workers and therefore simply refused to pursue career advancement. In her view, such dilemmas prevented many employees from seeking further work qualifications and thus altering their life situation.
This study of the DDR-Kombinat and the life situation of its employees is a meticulous investigation that chronicles vividly and in great detail the workings of informal networks and their strategies to further their own ends in a shortage economy. Particularly when drawing on the rich Eingaben from company archives, the author succeeds in portraying the enormous variety of all employees' Lebenslagen in both companies. The complexity of the findings, however, is also a weakness of the study. Ultimately, a more concise methodological framework would have benefited the book. Precisely defining the concept of Lebenslagen and analyzing how the multiple indicators, networks, negotiations, and strategies were interrelated and constitutive of life situations would not only have made the study more compact, but also perhaps provided a central argument rather than a long list of individual findings in the conclusion. Moreover, it would have been helpful to insert gender into the conceptual framework of informal networks, rather than noting only a few occurrences; one of the major features that the study aims to interrogate is differences between Heckert and EGS, which, after all, employed predominantly female workers. Despite these problems, Einkommen--Karriere--Versorgung is an important comparative examination of a central institution in East Germany's society, the Kombinat. It deserves to be read widely by economic and social historians alike for its many insights into the rich texture of company life.
Notes
[1]. Donna Harsch, "ConfRPT: New Understandings of East German History (CGCEH at AHA 2005, Session 19: Going to the Source," at http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-german&month=05…. H-German discussion logs, February 18, 2005.
[2]. This view modifies the claim by Peter Alheit and Hanna Hauck, in a concurrently published study, that workers destroyed the GDR economically, though unintentionally. Die vergessene Autonomie der Arbeiter: Eine Studie zum frhen Scheitern der DDR am Beispiel der Neptunwerft (Berlin: Dietz, 2004), p. 11.
Citation: Thilo Schimmel. "Review of Annette Wilczek, Einkommen--Karriere--Versorgung: Das DDR-Kombinat und die Lebenslage seiner Beschftigten," H-German, H-Net Reviews, July, 2005. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=313921126881272.
Copyright (c) 2005 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: .