COMMUNISTS: Iron Hands

When they picked up their morning papers last week, Budapesters could scarcely believe their eyes. The front-page attack on lazy Hungarian workers sounded like a product of “the slanderous propaganda machinery of Wall Street industrialists,” and yet it had been signed by none other than Matyas Rakosi, the country’s No. 1 Communist.

Neither workers nor administrators seem to realize, Rakosi complained, “that labor discipline is a political weapon of prime importance.” He revealed that wages had increased by 20%, despite a decrease in industrial productivity, a clear violation of “the supreme law of socialist work, that living standards can only be improved by increased productivity.”

Tardiness on the part of factory workers and state employees, Rakosi went on, has greatly increased. Some factories have separate time clocks which register 7 a.m. all day long for the benefit of latecomers. The number of absentees and sick has risen to an unprecedented height. In one week, for example, 500 employees of the State Cattle Administration were absent on sick leave. When visited by supervisors sent around by the state-controlled trade union, only one of the absentees was home—and he was celebrating his wedding.

Managerial personnel, Rakosi said, “do not have sufficient determination to create the necessary discipline with iron hands . . . They try to avoid the thankless duty of disciplining their workers and instead seek to establish a sort of ‘good fellow’ spirit by which they ensure their own popularity.” From now on, he concluded, “managers and foremen who tolerate bad work, bad discipline and laziness . . . will be relentlessly eliminated.”

In the Communist fatherland, Bolshevik bosses were also having trouble with men who coddled the worker. “Some managers,” Moscow’s Pravda whined, “are prone to show off their lavishness and kindness at the expense of the state, under the guise of awards and presents. They encourage all kinds of . . . soirées and banquets on any and every occasion—or even without any reason whatsoever.”