APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110024-7
D. Societal aspects of labor
1. Manpower resources
The labor force totaled 8,218,000 persons in 1970 and accounted for 48.2% of the total population and 83.3% of the population of working age.[1] The labor force figure does not include approximately 225,000 to 250,000 persons in "confidential" categories of employment (armed forces, internal security forces, workers in uranium mines and defense plants, and persons abroad on diplomatic and economic missions), a group which is omitted altogether in the government's annual estimates.
The labor force in 1970 was considerably smaller than in 1946, when over 8.7 million persons were counted as economically active. The massive East-to-West population movements of the first postwar decade reduced the 1946 figure to less than 8.2 million in 1955. Despite the regime's efforts to increase labor force participation, the ebb tide of emigration could not be overcome, and the labor force continued to decline, dropping to a postwar low of 7.9 million persons in 1963. From 1963 to 1967 the size of the labor force crept up to 8.2 million persons, and it has stabilized at this figure since then.
These trends in labor force growth reflect the highly unfavorable age and sex structure of the East German population attributable to low birth rates during and immediately after the First and Second World Wars and heavy wartime casualties. The share of the pension-age population (men 65 and over and women 60 and over) rose from 11% in 1939 to over 19% in 1970, one of the highest, in the world. The aging population creates particularly serious programs in agriculture, where more than one-third of the full-time workers are 50 and over. As for the share of the population under 15 years of age, a slow decline has been underway since 1966, and future labor force growth is thereby impossible from this source. By 1970 the working-age group accounted for only 57.8% of the total population, compared with 64.1% in 1950 (Figure 11). Only in terms of the restoration of parity between the sexes in the working-age population (in 1970 males comprised 49% of the working-age group and only 46% of the general population) as postwar age classes have entered the labor force have the effects of the two world wars been overcome. The diminishing rate of replacement of new workers for old has forced the regime to resort to a wide variety of techniques to sustain economic growth, including constant harangues for greater productivity, a stress on rationalization and labor-saving techniques, and increasing imports of short-term contract workers from East European labor surplus areas.
Although demographic factors alone would have been sufficient to bring about a shortage of labor, East Germany's unfavorable manpower situation was exacerbated by the loss of population through the mass flight to West Germany—a loss that was halted only by the closing of the Berlin border in 1961. It is estimated that 2.3 million people fled to the West between 1948 and 1961. Of the total leaving East Germany, about 75% were of working age, and an estimated 19,000 were engineers, technicians, and highly skilled workers.
The regime has been highly successful in encouraging a high rate of labor force participation. The share of the working-age population actually in the labor force rose from 72% in 1955 to 83% in 1967, at which point the proportion stabilized through 1970. This increase is attributable chiefly to greater participation by East German women. From 1955 to 1970 the proportion of economically active working-age women rose from 58% to 79%. The proportion of all women in the labor force, 43% in 1970, is comparable to that in the rest of Eastern Europe (U.S.S.R., 46%; Czechoslovakia, 43%), but is high when compared to Western industrialized countries (30% in both West Germany and the United States).
The proportion of working-age men who are economically active has held steady from 1955 to 1970 at 88%. However, the proportion of all East German males who were economically active has dropped slightly over the same period from 58% to 54% as male deficits caused by war losses are made up with the passage of time. The 1970 rate for East German men equalled that in Czechoslovakia and the United States but was surpassed in a number of countries, including West Germany (59%) and the U.S.S.R. (56%).
In the early postwar years, unemployment was a matter of some concern. Since 1955, however, the decline in the labor force, the recovery of the economy, and the resulting full utilization of almost all available manpower have resulted in the virtual disappearance of this problem. Abrupt changes of planning sometimes result in temporary periods of unemployment for some workers, but the regime usually acts quickly to move such workers into high-priority projects.
Similarly, there is no real underemployment. However, periods of worker idleness, ranging from a few hours to several days, occur from time to time in many industrial plants because of an uneven flow of supplies, production bottlenecks, and frequent machinery breakdowns. In agriculture there has been little underemployment since the mid-1950's, largely because of the steady shift of workers into industrial employment.
The labor reserve—economically inactive persons of working age who would enter the labor force in case of
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110024-7
- ↑ The East German definition of working age is 15-64 years for males, 15-59 years for females, plus 12% of both males and females who are 14 years of age.
