SOVIET INDUSTRY

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 243, 4 June 1932, Page 2

SOVIET INDUSTRY

COLLAPSE OF LABGUR DISCIPLINE. In connection with the radical revision of all economic and administrative organisations in the Soviet Union, central departments in Moscow appear to be vieing with each other in describing the abnormal conditions and abuses prevalent in their subordinate establishments, which hitherto have been described in official reports as functioning in an exemplary manner (writes a correspondent from Riga). There appears to have been general 'failure of the one-man management system decreed over a year ago. Reports of the last few days, especially from the heavy industries and nonferrous metal industries, describe conditions at large-scale enterprises as chaotic. Labour discipline has become bad, and in. many works the workers are so out of hand that even Communist directors are unable to enforce authority. Orjonilcidze, Commisar for Heavy Industry, and Kaganovich, Third Secretary of the Communists party, went to Nizhni Novgorod personally to find out why the new motor-car works there could. not hegin regular work. They discovered great disorder. Twenty-five thousand workmen had been on the pay roll since Januaiy, but most sections were unahle to work owing to the lack of some vital apparatus or materials, and the whole work was held u.p hy what the Communist for Heavy Industry calls "a rotten chain of weakness." The Commissariat adds that similar failures have recently become apparent in many other important sections. There ha.ve heen seven different directors of the Konstantinovka Zinc Works in the course of a year, but the works are now in a state of chaos, and are obliged temporarily to close. One of the chief reasons given. for the failure is that directors and technical specialists are terrorised by the undisciplilied rank and file, and not given the proper- support hy party organs. The loss on the Konstantinovka