Not a workers’ paradise

Press, 18 March 1987, Page 20

Not a workers’ paradise

From the “Economist,” London

“They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work,” runs the old Soviet joke. In Moscow, you have to pretend to work for a long time to keep your family fed and provide it with the odd luxury. Some painstaking research by Mr Keith Bush of Radio Liberty has produced a concise report which speaks volumes about the gap in workers’ purchasingpower between Russia and the West. Comparisons of, say, gross domestic product (G.D.P.) per head in America and Russia are tricky — and misleading — because the official rouble-dollar exchange rate is bogus, and attempts to “reconstruct” Soviet G.D.P. in dollar terms are less than convincing. Mr Bush avoids the exchange-rate problem altogether. Instead, with the. help of a team of some 60 researchers, he has looked at the time the average industrial worker in Moscow has to be at his job to buy a range of goods, and compared this with the work-time needed to buy "equivalent” goods in Washington, London, Paris and Munich. The results are striking, if not entirely surprising. It takes the Moscow worker 51 hours of work to buy a "weekly basket" of goods (milk, bread,

meat, vegetables, drinks and so on) for a family of four at the average Soviet level of consumption; this is between two and three times as long as the time needed in the Western cities. The average urban family in the Soviet Union has two wageearners, so the study suggests that more than half of Mr and Mrs Ivanov’s disposable income goes on food, drink and cigarettes. The Moscow worker has to work longer than his Western counterparts for almost every item in the “weekly basket." For example, it takes 100 minutes of work to buy 20 eggs in Moscow, compared with ten minutes in Washington and 20 minutes in London. A remarkable 851 minutes of work is needed in Moscow to buy 0.7 litres of vodka, which is between five and nine times longer than in the Western cities. The gap for expensive consumer durables (not included in the “weekly basket”) is just as big: seven years’ work-time in Moscow, but only one year in Munich, to afford a mediumsized car. The big exception is rents, where the Moscow worker fares better. Rents have not risen in Moscow since 1928, which helps explain why it takes nearly five

times as much work-time to pay them in Washington as in Moscow. Remember, however, that apartments in Soviet cities are small (the living space for each Russian is roughly a third of that for each American) and often shoddy. Indeed, as Mr Bush recognises, the difference in the quality of goods on offer in the various cities is one of several pitfalls in the study. One of his surveyors described the cans of corned beef at Moscow’s Kutuzovskaya store as "very corroded on the inside, with black spots.” On the other hand, Moscow’s vanilla ice cream is, it seems, unbeatable. The study does not take into account the time spent in queues, nor could it allow for the fact that some goods have a habit of being unavailable even in Moscow, where supplies are better than in most Soviet cities. The average industrial worker is not the average worker (how many industrial workers do you know in Washington?). So there are limitations. Even so, Mr Bush’s findings give a vivid picture of the gap Mr Mikhail Gorbachev is hoping to bridge. Copyright — The Economist