Differentiation of wages in the Ural industry: on the way to the “Great Turning Point”

Abstract

Regulating wages in the state industry was an important socio-economic task during the NEP years. The general direction of this regulation can be characterized by an leveling trend, which was initiated and supported by trade unions. At the same time, enterprises sought to achieve a certain differentiation of employee's wages in order to maintain the required level of labor incentives. The implementation of this policy in the Urals had some peculiarities. Thus, the wages of Ural workers were on average noticeably lower than in the industrialized areas of the center of the country. The article provides examples of protests by various layers of workers in the Urals regarding the course towards “leveling”. The characteristics of the tariff reform of 1928 are given. The article sets the task of assessing changes in the level of differentiation of wages for industrial workers in the Urals during the years of the “late NEP”. The measurement of differentiation and wage inequality is carried out in the article using the decile coefficient and the Gini index. The article shows that carried out in the 1920s the policy of equalizing workers' wages was not only proclaimed in governing documents, but was also implemented, in this case, in the Ural industry. Measurements carried out using various methods confirm a decrease in the degree of differentiation of wages for workers in the Urals at the final stage of the NEP. At the same time, the gap in wages between blue-collar workers and industrial employees was significant and showed a tendency to further increase. However, after a couple of years, the policy of leveling wages was decisively condemned. The authorities claimed exiting tariff scales represented the “cultivation of petty-bourgeois egalitarianism” and hampered the stimulation of raising the qualifications of workers.