Book Description

The book is concerned with the right of an employee of a Soviet state enterprise to keep his existing job, unless he/she voluntarily quit it to search for another, and with the maintaining of overfull employment in all regional labor markets of the Soviet Union. The author hypothesises that over most other objectives to preserving these conditions favorable for labor. This hypothesis is contrasted with that which explains the low unemployment and low dismissal rate in the Soviet Union simply by the oberheating of the economy, finding a parallel here with capitalist economies in high-boom periods. The novelty of the book is twofold. It is the first examination of the Soviet economy from the theoretic viewpoint described above. Second, it is a full length treatment of labor markets in the Soviet Union and is the first study of such markets since that of Abram Bergson published in the 1940s. Indeed, no similar treatment of labor markets exists for any centrally planned socialist economy.