re been considered by the
Party leadership of utmost urgency to ensure sustained economic
development.

The latest evidence of the leadership's profound concern about these
basic labor problems was provided by the Party's Central Committee
plenum held at the end of December 1969, devoted to a discussion of
means for raising productivity and tightening labor discipline. In its
report delivered to the plenum, the Political Bureau (Politburo) of the
Central Committee expressed strong dissatisfaction with what it
considered an unsatisfactory rate of participation in employment by the
collective farm population. It placed the blame for this situation on
local government organs, which had become reconciled to the backward
traditional concepts that keep homemakers and some young girls in the
home and that require a member of the family to look after the family's
privately owned livestock and thus be unable to seek outside work.

The Party's report also called attention to the prevalence of a petty
bourgeois attitude among many families of workers, employees, and
servicemen that keeps their members from accepting employment. To
facilitate the employment of women, the Party urged more widespread
provision of amenities, such as nurseries and dining halls, that would
free them from household duties.

Meaningful information on labor productivity is not available because
statistics on this subject have not been published and because essential
details of the methods used in calculating the percentage rates of
increase in productivity that appear from time to time in official
public statements are not sufficiently known. Based on physical output
and labor data, Western observers believe that the published data
overstate the actual advance achieved.

According to the Politburo report, productivity in industry rose 2.2
times between 1950 and 1968, and this growth accounted for 60 percent of
the increase in industrial production during that period. In agriculture
67 percent of the increase in output during those years was attributed
to the growth of productivity. These figures indicate a slightly faster
advance in agricultural productivity, but in absolute terms productivity
in agriculture has been very much lower than in industry.

During the Third Five-Year Plan (1961-65) labor productivity reportedly
rose by an annual average of 2.1 percent in industry, 4.6 percent in
construction, and 2.7 percent in automotive transport. Data fo