above found hiding in stored file...
More recycling: Soviet system (irrespective of its character) largely eliminated long-term secular unemployment and short-term cyclical unemployment associated in capitalist economies with business cycle of expansion and contraction. While elimination of mass unemployment was, in part, the result of extensive industrial growth, Soviet economy provided job security that was perceived as positive achievement and cannot be lightly dismissed nor should it be sacrificed as a value goal.
When extensive growth model reached outer limits, Gorbachev leadership launched initiatives for "intensification" of production methods and greater reliance on market-type demands. This also meant accepting inevitable trade-off of considerable joblessness since any return to a predominantly market-driven economy produces not just temporary mass unemployment, but unemployment as basic feature of social landscape, with all the consequences that this brings for market societies
Soviet public opinion data (I'm aware of limits of polling research) collected in late 1980s indicated that overwheling majority of working people were opposed to Gorbachev 'reforms.' I spent some time with Soviet sociologists back then and they were very clear: professional/managerial types such as themselves were more supportve of policies committed to greater economic efficiency, flexibility, and innovation. Workers opposed threats to job security even as they expressed sense of alienation from work process. Work in USSR did not cease to be a source of alienation. Marx, in addition to citing capitalist exploitation, pinpointed character of the work process and absence of opportunity for creativity and autonomy as sources of alienation. Oh yeah, there was that 'associated producers' thing.
Critics asserted that type of security existing in Soviet economy, over time, undermined work discipline and failed to provide incentives for efficient and diligent work. And some people couldn't find kind of employment for which they were trained because of planning errors or geographical preferences (hard to get highly skilled folks to go to frigid climate and barren landscape of Far North). Small amounts of frictional unemployment (i.e., people changing jobs and 'layabouts') also existed.
In main, however, Soviets eliminated mass chronic unemployment as a social problem. There was nothing (of course, there now is) comparable to working-class districts in capitalist societies where jobless line sidewalks, hanging out in summer and winter, in good years and in bad, a constant feature of social landscape (so much for Keynesianism and trauma/misery of being out work being alleviated but not expiated by various forms of unemployment compensation). Michael Hoover (neither confused nor forgetting and anti-technocratic to boot)