You are right: Your opponents are again mistaken! Working class in the USSR was quite a privileged stratum of the population. The average wage of a factory worker was about 230-250 rubles per month plus they received quarterly bonuses, the so-called "progressivka" (bonus for overfulfillment of the plan) and "vysluga let" (regular extra pay for long service). All combined, a factory worker with over 5 years of service made around 400 rubles per month. Moreover, workers enjoyed huge discounts and even free passes to health resorts, free passes to vacation resorts for their children, etc. However, to be honest, low skilled labor was not paid that well. Cleaners, for example, made around 100 rubles per month, but these were utterly lazy people, mostly alcoholics. For comparison, a university graduate was paid 115 rubles per month and his best prospect was to rise to around 300 rubles per month toward pension. Of course, professors and members of the USSR Academy of Sciences were paid well, but they were few. Doctors and teachers were paid around 150 rubles per month. Furthermore, being a factory worker was a privelege in itself. "I'm a worker" was always pronounced with pride, while "intelligentsia" was often called "spoilt brat".
Regards
-Hi Chris, that is exactly the information I have about USSR. The Brezhnev years were a kind of Golden Age for the Soviets, and looking to Maddison data on PPP GDP per capita, by 1973, the USSR had more or less 40% of the per capita GDP of the USA, which, would be the relative situation of South Korea today (and btw, poor South Koreans, a minuscule 2 room apartment in Seoul costs as much as a good 3 room apartment in the city I live, so...) -Still, it´s possible that poor consumer goods quality and relative scarcity mad the Soviet citizen somewhat upset, as there weren´t enough goods to fulfill the needs of works whose wages were improving. I think Wotjek made a very reasonable point on the prices distortions of EE economies -However, I have another question. To what extent the practice of paying more to workers, in relation to people with higher education discouraged people to go to the universities? Why to spend 4-6 years more in a university to earn 30% of a factory worker? I´m not talking about abstract notions of fairness but about the role of personal incentives in a socialist economy. To what extent this practice wasn´t part of a broader economic policy bias toward heavy industry that may have contributed to the failure in the transition to a IT based economy?
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