STUDENT CONSTRUCTION BRIGADES, EFFICIENCY AND PRODUCTIVITY OF THEIR LABOR

V. I. NAGORNOV

In his report at the Third Session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of the eighth convocation, A. N. Kosygin noted: “With the planned growth of labor productivity, the number of workers employed in material production will have to be increased over the five-year period by only 4.2 million people, whereas at the 1970 level of labor productivity an additional 37 million workers would have been required. Consequently, thanks to the technical re-equipment of production, the improvement of its organization, the growth of labor productivity ensures a real saving of living labor of more than 32 million people”¹. Fulfillment of the Ninth Five-Year Plan is determined by a set of measures that promote the growth of labor productivity. But fuller use of all labor resources is also necessary.

As practice shows, a noticeable role in solving this task can be played by the use of students’ labor power in public production. Over the past 12 years, student construction brigades have completed work worth 1 billion 648 million rubles. This amounts to 35 thousand constructed projects, among them apartment houses, highways and railways, and power-transmission lines².

The practice of using SCB shows that their labor is most effective in construction. The mobility of SCB does not require large one-time investments for their establishment, housing construction, or cultural and consumer-service institutions. Thus, according to data from Glavtyumenneftegaz, in the summer of 1969 students carried out work that 500 regular workers could have performed in an entire year. The one-time costs of creating such a collective amount to about 9 million rubles³. A student contingent, however, cost 1,421 thousand rubles⁴.

The effectiveness of SCB increases in connection with the high mobility of the brigades. They can be transferred to any district that is most in need of labor power. The high general educational level of students allows them to master a new specialty without significant monetary expenditures. Their use during the summer period substantially reduces the cost of projects under construction. One should agree with V. V. Smirno-

...that an indicator of the efficiency of an SSB may be the ratio of expenditures for providing the labor conditions of the SSB and of regular workers, calculated per unit cost of completed work, with one adjustment introduced—to include the coefficient of readiness of the project. This coefficient will take into account the volume of unfinished construction and thus more fully reflect the efficiency of the students’ labor. And the volume of unfinished construction is still large. Thus, if over 12 years in Kazakhstan students built 25,518 projects, 16,601 of them remained unfinished.

The use of SSBs over many years shows that their labor productivity is steadily increasing. Thus, over the period from 1959 to 1970, the average output per student in the All-Union Student Construction Brigade working in Kazakhstan increased from 737 to 2,613 rubles⁵.

Such growth in the labor productivity of Kazakhstan’s SSBs can be explained in part by the differing material intensity of the projects being built and of the types of work performed.

One of the main factors in the growth of SSB labor productivity is the degree of readiness of the brigades, which is determined to a decisive extent during the preparatory period. As a rule, it begins long before the start of work, in January–February. It is precisely the preparatory period that lays the foundation for the high labor productivity of SSBs. During this period, questions are resolved concerning the formation of line brigades, their number, and their composition by the relevant specialties, the list of which is established on the basis of contracts concluded with construction enterprises. In the same period, training is conducted for the command staff of the line brigades and for brigade members in those specialties that are most widespread in construction and in which there is a shortage of specialists. At the same time, classes in safety engineering and practical training are conducted. In Tomsk, university construction is most often used for this purpose, while classes in safety engineering and construction specialties (theory) are conducted by the forces of the construction institute, the technical school, and the vocational-technical school. Simultaneously, the regional SSB headquarters concludes contracts with the region’s construction organizations for the construction of particular projects, and questions of transferring brigades to their place of work are resolved. The whole complex of these problems and questions determines the labor productivity of the line brigades in the first days of work.

The second factor in the growth of labor productivity is the readiness of the enterprises themselves to receive the SSBs. This includes the preparation of design-and-estimate documentation, the availability of approved lists of projects under construction, mechanisms and tools, special clothing, safety posters, the readiness of construction sites, housing for students, and so on.

Sometimes organizations refuse brigades shortly before their arrival. It becomes necessary to “transfer” brigades to other districts and to other projects, different in the nature of the work, for whose construction they were insufficiently prepared. To regulate such relations, it is proposed that regional, territorial, and republican headquarters be endowed with the rights and obligations of a legal entity, so as to be able to impose sanctions on offending organizations⁶. In our view, such a provision is unacceptable, since student construction brigades would lose all meaning as a public movement. And the difficulties that arise can be resolved with the help of local party and

public organizations. This may be confirmed by the many years of experience of student work in Kazakhstan and Tomsk Oblast. The timeliness and correctness with which these issues are resolved depend on the responsiveness of the line and oblast, krai, and republican headquarters.

The most important aspect of raising the labor productivity of student construction brigades is the organization of material and technical supply. In Kazakhstan, for example, they have taken the path of creating “student” funds, which are distributed by the republican headquarters among the oblasts and organizations where student brigades work. In other republics and oblasts there are no such funds, and material and technical supply is carried out through the organizations in which the student brigades work. This situation is explained above all by the fact that in Kazakhstan student brigades are concentrated mainly at enterprises of two ministries, whereas the brigade of Tomsk Oblast was employed at enterprises belonging to more than twenty ministries. The situation is exactly the same in other regions of the country where student construction brigades worked.

Taking into account the large volume of work carried out by student construction brigades, it is necessary to include the activity of these brigades in enterprise plans in advance, with appropriate material and technical supply.

There is also a group of factors that affects productivity through the process and organization. Brigades often use integrated crews. But they justify themselves only when the brigade has poor material and technical supply, lacks qualified workers in certain specialties, or has no work front. As a rule, this is characteristic of small and medium-sized line brigades. Larger brigades most often use specialized crews. Such an organization is justified when the material and technical supply of the facilities is clearly organized and the work front is prepared in a timely manner. Therefore, when forming brigades, it is necessary to combine integration with specialization optimally, taking into account the specific features of the projects under construction and the availability of a qualified labor force.

It should also be borne in mind that the labor productivity of student construction brigades is influenced by such factors as the organization of leisure for the brigade’s students, the arrangement of competition and its “openness,” and the “social” climate in the brigade.

1. Newspaper Komsomolskaya pravda, No. 276 (142258), 1971, November 25. ↩

2. Newspaper Komsomolskaya pravda, No. 170 (14152), 1971, June 22. ↩

3. Construction of Pipelines, 1970, No. 6. ↩

4. Student Construction Brigades. Reports and materials for a scientific-practical conference. Alma-Ata, 1971. ↩

5. Student Construction Brigades. Reports and materials for the scientific-practical conference. Alma-Ata, 1971. ↩

6. Ibid. ↩