116 RALF AHRENS AND ANDRÉ STEINER
as in the Federal Republic. The automobile industry was not among the
winners that dominated the structure of the economy in the East. In-
stead, it was the iron and steel industries that continued to grow in the
GDR even while they were shrinking in the Federal Republic. Similarly
diverging developments could also be traced in the plastics processing
industry, which was one of the structural winners in the West, but on the
losing side in the East, despite the fact that it at least temporarily profi ted
from the SED’s economic policies. In this respect, the employment struc-
tures within the manufacturing sectors in both Germanys diff ered quite
considerably.^49
More detailed assessments of the structure of the industrial sector in
the FRG have shown that the industrial decline that had set in around
1973 did not result primarily from the increase in net redundancies within
the shrinking iron and steel, textile, clothing, and shipbuilding industries.
Rather, it stemmed from a decrease in net additions to the job markets
in the growth sectors in particular; in the high-tech mechanical engi-
neering industry, as well as within the microelectronics and aerospace
industries, for instance, the number of jobs created was too low. The
same applied to the mid-sized industries, such as chemical and plastic
processing, optics and precision engineering, automobile, electrical en-
gineering, and mechanical engineering (including offi ce and computer
equipment) industries.^50 Simultaneously, as mentioned above, this drop
could not be counteracted by an increase in jobs in the service sector
because it was mostly the capital-intensive areas of this sector that were
expanding. Even within the manufacturing sector, low-skilled jobs were
being eliminated, especially as a result of skill-biased technical change
and not necessarily because of the increase in international trade, which
were both at the core of the structural unemployment (Sockelarbeitslo-
sigkeit) emerging at the time.^51 All told, the technological revolution that
necessitated a more highly qualifi ed workforce and the corresponding
structural change in the economy that had begun in 1970s took on new
proportions, ultimately becoming one of the long-term factors behind the
development of mass unemployment. Although this transformation did
not take place in the East at the same pace as in the West, it was nonethe-
less a factor behind the erosion of full employment looming in the GDR,
which manifested itself in increasing downtime and idle periods as well
as overqualifi ed employees and a growing number of increasingly toler-
ated dropout livelihoods of diff erent kinds.
Since full employment was considered to be one of the “basic values”
of East German socialism, it thus remained one of the primary goals of
economic and social policy. Economic policies appeared to be structural
policies per se in the East, and they were governed by a Stalinist para-