TRANSFORMATIONS IN WORK 241
at the implications of rationalization eff orts on gainful employment in
the industrial sector in West Germany as opposed to East Germany. The
third section focuses on structural transformations in gainful employ-
ment within the service sector from the 1970s to the beginning of the
twenty-fi rst century, paying special attention to precarious job situations.
Frameworks
The constitutions of the two German states laid out fundamentally diff er-
ent frameworks for each society, beginning with their catalogs of basic
rights. Whereas the GDR constitution established the right to work, the
Grundgesetz (Basic Law) of the Federal Republic makes no mention of it.
Instead, the government of the FRG expanded the social benefi ts system
for the unemployed and fostered internal employee participation within
companies and factories after 1949. Although the right to work was tied
to a duty to work that was imposed in a politically repressive way in the
GDR, which meant that Werktätigen (“working people”) who opposed the
political system could be demoted to lesser jobs, it was virtually impos-
sible for employees to lose their jobs. The right to work anchored in the
GDR constitution (Article 24) and the corresponding Law on Work (Gesetz
der Arbeit) from 1950, as well as the Labor Code (Gesetzbuch der Arbeit)
from 1962/1974, contained fundamental political concessions granted to
workers and employees who were collectively referred to as Werktätigen.
They were the key source of legitimization for the SED, which styled itself
as the “avant-garde of the working class” and its “workers’ and peasants’
state.”
The permanent employment guarantee that was tied to the right to
work granted the working population in East Germany a great deal of
leeway in their everyday work. The national economy put into place by
the SED followed the model of a late-Stalinist style, centralized-command
economy. Thus, since the party had the last word on all political, social,
and economic questions, it had to bear the blame for any grievances,
material shortages, or production stops, as well as the poor organization
of labor resources or complaints about unfair wages. In Western mar-
ket economies, on the other hand, companies and employers remained
solely responsible for such issues, functioning as an intermediary institu-
tion that buff ered dissatisfaction politically when it bubbled up to the top.
Although government spending in the FRG already amounted to about
45 percent of the GDP in 1975 and continued to climb slightly, confl icts
and labor disputes tended to be directed at diff erent targets in the East
than in the West.