TRANSFORMATIONS IN WORK 253
really ran smoothly. Except in a very few cases, none of the plans to import
entire production facilities or partial manufacturing technology systems
from providers in the West ever bore fruit.
Fourth, the GDR had a serious human resources problem. The plan-
ning commission sought to assign an additional number of planned em-
ployment positions to the individual factories within the framework of its
investment in rationalization and expansion. Yet it remained to be seen
whether or not the factories were truly able to hire additional personnel.
Especially given the chronic competition to attract employees in the GDR
and the tendency among all the larger operations to hold on to unnec-
essary workers so that they could rely on these extra hands when things
broke down (which was not that seldom) in order to be able to still meet
their quotas, eff orts at modernization often failed because the necessary
positions could not be fi lled.
Since it was virtually impossible to overcome the roadblocks stand-
ing in the way of substantial rationalization in production technology, it
made sense to try to increase workloads by means of traditional Taylorist
methods. But, even these endeavors faced insurmountable diffi culties.
For much of the industrial workforce, REFA, the German version of Tay-
lorism and assembly-line manufacturing, had been tainted by the strong
scent of capitalist exploitation since the 1920s. The general aversion to
“stress and pressure at work” along Taylorist and Fordist lines survived
the Nazi dictatorship, becoming even more virulent in the SBZ/GDR. The
uprising on 17 June 1953 that had been provoked by more demanding
work norms, which were really Taylorist-style measures that had been
introduced administratively, hit the SED where it hurt, revealing one of its
major sore points: it was not really possible to push through the increases
in workloads that were necessary to force industrialization against the
will of the “working people” because workers were considered to be the
main pillar of support for the regime, and the SED claimed to represent
their “objective” interests. After the uprising was put down, the fear of
another wave of strikes akin to those of mid-1953, which has been termed
the “June syndrome,” made the SED more hesitant to introduce any kind
of rationalization measures in the factories.
All the eff orts to put “old wine into new wineskins” by changing the
terminology used to describe the forms of rationalization and workload
increases that the regime hoped to implement, which resembled those
that had been developed before and after 1945 “in the West,” proved to be
futile. Since the 1960s, for example, the addition of “socialist” to the term
“rationalization” was part of a calculated political attempt to “sell” this
concept. Such ideas also included “technical-organizational measures”
(TOM), which laid the groundwork for Fordist and Taylorist initiatives.