45° POLSKA LUDOWA
society, feeding the nation and paying their taxes, but not enjoying the full
benefits of the Welfare State. In between the peasantry and the proletariat, a
prosperous hybrid group of chlopo-robotnicy (peasant-workers) contrives both
to own land and to earn industrial wages as well.^49
In thirty years of constant demographic movement, over ten million people
had flocked into the towns from the countryside. For the first time in 1970, the
town-dwellers outnumbered the countryfolk, and by 1977 had reached 57.4 per
cent of the whole. The five major cities - Warsaw (1,532,100 - population in
1977), Lodz (818,400), Krakow (712,000), Wroclaw (592,500), Poznan
(534,400) - and the conurbated towns of the Katowice region (3,862,000),
continued to grow despite a strict system of urban planning and residence
permits.^50
Housing conditions reflected the stresses of accelerated urbanization. Well
over three million housing units had been built since the War, and, notwith-
standing the increase in population and the influx into the towns, reduced over-
crowding from 4.73 persons per unit in 1946 to 4.37 in 1970. Approximately half
of the houses under construction were owned by municipal co-operatives. The
rest were divided between those built directly by state concerns and those built
by private owners. Building standards were extremely primitive, however.
Cement, plaster, and bricks were of the poorest quality, and workmanship were
notoriously shoddy. Less than one home in three possessed a bathroom, an
inside lavatory, or central heating. In the countryside, less than one in twelve
possessed such refinements.
Personal incomes revealed wide variations and large differentials. In so far as
tax payments, pension contributions, social insurance premiums, and so forth
were deducted at source, wages and salaries could not be directly compared
with their counterparts in Western countries. But by any reckoning they were
extremely low. The purchasing power of the average monthly wage of 3,500 zl.
(1976), which was equivalent in exchange terms to about 35 dollars US or £18
sterling, had to be measured against average prices for 1 kg of bread (8 zl.), 1 kg
of ham (120 zl.), for a pair of shoes (300 zl.), a gent's suit (2,000 zl.), or for a
Polski Fiat 125P 1500 (225,000 zl.). Almost all families counted on a second
wage from the working wife, and many had to supplement their budget from
unofficial spare-time jobs.^51
Unemployment was unknown. Work, officailly, was both a right and a duty.
The able-bodied could demand employment. The idle could be prosecuted for
social parasitism. If this system avoided the scandalous insecurities and indigni-
ties of the world of free enterprise, it also encouraged all forms of indiscipline in
the labour force. What is more, it concealed huge areas of underemployment.
The Polish employee who had little or no work to do, and who only attended in
order to collect his pay packet at the end of the week, had little more real satis-
faction than the members of the British and American dole queues.^52
Trade unions in the Western sense did not exist. The Central Council of
Trade Unions (CRZZ), which had absorbed all the previous independent orga-