254 RÜDIGER HACHTMANN
These, in turn, revived concepts that had been dominant prior to 1945,
which reappeared in virtually unmodifi ed forms at fi rst. The Scientifi c
Work Organization program (Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsorganisation, or
WAO) bore a striking resemblance to classic Taylorist methods. In imple-
menting this program, SED economists drew on the Methods-Time Mea-
surement (MTM) system, which had been developed in the United States;
this system was a more elaborate version of the Taylorist time measure-
ment method.^24 All things considered, the recoding of these terms and
the reliance on Western expertise when it came to modern forms of pro-
duction technology and workfl ows did not have much use. On the whole,
as scholarship on the automobile industry has illustrated, the supplier
factories did not implement major internal rationalization measures “at
all,” while the factories responsible for fi nal assembly in Zwickau and
Eisenach only managed to do so “in a few exceptional cases.”^25
Likewise, not even older “American” production ideas were able to
gain a fi rm foothold in most of the other industries in the GDR without
major lag times. In the 1970s and 1980s, traditional Fordist structures
were increasingly being replaced by more fl exible production systems
in West Germany, but the industrial sector in the GDR, as Peter Hübner
noted, “was not even close to getting over the fi rst hurdle.”^26 For all in-
tents and purposes, the leadership of the SED state eff ectively abandoned
all of its initiatives to bring about a major modernization of production
technology in manufacturing operations such as carmakers.^27 In 1989,
productivity across the GDR was about a third less than in the FRG. The
factories were only able to maintain their production volumes through
constant “self-help” measures and economic as well as political juggling.
Factory managers more or less became “masters of improvisation.”^28 The
same could also be said of their “subjects” who were also forced to hone
their skills at improvisation in order to deal with the continual produc-
tion hold-ups and machinery outages. The talented workmanship and
advanced technical skills of both male and female workers employed in
the East German industrial sector thus proved to be a major asset. The
percentage of skilled workers and master craftsmen (not including those
with advanced technical and university degrees) within the workforce as
a whole increased from 53 percent in 1975 to 64 percent in 1985; corre-
spondingly, the percentage of semiskilled and unskilled workers dropped
from 33 percent down to 15 percent.^29
Moreover, social pressure, as well as material incentives, were lacking
on the shop fl oor in East German factories. As a result, most working
people had accustomed themselves to an easy-going workday, and the
number of absences was comparably high.^30 By the end of the 1970s, the
demands that the DGB trade unions were making on the other side of