Employment Law in USSR

There is one other thing that makes some people nostalgic towards communism and socialism. That is soviet employment law. While outright refusal to work and having no employment at all was illegal and punishable by jail terms. However, finding jobs were easy and losing a job was completely impossible.

All businesses were government owned, their policies controlled by the government. Jobs were offered to anyone who needed them.

However, its inability to lose a job that was the most important and bizarre elements of soviet system. One cannot lose a job even if they arrive 3 hours late and are too drunk to stand or talk intelligibly. Management faced with that could call the police to deal with a drunkard but could not fire them. Next day management typically had to deal with exact the same scene over and over again, every day of the week, every week of the month. In the end of them month such employees still received their paycheck for hardly ever working a day due to constant drunkenness. However, they were not considered unemployed due to them being on the payroll somewhere.

Certain professions were particularly prone to this behavior. Plumbers, electricians, lift repairman, street swipes and other communal services were typical career path for routine alcoholism work avoidants. Because of that Soviet people had hard time having plumbing of electricity fixed, many had to learn these skills themselves.

Reforming this system was not possible for political reason. Other people were equally worried for their own job security is management was allowed to fire people at will. It was also one of the popular measures that government used to justify their system against capitalism. After all even propaganda needs some real reasons to trump up socialism over capitalism and that was it: under capitalism workers can be fired at the whim of managers and business owners, but under socialism workers are protected by the system.

That is why many claim that social security was better then.