Zemskov, V.N. Workforce organization and tightening of labor legislation during the Great Patriotic War.

Abstract: The war required a temporary departure from the forms of recruiting workforce for public works used in time of peace. The methods of peaceful times (contracts with collective farms and enterprises) could not guarantee the necessary number of workers in the conditions of war. In order to guarantee sustainable production growth and strengthening of the military economy, it was necessary to use the forms of involving labor resources in accordance with the wartime conditions. A serious form of workforce mobilization was the formation of the construction battalions and work strings out of the persons obligated for military service but who were temporarily or permanently unfit to be drafted to the army. Workforce mobilization for agricultural purposes was organized by the mobilization departments of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Union and Autonomous Republics, regional and district departments. In some autonomous republics, regions and districts there were commissions for the organized recruitment of workforce and also the divisions for the economic placement of evacuated persons. It turned out that different divisions implemented the same function. It complicated the reporting, distribution and rational use of labor resources. Mobilization of the workforce was aimed at the maximal and most efficient use of the cadres, their redistribution in favor of military production and heavy industry, introduction of obligatory overtime work at the factories and cancellation of vacations (both basic and additional), mobilization and allocation of workers and officials for permanent work in the military and cooperating industry for the entire period of war; mobilization of the city and village population capable of doing work and not already involved in social production in order to do work in the spheres of industry, construction and transportation; general work obligation, allowing to involve all of the population capable of doing work into providing for the military need; allocation of necessary cadres: qualified workers, specialists, and officials in the most crucial industrial spheres providing for the military through reservation, that is, through freeing them from drafting to the army; mass education of new workers, their advanced training at the place of work, and at schools and colleges for worker reserve; teaching specialists at the higher education institutions; organization of work and payment with the due regard for the specific wartime conditions — support and development of creative initiative, competitions for more productive work, working time economy and achieving the goals with less workers.

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