Working and living conditions under the Five-Year Plans: workers and women

Workers benefitted from the Five-Year Plans

• Workers and young people were enthusiastic and many volunteered to work on distant projects
• Workers approved of the attack on bourgeois specialists
• Industrial workers in the late 1920s with valued skills advanced quickly to supervisory or management positions
• There were great strides in higher technical education and intelligent proletarians did well when wage differentials were introduced in the 1930s
• Training courses meant workers who stayed in their jobs had opportunities to get higher pay, better working conditions and better housing

Workers did not benefit from the Five-Year Plans

• During the First Five-Year Plan, workers suffered because of the lack of consumer goods and food
• Cities and towns were growing by 200,000 a month and overcrowding was intense
• Remote towns had no paved roads…