In the gritty industrial section of Warsaw, at the end of the tram line and next to the large state-owned factories, lies a modern medical-equipment plant. Its private owners are being tolerated and even coddled by the authorities in the hope that they and others like them will transform the work ethic of socialist Poland.
The company, Plastomed, which has 350 workers producing calibrated pipettes and electronic laboratory equipment, is one of the 650 privately owned companies financed from abroad that have sprouted here in the last three years with the blessings of economic planners.
Although these private companies, all involved in light manufacturing of items such as cosmetics and clothing, together account for scarcely 1 percent of Poland`s national production, they are being increasingly viewed as the cutting edge of an effort to revitalize a limping economy and invigorate a sluggish industrial labor force.
Despite occasional ideological attacks on the idea of private, profit-oriented businesses from hardliners in the Communist Party, the government of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski is nurturing at least some of these companies. It is also studying an expansion of the concept that would draw larger amounts of private capital for large-scale joint ventures beyond light industry.
As originally conceived during the upheavals of the Solidarity period, the government program limited investment and ownership to foreigners of Polish descent. At the time, the idea was explained here as another attempt to establish links with the ”Polish Diaspora,” the estimated 40 million people of Polish origin who live beyond the country`s borders. Under the original plan, expatriates could invest as little as $2,000 to open a business whose profits would be untaxed for three years.
Because of the links to Poles abroad, the concerns were called Polonia companies. The name is still used, even though, in its search for capital and modernizing technologies, the government has expanded the program to include those without Polish ties.
A major objective of the plan was to attract capital to a Poland hit hard by restricted credits from the West. It was geared to attract export-oriented projects, and the foreign owners are permitted to repatriate half of their gross hard-currency profits.
Beyond the pure economic elements, the Polonia companies are being studied as models for changing the behavior of a work force that has about the lowest productivity record in Europe.
”There is no doubt that what Poland needs is a new work ethic to replace attitudes that have developed in the last 40 years,” a close aide to Jaruzelski said in a recent interview.
Those attitudes are enshrined in jokes and sayings often heard among workers. ”Whether lying down or standing erect, a thousand zlotys you can expect,” is one such adage. Another claims, ”The state pretends to pay us, and we pretend to work.” Absenteeism runs high, maternity leaves extend to three years, and recent visits to state automobile, beer and glider factories revealed a highly casual attitude toward work and a seemingly high number of unoccupied seats.
Throughout the Eastern bloc, the dominant economic quest is for mechanisms to increase productivity. In Hungary, for example, workers in state factories are now permitted to band together and bid to produce specified numbers of items after regular hours of work, functioning effectively as private contractors doing their regular jobs on state-owned machines after regular shifts. Not surprisingly, studies have shown that the Hungarian workers are more productive, for the most part, during their after-hours stints than when they are using the same machines during their regular shifts. Another recent Hungarian innovation intended to improve worker morale is a provision that permits managers in certain state factories to be elected by workers.
In Poland, it is the Polonia companies that are serving as a stimulus if only by providing a control group against which productivity can be measured. ”Just like the black market serves to tell us what the real value of things are, so the Polonia firms help establish the real value of work in a setting where wages, expenditures and production norms are all centrally planned,” a Polish economist said.
The experiment is not fully conclusive, although there is a general belief among many workers that wages in the Polonia companies are considerably higher, that work conditions are better and opportunities for advancement greater.
Some political opponents of the idea have noted the shady operations of some investors, who brought in almost no money and then shut down operations after taking advantage of the tax holiday and then started another
undercapitalized enterprise.
Meanwhile, managers of state enterprises now often explain declining production by saying their employees are being drawn away to the Polonia firms.
”That is nonsense,” said Andrzei Czernecki, the manager of Plastomed, noting that the Polonia companies probably employed no more than 100,000 people. However, he said, behavioral changes apparently are being forged by some of the Polonia companies.
”You can see the difference in our bathrooms,” Czernecki said. ”All over Poland, in the state factories, the bathrooms are filthy, few people have pride in their workplace, while here, because real work has real value, the bathrooms are kept clean.”
The biggest difference in the work, said the Austrian-trained manager, was the linking of salary levels to productivity. ”It is true that our average entry-level worker gets about 50 percent more than his counterpart in a state enterprise, but I would say that he has to work more than 50 percent harder,” the manager said. ”We have a number of people who come and leave very soon, making it clear they prefer to do less and receive less, and we have even more we dismiss because they cannot work up to standard.”
”Our biggest problem,” he went on, ”is finding managers attuned to making quick, independent decisions. Here, people are trained to think vertically, rather than horizontally. They learn early that you are less likely to get in trouble for saying no than saying yes.”
Despite such problems, Plastomed`s owners in Frankfurt have already recouped their $150,000 investment, and they are about to expand.
”Their idea was to exploit Polish know-how and engineering talent,”
Czernecki said on a tour of the plant. ”So far, most of our production has been for the Eastern bloc. This part has been easy, because we essentially have a monopoly and can sell everything we produce and have the backing of the government, which needs our production.
”Meanwhile, we distribute most of our ruble and zloty earnings to our workers in the form of bonuses and incentives, and we are now using the staff to develop a line of fairly sophisticated equipment for export to the West. The real test of our efforts will come when we face real competition.”
Czernecki said his company had received excellent cooperation ”from the upper levels of government,” which he said understood that companies like his were catalysts. ”Where we do have some trouble are middle-level bureaucrats, such as the man who did not want to remove our scrap metal, or from the managers of state companies who see our operation as a threat to their own way of doing things,” he added.
While the Polonia effort seems to be growing, political forces allied to the middle managers have raised ideological attacks on what they regard as the dangerous growth of private enterprise. These attacks see the pay differentials employed by the Polonia companies and their incentives as a retreat from what they call the socialist principle of egalitarianism.
While there are some commentators who believe that principle has led to the low productivity, others have cited a national character that was formed long before the imposition of socialism or central planning.
