OUR questions about production take us back to the Red Director's Office. Nicholas Varonin, originally a Leningrad machine driller, now manager of this huge plant, is ready for us-charts, record-books, and pages of neat figures laid out around him.
Incidentally, Varonin a typical of the new crop of directors and specialists which the working class is developing from its own ranks. Immediately after the revolution, when the old engineers and technicians were creating havoc with their sabotage, the workers in his Leningrad pipe factory came together to choose from among themselves men to replace the wreckers. Varonin was one of those chosen. "Here," his fellows said, "You're literate and not so bad at figures." They put him at technical work. How he sweated over his books! What blunders they all made! Yet, somehow things got going.
Thus began a long struggle to fit himself for the various responsible posts at which he was put by his fellows, at one time organizing munition supplies in a strategic sector for the Red Army during the height of the Civil War, later, serving as secretary of the Provisional Committee of Metal Workers, then on Party work in Moscow, meanwhile studying in a Workers' Faculty. Since 1924 he has been on economic work, combining his job as director of a tool factory in Moscow with technical study in an Evening Industrial Academy. Last year, when the Podolsk plant was in need of a director, Varonin was appointed to the post by the Soviet Metal Trust, in agreement with the Party and Metal Workers Union.
In the midst of his crowded days and evenings, he still finds time to continue his engineering courses. This year he expects to complete his work in the Lepse Institute for Heavy Industry. All theoretical work and higher mathematics have already been completed, only some of the practical testing remains. One of his practical tests was the technical and productive organization of the new foundry. This is theory and practice combined in the U.S.S.R., producing a type of engineer that knows his job thoroughly.
The respect which the workers in the plant have for Varoniny is not based an any super-imposed system of discipline, or on, that artificial distance created about "the big chief," such as exists in foreign factories. Varonin is one of theirs. Simple, genuine, inspiring their confidence and liking. In a metal-welding department meeting of Party members, called together to discuss the coming collective agreement to be signed between the administration and working force, I remember discovering Varonin perched beside a machine, among the men. Only when he was sailed on to speak, did he come forward.
For several hours Varonin discusses with us productive problems, advances, set-backs, and prospects with that sure grasp, level-headedness, and frank self-criticism that one learns are common traits of Russian Bolsheviks. Here there is space to give only the outstanding landmarks of the long and still continuing up-hill struggle of the Podolsk workers develop their plant and master technique.
As soon as the workers took over the plant, in 1917, they found themselves faced with tremendous difficulties. Singer had followed a clever policy of importing over two-thirds of the small parts of the machine, such as needles, shuttles, and bobbins. Only casting of, big parts and general assembling had been done in Podolsk. This had kept the plant dependent on American imports, and meant the development of few skilled workers. Furthermore, Singer had carefully developed a type of sewing machine and its necessary machine-producing equipment, along patterns kept secret by him. When his man, Dixon, had beat his hasty retreat from Podolsk at the outbreak of the revolution, he had not forgotten to take the blue prints with him. Most of the older engineers and department managers, who could have helped, were openly hostile to the workers' power. "Go ahead," they sneered, "see what a mess you can make of it."
So the workers had to start almost from scratch-without blueprints, small parts, necessary equipment, or raw material, with few skilled workers, and most of these away at the front, busy driving out the enemy. In the first years, production slumped almost to zero. Machines rusted, grew cobwebs. Only part of the plant was ased to produce small tools and other necessary implements. With the Soviet power consolidated, the workers could return, laying aside their guns and tackling production problems with the same dogged determination with which they had chased out the Whites.
Here are the results: By 1928, the peak of production under Singer--409,58 foot-power sewing machines--had been surpassed. Every year fewer parts were imported, more being produced on Soviet soil. This year, the factory is able to declare its complete independence of import. Meanwhile, hours of labour have been reduced from the ten and eleven-hour day under Singer to eight, and then seven, with one day rest in every six; working force increased from four to eleven thousand, wages were raised by four times, and a complete system of social insurance covering old age, illness and unemployment, introduced. The plant has been expanded and old buildings re-equipped until there is only one structure which remains the same site as it was in Singer's time. Beginning in 1930, the Podolsk workers set out to do what Singer had never undertaken: produce industrial sewing machines to equip clothing factories.
Varonin receives 300 rubles, the maximum wage for Party members. Recently the maximum was raised, so that his income will probably increase to 400.
While the Podolsk plant has been expanding, what has been happening in Singer plants in America? From a former Singer employee now in the Soviet Union, we hear that the Elizabeth, N. J., plant has been reducing its production radically for the last three years, laying off workers in the fall of 1931 at the rate of 200 a week, until only about 3,000 were left, and then getting but two or three days' work a week. Unemployed Singer workers and their families were left without any prospects of work or any relief. Meanwhile, inside the plant, the speed-up has increased and one wage-cut followed another, until in many departments earnings are as low as 30 cents an hour. Men with families to support are bringing home pay envelopes of six, eight and twelve dollars. The Singer plants in Bridgeport and South Bend tell the same story.
Although much has been accomplished at the Podolsk plant, Varonin tells us that he and the workers are far from satisfied. Much remains to be done. Costs of production, due mainly to the relatively low output per worker and large proportion of waste, are too high, although decreasing.
Luckily, the reasons for these shortcomings are well understood by the workers' management, as well as how they are to be overcome. There have been shortages in metal, machine oil, and other raw materials, which the opening up of new blast furnaces such as those at Magnitogorsk will relieve. One basic factor has been the cutting off of all imports from abroad of desperately needed machinery and measuring tools. For instance, it was planned to purchase a hundred and fifty foreign machines to be used in the production of the new industrial sewing machine, No. 31. When the foreign bankers, however, continued to put impossible credit conditions, it was decided to proceed without these purchases. Old machines were converted, largely by the method of trial and error, into machines producing parts for No. 31.
In the face of these difficulties, along with the problem of transforming thousands of former peasants only recently come from the village into skilled mechanics, the accomplishments of Varonin and his fellows seem of heroic proportions. Such struggles as this test a man's metal: fighting for better organization of labour, for personal responsibility of each man for his particular tasks, for getting rid of inefficient and wrong methods in the plant's inner organization, mastering technique, developing fresh cadres from the ranks, at the same time winning more active co-operation from the older engineers, and for creating the means for higher standards of life. Tasks, these, which stagger the faint-hearted, but send the blood pounding through the veins of those with dating and imagination.
This struggle is not without its enemies. While I was in town, crude bolts of iron were found thrown into the foundry's giant mixers. The son of a kulak had managed to get entrance by a ruse, hoping to spoil the plant's work. In the days of the famous Rarmsin trial, a local engineer in the Podolsk plant found was found guilty of sabotage, and removed from his post, but not before he had done considerable harm.
Some time has passed since then; successes of socialist construction have won over many wavering and even once hostile elements. The former saboteur is now at work, under watchful supervision, in a large Moscow factory, and reported to be sincerely exerting himself in behalf of Soviet industry.
One problem which Singer wrestled with, the workers' power finds no problem at all. That is, finding a market! In fact, the shoe is on the other foot: demand now far exceeds supply. Singer kept a force of thirty thousand salesmen in the villages and cities, hunting orders. Soviet distribution requires no such army, as the sewing machines are ordered by purchasers through branches of state banks and 290 special shops of the state trust. Schools for teaching peasant women to operate them have been established in many villages.
The present plan is to expand very greatly the production of industrial machines, while the output of home sewing machines will remain around the present figure. Let the women be freed from this as well as other types of household drudgery, says Varonin. At the same time power-run machines operated on a mass scale of production will supply twenty times as much clothing for the same labour, to the country. Besides, on the whole, the clothes will have more style.