GalleryMain Aim
The aim of the Seven-Year Plan is to raise steadily the people's living standards—in other words, to create every condition for the Estonian people to grow more prosperous with every passing year and to satisfy more fully their material and spiritual requirements.
Today the Estonian working people are far better off than they were under the capitalist rule. Let me give a few comparisons:
In 1938-39 the monthly wage of a skilled worker averaged 72 Estonian crowns, about 576 roubles, in terms of present prices. Today it averages 856 roubles, 48 per cent more.
Furthermore, one must add benefits and services which the worker did not have before: a Soviet citizen's income cannot be restricted merely to his earnings.
Thus the health service is free for all. All are entitled to paid holidays; anyone can be accommodated in a sanatorium or holiday home. Sick pay, paid maternity leave and other benefits are guaranteed. There are special benefits for people with large families.
Old-age pensions are as much as 50-100 per cent of one's earnings. In capitalist Estonia pensions totalled a sum equal to as little as 4 per cent of the total wages bill and, furthermore, factory workers received only 7 per cent of all the pensions, which went mainly to favoured civil servants.
Today the pension sum is 12 per cent of the wages fund, and all factory and office workers are eligible for pension.
All the additional state-borne benefits mentioned above are equal to about a third of the wages fund. The net result is that today real wages and salaries in Estonia are twice as much as they were under capitalist rule even during boom, let alone crisis, years.
In the next seven years Soviet workers will get far more both in wages and especially in benefits. By 1965 the total wages fund will be nearly a third more than in 1958. The wages and salaries of lower- and middle-paid sections will be raised, as will minimum pensions.
By 1960 all the factory and office workers in Estonia—as throughout the Soviet Union in general—will have gone over to a six- or seven-hour working day. In 1962 factory and office workers, previously switched to a seven-hour day, will have gone over to a forty-hour working week, while beginning from 1964 the gradual transition to a 30-35-hour week will be started.
The reduced five-day working week will not mean any cut in wages.
Estonian shale miners already work a six-hour day. But their earnings are even more than when they had an eight-hour day.
At mine No. 4 in Sompa the average monthly earnings of a miner working underground have increased by 10-12 per cent and now reach 3,000 roubles, due to a higher level of mechanisation and better organisation of the work.
The incomes of the collective farmers will also go up in the coming seven years. Total cash payments—apart from what the collective farmers receive in kind—will increase by roughly 60-65 per cent.
Soviet Booklets, London, England, in December, 1959, as part of the series
"THE FIFTEEN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS OF TODAY AND TOMMORROW."
We do not endorse the Soviet account of historical events or their circumstances contained therein as factual.
