A study of many aspects of employment conditions and the labour force in the Soviet Union. It examines production capacity, job rights under Soviet law and an outline of Soviet wage policy. The information is current as Soviet newspapers and journals were used as research material.

Part 1 Employment planning and labour balances: employment planning - an outline of theoretical and practical issues; labour balances and employment growth; labour shortage and excess labour - branch and territorial imbalances. Part 2 Labour redeployment - trends and institutions: labour redistribution; labour redeployment under "perestroika"; the administration of labour displacement - the Job Placement Bureaux; labour law and job rights. Part 3 The demand for labour; the enterprise demand for labour; the output - versus the employment-oriented approach - the notion of workplace; excess-capacity - a new definition of labour shortage; capacity-labour balance model. Part 4 Production capacity utilization and knowledge: production capacity utilization and shift regime - indicators and quality of information; information and capacity utilization in theory; information on capacity utilization in practice; contradictory information and investment policy; actual and expected outcomes. Part 5 Labour-saving - notion and indicators; labour value of output and productivity; labour-release in planning theory - relative release versus absolute release, conventional labour-release; the principles of labour-saving at the enterprise level; labour-saving in practice - the physical indicators; the rationale of limits on employment; the branch limits on employment; the territorial limits on employment. Part 6 Wages, employment and labour-saving: outline of Soviet wage policy - theory and practice; the wage-productivity relation and employment; labour-saving through wage incentives - experiments and model; wage control - wage norms and the principle of residual formation of the wage fund; the wage reforms - increased differentiation in wage rates and bonuses; the implementation of the wage reform. Conclusion: concluding remarks and discussion of the options for the 1990s.