Rita Röhr

Employing Polish Workers in the German Democratic Republic 1966-1990. The Contractual Foundations and their Realisation

This article examines the development of the contractual foundations underlying the employment of Polish workers in East German factories. It describes as well how the legal framework was put into practice by describing the numbers of employees and the structure of their employment. The analysis concentrates, on the one hand, on those interests who wanted to employ Poles in East Germany, and, on the other, on those power structures in which these interests were realised. The negotiating partners were those "authorities responsible for work and wages", who worked in the economic administrations of their respective countries.

The initiative came from East Germany. The goal was a planned expansion of the volume of available working hours, in order to increase production through a better employment to capacity of existing machinery. At all times there were, however, economic reasons which spoke against such a mobilisation of labour. For East Germany foreign labour was not cheap but expensive. One needs here to distinguish between two forms of employment. On the one hand there were a number of people in the border region who travelled back and forth daily, who worked in factories in the East German border region on the basis of a 1966 treaty. The number of these daily travellers remained relatively constant from the beginning of the 1970s up till the end of East Germany in 1989/90 – between 3000 and 4000 people. On the other hand the number and the form of employment was expanded with the government treaty of 1971, which laid the foundation for so-called contract work. The number of contract workers varied greatly, but there were generally between 6000 and 8000 a year.