The labor day (trudoden) was a mechanism for calculating the labor payment of peasants belonging to collective farms. In theory the collective farm was a cooperative form of organization, and thus peasants divided among themselves a residual payment for work rather than a contractual wage. The latter was reserved for the payment of state workers (rabochii) in industrial enterprises and on state farms.
Each daily task on a collective farm was assigned a number of labor days, according to the nature of the task, its duration, difficulty, and so forth. Peasants accumulated labor days, which were recorded in a labor book. Although a peasant might have some sense of the value of a labor day from past experience, the value of a labor day in terms of money or product would not be known until the end of the agricultural season. Valuation would be determined by the following general formula: To calculate the value of a labor day, the compulsory deliveries to the state would be subtracted from the farm output, and the result divided by the total number of labor days.
After the completion of the harvest, the value of each labor day could be known, and each peasant rewarded in kind (for example, grain) or in money (rubles). With the magnitude of compulsory deliveries at low fixed prices set by the state, the state wielded significant power by extracting products from the farm. Moreover, even though changes in the frequency and form of payment were made over time, the labor day system was a very crude mechanism of payment, with severe limitations as an incentive system.
Bibliography
Davies, R. W. (1980). The Soviet Collective Farm, 1929 - 1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Stuart, Robert C. (1972). The Collective Farm in Soviet Agriculture. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.
—ROBERT C. STUART
