WAGE POLICY AND LABOUR DISCIPLINE IN SOCIALIST ROMANIA(1945-1989) – THE CASE OF TIMIȘOARA
WAGE POLICY AND LABOUR DISCIPLINE IN SOCIALIST ROMANIA(1945-1989) – THE CASE OF TIMIȘOARA

Summary/Abstract: This article analyzes socialist industrialization in Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on Romania between 1945 and 1989. It examines the main theoretical models underlying socialist economic planning—Feldman’s growth model, Preobrazhensky’s theory of primitive socialist accumulation, and the Stalinist system of centralized industrialization—and explores their differentiated application across the Eastern Bloc. While countries such as Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic benefited from pre-existing industrial infrastructures, Romania and Bulgaria implemented more rigid and ideologically driven versions of the Soviet model, prioritizing heavy industry and extensive quantitative growth over efficiency and productivity. The study further investigates the Romanian case under Nicolae Ceaușescu, where industrialization became a central instrument of economic autonomy, political legitimacy, and social engineering. Although the model generated rapid structural transformation, urbanization, and industrial expansion, it also produced deep structural imbalances, particularly during the 1980s austerity period, when external debt repayment policies severely affected domestic consumption and investment. At the local level, the city of Timișoara is analyzed as a regional case study illustrating how national industrial policies were translated into urban restructuring, demographic change, and infrastructural transformation. The city thus functions as an “urban laboratory” of socialist industrialization, where economic planning directly shaped spatial and social organization.

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