The Stability of Occupational Structures, Social Mobility, and Interest Formation: The USSR as an Estatist Society in Comparison with Class Societies.

The article focuses on the stability of occupational structures and social mobility in the Soviet Union. Any society has its own specific social relations and relatively fixed class structures and interest groupings, which form the basis for each society's social contract. Family resources are of some significance in socialist societies for the reproduction of social inequalities. The average individual incomes as well as the household incomes have never been so unequally distributed in the Soviet Union as in western societies. The practice in socialist societies is to economize in the social services sectors, and to keep the wages of at least the bottom-level and middle-level white-collar workers in these sectors low. Since there is almost no vocational apprentice training in the Soviet Union, the rank within a firm is determined essentially by considerations of seniority. The relatively low average incomes in many service sector branches, are responsible for the relatively low earned incomes of unspecialized white-collar workers.