re: #232 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))
The practical upswing is that everybody had a job but they worked about a third of the time, the rest was spent loafing or ducking out to stand in line at a store…
The running gag, at least in the Brezhnev years, was “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” Said with, I’m sure, a particularly Russian shrug that can’t quite be translated into English.