The study examines the corporate policy of discipline and punishment through selected snapshots from the life of management and staff at the Csepel Car Factory. Although the paper investigates the topic primarily from the viewpoint of the workers, it also touches upon some cases that involved middle and upper management. This latter is notable precisely because from the 1950s onwards both management and workers were liable to be demoted or brought to disciplinary action for a variety of reasons. The forced industrialization of the early 1950s, as well as the resulting performance pressure dictated by the corporate plans, provided the establishment with opportunities to “set examples.” These cases included the sanctioning of “voluntary leavers”, workers committing “Plan fraud,” or being late for work. The workers and their direct superiors attempted to solve most cases “among themselves” which suggests the existence of informal arbitration. The cases resulted in legal procedures proper, as well as party disciplinary actions against the factory’s employees. Cases involving the party state and the corporation’s internal disciplinary policies reveal that the practices of discipline and punishment in this period were far from standardized and egalitarian.

Nincs absztrakt.

The ordinary life of Szigetszentmiklós and its environs situated on Csepel Island underwent visible and profound social transformation at the end of the 1940s. At the end of 1949 a political decision has launched a new heavy goods vehicle factory out of the ruins of the Danubian Plane Manufacturing Plant. The first Five Year Plan, starting on 1 January 1950, assigned the development of Hungarian vehicle production as the main duty of the new plant. The study focuses on the effects of 1950s socialist human resource politics on the life of the car manufacturing plant. Kiss examines events and phenomena which illustrate the relations between the establishment and the industrial labourers of the Csepel plant. The implementation of socialist human resource politics was met with difficulties in the plant shortly after its foundation, and its deleterious consequences were felt almost immediately. The number of workers was never adjusted to the increasing productivity of the plant, which resulted in the deterioration of working conditions as well as the mass departure and speedy turnover of workers. This, in turn, brought about extensive governmental monitoring within the plant and various forms of worker’s opposition.