Must Change Attitudes, Soviet Workers Told : Economy: Gorbachev tells industrial workers that incentives are vital to his economic reform program.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev told workers at an industrial center in the Ural Mountains today that his economic reforms will not be successful unless people change their attitude toward work.

The 59-year-old leader, making his first domestic trip in his expanded post of executive president, said the country has a powerful industrial base, scientific potential and educated people.

But he said workers “don’t have enough incentives or responsibility.”

“On the one hand, incentives are needed so a person has a different attitude to matters. On the other hand, incentives don’t appear so easily, for psychology is formed over decades,” Gorbachev told workers on the shop floor of the gigantic UralMash machine-building complex in the city of Sverdlovsk.

Soviet television showed Gorbachev gesturing with his hands in animated conversations with UralMash workers.

The TV correspondent said the chats touched on some of the sore points in the city, such as shortages of meat, milk and fruit. About 11,000 of the workers are living without adequate housing, the reporter said.

Tass press agency said Gorbachev made the trip to find out if workers will tolerate tough reforms needed to save the economy.

“The Soviet leader well knows how difficult his conversations will be with workers of the Urals cities with the background of empty store shelves,” Tass said as the president left Moscow.

Gorbachev will try to gauge how the workers “will take new social shocks in the near future,” the news agency said, referring to a plan to shift the Soviet Union to a market economy.

No decisions on the new reform effort have been reached, and some reports say the plan will be less ambitious than originally planned because of fears of major social unrest.

Foreign reporters were not allowed to accompany Gorbachev to Sverdlovsk, a closed city known as the home ground of maverick politician Boris N. Yeltsin and a center for rock music, which was officially frowned upon until Gorbachev’s glasnost program of greater openness.

Soviet spokesmen did not specify why Gorbachev chose Sverdlovsk for the trip. The Soviet leader has made a habit of staging walking tours in various parts of the country to get a sense of public opinion.

Sverdlovsk residents have taken to the streets several times in recent months, once for a pre-New Year’s protest over a shortage of vodka.