Changing Lifestyles : Where the Work Ethic Doesn’t Work : In Eastern Europe, socialist-bred habits die hard at the workplace. ‘They drink, they smoke, they come (in) late,’ complains one employer.

For a generation or more, it was an axiom of the socialist workers’ world: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

The terms of this unwritten but well-understood contract of the Communist world, for both managers and employees, were simultaneously hard and convenient. For the bosses of factories, it may have meant unfulfilled quotas, but it also brought infusions of state money to make up for “losses.” For workers, it meant lousy pay--but holidays of up to six weeks annually, long “sick” leaves, lax to nonexistent job discipline, company-subsidized housing and virtually inviolable job security.

It was an arrangement that translated, most visibly, into shoddy work and shoddy products--and a lot of leaning on the shovel.

The revolutions that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 changed the politics and continue, painfully, to work their slow transformations on the economies of the region. But the peoples of Eastern Europe are finding out (as the citizens of the former Soviet Union will as well) that old habits--particularly work habits--die hard.

Krzysztof Dziewulski, a Polish-American from Garfield, N. J., complained about the problem bitterly recently. He had come to Poland with the idea of setting up a joint-venture firm offering custodial services. The new outfit, Continental Group Services, is under way, but not without difficulty. His big problem, Dziewulski lamented recently, was personnel--the Polish worker.

“They drink, they smoke, they come to work late,” he said. “They don’t know how to work.”

Now, as economic shifts take hold and as the specter of unemployment becomes more than an abstract threat, the revolution is beginning to catch up with the workers. But it has been a slow process and is far from over.

“We had very hard problems when we first opened,” said Maciej Kopacki, manager of Luxus, the first Western-standard supermarket in Warsaw.

“Sometimes people would work for us one day,” Kopacki said. “They would come in, throw their aprons on my desk and say, ‘I quit.’ One woman said we were running a ‘concentration camp’ here. I would go to Holland on a business trip for three days, and when I came back, 50% of the faces would be new to me.”

For the last two years, since reforms began to take a visible hold in Poland, complaints about lazy workers have been common among the newly emergent entrepreneurial class--the highly visible, adrenaline-driven merchants, traders and profiteers who were out to earn money at breakneck speed. As they moved swiftly to fill the obvious gaps in the economy, particularly in service industries, they hired--and fired--ruthlessly, paying good wages by Polish standards but demanding good work in return.

Mikolaj Miszczak, who in the past two years has turned a hole-in-the-wall hamburger stand into a pair of pizza parlors and two more hamburger restaurants, employs 100 people in Warsaw but estimates that another 50 to 60 have not made the grade.

“I’m getting better at hiring,” he said recently. “I’ve had to fire only about 10 people this year. Now I know better what to look for. If they come in and ask me, ‘How much am I paid?’ I am not interested. If they come in and ask, ‘What is the work, how do I do it?’ then usually they are good people.”

But, he adds, the special conditions of Warsaw, where unemployment is low, add to the problems of finding eager, willing workers. “Warsaw people are harder to deal with, they don’t know how to work. I’m opening a new place in Gdynia (on Poland’s Baltic coast), and I have to protect my people there from my employees in Warsaw. The Warsaw people will infect them.”

The latest Polish government figures show unemployment at 2,155,600, or 11.4% of the labor force, with the figure ranging as high as 17% in some generally rural districts in northeastern Poland. The rate for Warsaw, however, is around 3%.

Some economists argue that the unemployment figures are inflated by the large number of casual laborers who queue up outside employment offices and work for one or two days at a time, enough to pay for their minimal needs. With additional unemployment benefits of up to about 600,000 zlotys (about $50) a month, their incomes roughly equal the lowest state wage levels.

To some employers, these state-paid benefits are simply too high to contribute much to the Polish work ethic. “Why work at a steady job,” one asked rhetorically, “when you can work a couple of days in the ‘black’ (where their income is not reported to employment or tax authorities) and collect unemployment?”

The difficulty of finding reliable manual laborers, particularly in Warsaw and other large cities, has opened the market for a wave of workers from the former Soviet Union, who have found thousands of jobs in the construction business.

“I’ve had miserable experiences with Polish workers,” said Robert Stankiewicz, an entrepreneur who is building a large house for himself on the outskirts of Warsaw.

“They drink,” Stankiewicz said in an interview with Reuters news agency. “They work for a while and then go on a binge for a week.”

Fed up, Stankiewicz hired four workers from Ukraine who, he said, “work 12 hours a day, they don’t drink and they do a month’s work in three weeks.”

The problem, however, reaches beyond the unskilled labor pool. Indeed, it is sometimes worse in the office, where technical skills are in short supply and where workers, in the old system, were used to undemanding standards.

“We are in a situation now,” said Piotr Marciniak of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who has studied the labor issue, “where if you know anything, you can go very high immediately. This is very obvious to anyone coming to Poland to do business and finding these people lacking--for example, highly expert secretarial services, good bookkeepers, good managerial assistants.”

Marciniak divides the labor force of Poland, and by extension the rest of post-Communist Europe, into three broad categories:

* At the top are the entrepreneurs, ranging from street-corner fruit vendors to millionaire traders. They are--whatever their level--energetic, creative, dynamic and quick to adapt to markets and opportunities.

* At the bottom are the “marginal workers,” who were marginal in the Communist system as well. “The old system, however, protected them. They might be factory workers or, in fact, factory managers. In socialism, this was a large group. It was this group, for example, that the Pope used to refer to when he said, ‘Polish labor is ill.’ For these people, confrontation with a real work regime is terrifying. Even higher pay cannot compensate them for the loss of their lifestyle, which is based on avoiding work.”

* In between may be the group most psychologically wrenched by the changes whirling on around them. “They are qualified, either objectively or in their imaginations,” Marciniak said. “They do not see themselves as entrepreneurs--an idea they find distasteful--and they think they should be earning real pay, pay at the level of private enterprise. Most of these people were in state enterprises and had jobs that once--at least in their minds, and to some extent objectively--had some prestige. Now everything has shifted. They are caught between the old world and the new, and they can no longer identify their place in the system.”

As Marciniak’s analysis suggests, age has much to do with it. Employers have generally found that younger workers adapt far more easily to the changes.

Paul Malcolm, the marketing director for the Marriott Hotel, which opened in Warsaw in October, 1989, has seen a vast improvement in worker standards in the past two years.

“We certainly had our teething problems,” he said. “We lost a lot of people at first because they couldn’t take the pace.” Last year, however, employee turnover dropped to about 1%--very low, he said, for a work force of 1,050.

“We hired a lot of young people,” he added, “and less than 1% of them had any hotel experience.” The hotel instituted frequent training sessions and emphasized such matters as grooming, dress codes, the use of deodorant.

“You can’t fix the old system in a year,” said Maciej Kopacki, the Luxus supermarket manager. “The principle in the Communist system--I know, because I worked in it--was that you did your time and you left. You were not a part of it. If someone doesn’t feel a part of it, he doesn’t care. Now it’s different, and some people are beginning to understand it. We exist because the company exists.”

Looking at the Labor Force

Piotr Marciniak of Polish Academy of Sciences divides Eastern Europe’s work force into three categories:

* Entrepreneurs, who range from street-corner fruit vendors to millionaire traders. They are energetic, creative, and quick to adapt to opportunities.

* Marginal workers, such as factory workers, whose lifestyle was based on avoiding work. They were marginal in the Communist system, as well.

* In-between workers, who are qualified as employees but do not see themselves as entrepreneurs. Caught between the old world and new, they are group most psychologically wrenched by changes whirling on around them.