Organisation of technical inspection in student construction brigades (a case study of Buryatia)

The article analyses the way a general idea (of public control, of striving for a higher quality of released products, etc.) found its practical implementation in the creation of the student technical inspection for student construction brigades (SCB). The archival documents provide information for tracking the growth of popularity and increase of the number of SCBs. By the end of the 1960s students of training colleges who joined brigades selected from students of higher education institutions, organization of special-purpose student brigades (i.e. logging, power engineering, transport, etc.) and stricter requirements and responsibility for health and lives of students during the summer labour semester attracted great attention of the local SCB headquarters and forced them to create a technical inspection promptly. The author focuses his attention on the selection process of candidates for the inspection which was designed scrupulously to make sure the future inspectors would provide for a thorough implementation of operational safety rules and secure labour conditions, as well as secure living at construction objects. The analysis of available data proved that the regional headquarters observed strictly the practical training of SCBs in the operational safety rules. During this period a large scale operational safety training was launched. The training programme was designed for future technical inspectors and SCB members, and was implemented by technical instructors, as well as by professional engineers and skilled workers who represented construction groups and departments. It was a typical fact that the new subdivision within the structure of SCBs confronted not only violations of rules specified for the sphere of labour relations, but also an obsolete thinking of some managers of construction objects. Such managers viewed students as low skilled labour force capable of accessory work only. The study revealed that daily activities of the technical inspection proved its potential in resolving conflicts between the employer and students, in settling issues concerning production processes and daily life, revealed its most significant positive results. This allowed in a short-term perspective to determine the ways and means to make the work of the technical inspection more efficient, to analyse the accumulated data and present the arguments to the organizations and departments whose trust was to be earned. The author comes to a conclusion that measures undertaken by the regional SCB headquarters to introduce a compulsory safety training to students in the preliminary period, to create a new students' service (technical inspection), and efforts to ensure its activity remain an actual and paramount goal.

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