After a visit in the fall of 1969, a specialist on Balkan affairs reported that austerity and regimentation were still the rule despite a substantial measure of economic progress achieved during the period of independence. He also expressed the view that Albania undoubtedly remained the poorest country in Europe but that the economic and social advances attained could be envied by the countries of the Near East. LABOR Although economic development is still in its infancy, growing concern has been officially expressed about the adequacy of the labor force to meet the needs of industrialization and of expanding social services without adversely affecting agricultural production. The main cause of the incipient labor shortage is low productivity owing to a lack of industrial experience, a low level of mechanization, and the survival of backward traditional methods in agriculture. Officially, low productivity has been ascribed to poor labor discipline and inefficient management arising from an inadequately developed sense of political and social responsibility. It has also been blamed on a failure of manpower planning and on the relaxation of central controls over enterprise funds. At the end of 1969 the Central Committee of the Party adopted a decision on means for correcting this situation. An important element of the program is the education and political indoctrination of the workers. This task is a major function of the trade unions, which are primarily a political arm of the Party for the control of labor, without any significant responsibilities in the field of labor relations (see ch. 6, Government Structure and Political System). In 1967, the last year for which official employment data are available, the working-age population comprised 932,000 persons, 739,200 of whom were actually employed. The number of employed did not include roughly 6,000 peasants working on the private holdings still remaining in that year. Including these peasants, the participation rate in the labor force was 80 percent. Two-thirds of the labor force was employed in agriculture, the remainder in a variety of nonagricultural pursuits, chief among which were industry, construction, trade, and education. Apart from the peasants working their own land, farm labor included about 427,000 persons on collective farms and 64,000 on state farms. The industrial labor force of 105,300 accounted for 14.1 percent of total employment, and 40,000 construction workers, for 5.4 percent. The nearly 32,000 workers in trade and 25,000 workers in education constituted, respectively, 4.2 and 3.4 percent of the employed manpower.