ABSTRACT
This chapter argues, on the contrary, that the changing view of employment resulted largely from new policies, many of which were initiated to avoid unemployment. At the outset of the post-Stalinist period, employment in state industry was regarded as the most productive and most virtuous. The attention to growing forms of work outside of the main job encouraged Hungarians to think of employment as only part of a larger set of income sources. Innovations in the categorization of work became their own independent cause for reconceptualizing the economy. Favorable treatment for workers and enterprises in this part of the economy yielded self-fulfilling evidence of its central importance. The embrace of supplementary work led to new political expectations and norms around employment, and with them new definitions of unemployment. In worker households, the head of household was a non-agricultural manual worker and no other member was engaged in agriculture.
