Creating Material and Moral Incentives to Motivate Workers

Urban Farm DB summary

This chapter describes how Cuba's 1980s economic reforms ("perfeccionamiento empresarial") sought to link urban agriculture workers' incomes more closely to their production output, noting that Cuba's urban agriculture price-formation and supply-demand mechanisms provide relatively high incomes for the workforce, and that non-monetary "moral" incentives—awards such as "de referencia" and "de excelencia" status given to individuals, collectives and provinces, plus an annual December 27 meeting between the President and outstanding urban agriculturalists—operate alongside material incentives to raise workers' self-esteem and social standing.