In 1930es, when Stalin's industrialization kicked into high gear, there were a few distinct classes of "factory workers". Firstly, there were really experienced factory workers who stayed in the industry from the pre-Soviet times; quite often, these were the most skilled of the bunch. Secondly, there were workers who entered the industry prior to industrialization; these workers would normally already have establish themselves in the cities and would have more or less traditional formal education. Finally, there were literally hordes of very fresh factory workers, who were drafted into industry military-style to fill in the newly created positions; typically, these people would have a very rushed education (if any) and be housed in hastily-built "barracks" - or communal houses which were built as cheaply as possible to house as many people as possible, and, as a result, offered really poor housing conditions.

The risk to the first group of workers being purged was particularly high; not only they typically occupied the most desirable positions on the factory, but in 1928 the Communist Party declared, more or less, an "open season" on this class, as Shakhty Trial set a high-profile precedent of highly skilled "saboteurs" who secretly conspired with the Tsarist ex-owners to impede Soviet industry. In practice, this meant that anybody who worked at the factory prior to 1917 was considered a person who could conspire with "Tsarist ex-owners", so NKVD often would purge a person based on anonymous reports of "sabotage". Given that such anonymous reports were often driven by the desire to get a purged person's room or purged person's job - something that ex-Tsarist workers often had - the risk of a purge was very high, to the extent that in 1934 a different directive hinted that people should not be so trigger happy.

As Stalin's industrialization in practice meant that a lot of workers would have to work more for less, the practice was met with strikes. To quash the resistance, a second "show trial" - the Industrial Party Trial was organized in 1930. This time, it put spotlight on all Soviet workers who would conspire with foreign industrialists and sabotage the new workers' equipment. This essentially put a target on people who would work prior to the mass arrival of the newly recruited workforce; as old workers were more established and, in particular, had better living arrangements, the temptation for new recruits to report the more experienced workers as "saboteurs" was quite big.

If you were a new recruit fresh off the boat, you weren't completely off the hook, but the chances of being purged were a lot lower, particularly if you came from the lower classes and had no Tsarists in your family. However, a big reason for this was the fact that typically such workers occupied the bottom of the food chain, so while the risk of purges was smaller, the risk of demerits or pay cuts that would result in starvation on injury-prone jobs was higher.