What you describe sounds a lot like the labor-day (trudoden) accounting system for collective farms in the Soviet Union. They actually did pay wages to the wor

What you describe sounds a lot like the labor-day (trudoden) accounting system for collective farms in the Soviet Union. They actually did pay wages to the workers according to the number of labor-days worked. (Note: It wasn't literally one day -- harder tasks could earn more than one labor-day per day.) If one farm needed some temporary labor, it would've been easier to trade labor-days with another farm than to settle in cash. I don't know about other Soviet bloc countries, but I would not be surprised if they used a similar system. 25 years ago would've been towards the end of the Communist era, which would also explain why it was fading.