Preliminary Programme

The Albanian and Bulgarian communists, similar to their comrades elsewhere, considered industrialization one of their major goals. They were particularly eager to build large steel industries for economic but also political and socio-cultural purposes. Steel factories were considered a prime site of the creation of the New Man and of a socialist working class. The steel factories in Kremikovci (near Sofia) and Elbasan (in Albania) – both of which became the single largest industrial enterprise in their countries , are a case in point: they not only swallowed huge investment but were also attributed significant, and to some extent contradictory functions.
In our paper we will focus on a central problem with respect to the creation of a socialist working class, which had long-lasting consequences for the nature of labour relations in the factory: the recruitment of workers. We will in particular discuss the difficulties, which the authorities faced in finding workers for these two showcase plants, and their strategies to recruit workers. These difficulties were, among others, related to the lack of an industrial tradition and to significant labour turnover, especially in Bulgaria. We will take recruitment as a prism to learn more about the realities of the domestic mobility regimes in place in communist Bulgaria and Albania and about the bargaining power of workers vis-à-vis the management. Hence, the two cases studies offer important insight in the social fabric of the two communist countries, which were different in some, but similar in other respect. (Show less)

Much of the recent labor history on European state socialism is replete with notions of working-class solidarity predicated on a clear cut distinction between the socialist state and society. Accordingly, workers’ solidarities are grasped mostly as functions of skill and age, gender, ethnicity and spatial boundedness while the socialist state is reified as an alien cluster of institutions almost already bent on diluting and refashioning, appropriating or accommodating workers’ allegedly common interests and shared values. The historiography informed by suchlike epistemological decisions has proven particularly well-equipped to tackle questions of outward resistance and informal unruliness, negotiation and compromise. However, scant attention has been paid to the trans-individual hence intermediary social field commonly referred to as “the social” - the very object of social policy, insurance schemes and welfare arrangements. In this paper I explore how work accidents occasioned the elaboration of a multiplicity of seemingly contradictory, yet competing discourses about labor solidarity. During the first years of state socialism, party and state authorities were keen on interpreting work accidents as acts of sabotage undertaken by invisible networks of conspirators. But this interpretative stance was soon found to demoralize both workers and factory managers thus significantly impeding the efforts to raise productivity. Consequently, the setting up of voluntary shop floor-based mutual benefit associations was encouraged throughout the 1950s with the hope that wage earners would be at least minimally insured against accidents and work-related illness. This policy, however, marked the emergence of an understanding of solidarity grounded in the socialization of industrial risk and expressed through the category of “professional risk”. The early drive to establish fault and responsibility within social contexts deemed hostile was slowly engulfed by managerial discourses targeting the prevention of accidents. Finally, I argue that “professional risk” was not only one of the organizing principles of the social insurance schemes concerning work accidents developed by the socialist state, rather it was also an empowering “category of practice” that legitimized workers’ claim-making, particularly in relation to better working conditions. (Show less)

Besides professional diseases and individual accidents, large industrial disasters in plants and mines were a too familiar scourge in the lives of working people in particular during the industrial revolution. Although the new communist rulers claimed to make a difference with regard to health and safety protection compared to their capitalist predecessors, a long series of disturbances and breakdowns, leading eventually to fatal mass accidents remained a feature of industrial labor in the planned economy of the GDR. These numerous so-called Havarien were duly examined by the secret police, the state planning administration, and Trade Union inspectors leaving behind ample sources testifying not only to endemic problems with sophisticated technology but also to the ongoing antagonisms between the different status groups and classes populating the social universe of ‘really existing socialism’: Workers and foremen, engineers and technologists, managers and party functionaries, scientific experts and police officers, and a public with scarce access to reliable information were all involved when it came “to make sense” of the tragic consequences from exploding steam generators and detonating chemical clouds. Explanations for such tragedies ranged from - always suspected but never proven - “sabotage”, lack of qualification of the work force, to gross neglect of safety regulations and prioritization of plan fulfillment over all other concerns by workers and their superiors alike. At the same time the socialist state could use the temporary state of emergency to stage itself as the sovereign instance by providing social assistance to the bereaved and injured, and bringing the situation back to “normal”.

Examining several instances of such Havarien in the energy producing and the chemical industry of the GDR from the late 1950s to the early 1980s I will argue that this category of event allows for a thorough investigation of industrial relations in situations of stress and trauma. Their close-up examination adds to our understanding of industrial labor in ‘Sovietized’ national economies and to the agents’ capability to cope with a production regime of protracted failure and technical deterioration.
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In a micro-historical approach the paper explores labor relations in socialist Yugoslavia comparing two companies producing motor vehicles in Slovenia and Serbia between the 1960ies and the 1980ies. Under the conditions of worker's self management, a normative system characterized by constant change, the automotive industry in Maribor and Kragujevac could rely on local industrial experience on the one hand, but had to deal with challenges that rapid social and technical transformation from agrarian to industrial society posed on the other hand. Automotive industry in particular faced the difficulties of complex production environments with intricate modes of work organization, supply with materials and prefabricates, skilled professionals as well as production workers and from the late 1960s onwards with the continuous call for higher intensity and efficiency of production. Having in mind the stratifications among production workers due to their origin, qualification, gender etc. this contribution will focus the forms of interactions with other social groups within the companies. The paper will track the interests of laborers and their strategies to put them forward in the environment of self managed socialism. By deploying a comparative perspective the paper seeks to shed light on Yugoslavia's inner diversity, but also aims to reveal potential common Yugoslav forms of labor relations and a specific consciousness of industrial workers that was produced by the system of worker's self management. (Show less)