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Women and Industry in the Balkans: The Rise and Fall of the Yugoslav Textile Sector PDF

231 Pages·2019·5.75 MB·English
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Women and Industry in the Balkans ii Women and Industry in the Balkans The Rise and Fall of the Yugoslav Textile Sector Chiara Bonfiglioli I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Chiara Bonfiglioli 2020 Chiara Bonfiglioli has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: A film still from the movie Od 3 do 22 by Krešimir Golik, 1966. Courtesy of Croatian State Archives, Zagreb. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist,but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7845-3960-3 ePDF: 978-1-8386-0075-4 eBook: 978-1-8386-0076-1 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. Contents List of figures vii Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 1 Industrializing Yugoslavia: Market socialism and textile workers’ structure of feeling 21 Textile factories in the interwar era 22 ‘Factories to the workers’: From shock-work to self-management 26 Biking to the night shift: Women’s emancipation through labour 32 The factory as a socialist microcosm: Work, welfare and leisure 40 Balancing welfare and productivity: Paternalist management in socialism 46 2 Being a seamstress in Yugoslav times: The ‘working mother’ gender contract 55 Re-conceptualizing the double burden in the Yugoslav context 56 From 3.00 am to 10.00 pm: The seamstresses’ endless working day 61 ‘What do you get from being a party member?’: On the ‘triple burden’ 67 Women ‘made of granite’: Workers’ portraits in the factory press 74 Seamstresses on screen: Workers’ representations in popular culture 81 3 Labour after Yugoslavia: Post-socialism and deindustrialization in the textile sector 87 Post-socialist transformations in the textile sector 88 ‘Before it was different, it was easier’: Work across generations 95 ‘Only duties and no rights’: The subcontracting limbo 103 Trade unions in post-Yugoslav states 112 4 Workers’ structure of feeling after deindustrialization: Loss, nostalgia and belonging 123 Deindustrialized landscapes across the post-Yugoslav space 124 Threads of belonging: Remembering the factory as a second home 132 vi Contents Missing the future: The end of intergenerational solidarity 138 Feeling Yugoslav: Nostalgia for brotherhood and unity 146 Matters of gender and class: Critical Yugo-nostalgia 153 5 Beyond nostalgia: Workers’ struggles for social justice and everyday resilience 161 Industrial workers’ struggles in the cultural, artistic and academic realm 163 Heads up: Textile workers’ strikes and collective organizing 169 Do it yourself: Everyday survival strategies 179 Conclusion 185 Bibliography 195 Index 213 Figures 1 Work at the Arena knitwear factory, Pula, 1970s. Reproduced with permission from the Arena factory archive in 2015. 8 2 Work at the Dalmatinka spinning mill, Sinj, 1950s. Courtesy of Muzej Jugoslavije, Belgrade, and Dalmatinka Project, Sinj. 38 3 The Metka factory in post-war Celje. Courtesy of Zgodovinski Arhiv Celje. 44 4 The canteen in the Arena factory, Pula. Reproduced with permission from the Arena factory archive in 2015. 51 5 Arena’s director Ivan Škrinjarić with leading communist politician Milka Planinc. Reproduced with permission from the Arena factory archive in 2015. 52 6 Anica’s portrait in the newspaper of the Vuteks factory, Vukovar. 76 7 A photograph from the shooting of Vera i Eržika, Pančevo. Courtesy of Želimir Žilnik. 85 8 A portrait of Tito in what remains of the Makedonka factory, Štip, 2013. Photo by the author. 98 9 Arena collections, design by Marija Vareško. Reproduced with permission from the Arena factory archive in 2015. 127 10 The abandoned Golden Deer, Arena factory, 2015. Photo by the author. 128 11 The Dalmatinka factory in 2016, before its demolition in 2018. Photo by the author. 143 12 The Konzum supermarket in the former Sana factory, Novi Grad, 2014. Photo by the author. 150 13 Kamensko workers’ protest, Zagreb, 2010. Courtesy of Tomislav Medak. 171 14 ‘Catwalk on strike’ in support of Arena workers, Pula, 2014. Courtesy of Dejan Štifanić. 177 15 The kindergarten in Prvi Maj, Pirot. Reproduced with permission from the Arena factory archive in 2015. 186 Acknowledgements In 2012, while designing a new postdoctoral project on gender and citizenship in the Balkans, I started to research the current living and working conditions of textile workers in the former industrial towns of Leskovac, Serbia, and Štip, Macedonia. Little did I know that the project would keep me occupied for the next five years, and that I would engage in a quest for factory tales across the post-Yugoslav region. Workers’ narratives of factory life challenged me to go back in time, and to tell the untold story of textile workers’ lives both during socialism and in its aftermath. I am profoundly indebted to the women and men who made it possible for me to record their words, emotions and interpretations. I hope that the book will do justice to the narratives I was so generously entrusted with. This book was made possible by transnational institutional support. The research started in 2012 within the Edinburgh-based project on the ‘Europeanisation of citizenship in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia’ (CITSEE), where it continued for an additional year thanks to a Rubicon postdoctoral grant awarded by the Netherlands Association for Scientific Research (NWO). I wish to thank Professor Jo Shaw for her long- standing support and feedback, which extended well beyond my stay in Edinburgh, as well as Dr Igor Štiks and all my colleagues within the CITSEE project. Dr Stef Jansen also provided valuable suggestions and support in the early stages of the project. Subsequently, I could count on a NEWFELPRO postdoctoral fellowship, based at the Centre for Cultural and Historical Research of Socialism (CKPIS) at the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, which allowed me to conduct more extensive ethnographic fieldwork across the region. My gratitude goes to Dr Andrea Matošević, Dr Igor Duda, Dr Boris Koroman, Dr Lada Duraković and all my colleagues at the CKPIS for making me feel at home in Istria. Special thanks also to Zorana Barišić at the NEWFELPRO office in Zagreb, and to Barbara Unković at the International Research Office in Pula. Finally, a European Institutes of Advanced Studies (EURIAS) fellowship, held at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, allowed me to focus exclusively on book writing for ten months. The IWM staff and fellows deserve praise for making my stay so pleasant and productive. I also wish to thank Professor Rosi Braidotti and Professor Francisca De Haan for their support, over the course of several years, with postdoctoral applications. Acknowledgements ix The narrators quoted in these pages could not have been reached without the help of numerous friends and colleagues, who kindly put me in touch with their relatives, neighbours and acquaintances. When hearing about the research, many appeared to have a mother, grandmother, aunt or neighbour who used to work in textile. I wish to thank Adriana Zaharijević for contacts in Leskovac, Pavlina Pikova for contacts in Štip, Milorad Kapetanović for contacts in Novi, Maja Hodošček for her help in Celje and Julija Sardelić for her help in Murska Sobota, as well as for her insightful feedback on the manuscript. In Sinj I am grateful I could rely on the contacts previously established by Nikola Križanac, Dragana Modrić, Jelena Pavlinušić and Silvia Milić, who also provided me with additional archive material and photographs. In Pula, I wish to thank Manuel Angelini, Sonia Angiolin, Marta Baradić, Tanja Habrle, Ivan Kraljević, Ena Krožnjak, Edna Jurcan, Maja Maksić, Jasmina Mihajlović, Ana Orsag and Dejan Štifanić for providing contacts, additional archive material and overall support with the project. In Zagreb, I am grateful to Jelena Miloš, Andrea Milat, Katarina Jaklin, Igor Lesar, Tomislav Medak and Sabina Sabolović for helping out with contacts and photographs. Thank you also to Andrew Hodges for the cat sitting opportunity and to Agata Juniku for her hospitality and friendship. In Belgrade, Marijana Mitrović was there for me with logistic and archival support, and Miloš Jovanović helped me with last-minute archival queries. Fieldwork across Croatia would have been way lonelier without the company of Nikolina Hrga, who also offered additional contacts in Varaždin. Thank you also to Željka Ljubičić Berić for her assistance with transcriptions. Želimir Žilnik and Sarita Matijević generously provided a copy of the documentary Vera i Eržika and a photograph for the book. Heartfelt thanks also to the narrators who went the extra mile, suggesting additional contacts, organizing meetings and providing archive material and private photographs. A major source of inspiration for this project was the 2014 conference Deindustrialization and its Aftermath: Class, Culture and Resistance, organized by the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, and by the Scottish Oral History Centre at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. I am grateful to Professor Steven High and his collaborators at COHDS, and to Professor Arthur McIvor and Dr Jackie Clarke for further discussions on gender and deindustrialization in Glasgow. I also greatly appreciate the critical feedback on the manuscript given by friends and colleagues engaged in post-Yugoslav labour history and social history, namely Rory Archer, Ljubica Spaskovska, Goran Musić and Vladimir Unkovski-Korica. Thomas Stottor from I.B. Tauris has been an exemplary editor. His suggestions, together with the constructive comments

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