Post-socialist deindustrialisation and its gendered structure of feeling: the devaluation of women’s work in the Croatian garment industry

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the devaluation of women’s industrial work during the transition from market socialism to capitalism in Croatia. On the basis of oral history interviews with former workers from the Arena knitwear factory in Pula, it explores the gendered structure of feeling created by socialist industrialisation, and its transformations during post-socialist deindustrialisation. In socialist Yugoslavia, female industrial workers participated in the discourses and practices of workers’ self-management. Despite their hard work and their low wages, most workers fondly remember the factory as a space of socialisation, solidarity and empowerment. The factory functioned as a redistributive centre for accessing welfare rights. After post-socialist transition, workers experienced worsening social rights, precarity and exploitation as a result of deindustrialisation, privatisation and the neo-liberal withdrawal of the welfare state. Workers’ nostalgic narratives about their work experiences during socialism are mobilised to reclaim the dignity and value of work in post-socialist times.

KEYWORDS:

• Deindustrialisation
• gender
• post-socialism
• nostalgia
• Croatia
• garment industry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This research was facilitated by a Newfelpro fellowship of the Government of the Republic of Croatia, co-financed through the Marie Curie FP7-PEOPLE-2011-COFUND program. I thank my colleagues at the Centre for Cultural and Historical Research of Socialism (CKPIS) at the University of Pula, as well as Rory Archer and Goran Musić, for their support. I also thank the editors, the two anonymous reviewers, and my respondents in Pula. I lived in Pula between November 2014 and September 2016 and there interviewed former workers of the ‘Arena’ knitwear factory (mainly blue-collar workers, but also middle managers and white collar staff, 18 women and 2 men). While based on the case of Pula, my overall reflections also rest upon further research conducted in the cities of Zagreb, Varaždin, Sinj and Osijek in Croatia, as well as in Slovenia, Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Overall, I interviewed over 60 workers across the post-Yugoslav region (Bonfiglioli, 2019).

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKkYDd6YWNM (last accessed 18 July 2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chiara Bonfiglioli

Chiara Bonfiglioli is a Lecturer in Gender & Women’s Studies at University College Cork. She received her PhD in Gender Studies from Utrecht University in 2012. Between 2012 and 2017 she held post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Pula, and the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. Her research addresses gender and women’s history from a transnational perspective, with a specific focus on the former Yugoslavia and Italy. Her monograph, Women and Industry in the Balkans: The Rise and Fall of the Yugoslav Textile Sector, was published by I.B. Tauris in 2019.