Table Of ContentWomen 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
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First published in Great Britain 2020
Copyright © Chiara Bonfiglioli 2020
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Cover image: A film still from the movie Od 3 do 22 by Krešimir Golik, 1966.
Courtesy of Croatian State Archives, Zagreb.
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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
