Abstract
ITAS, a Croatian machine tool company, is arguably the best-known example of worker ownership in all the countries of the former Yugoslavia. In the context of rising commodification of everyday life, I trace how blue-collar workers in ITAS discussed their salaries. I reveal divisions among them, despite great similarities in their predicament as a group and as individuals. Workers used the generational division as the main emic concept to make sense of the relationships on the shop floor. I offer a reflection on their perception of belonging to different generations with different interests. I show how talking about “old workers” and “young workers” was tied to a host of other social factors, such as attitudes towards labor, historical experience of dispossession, and relationship to space and mobility, which did not neatly map onto the generational division. Everyday discussions on the shop floor correctly described differential inclusion of workers of different generations into the labor market, which broadly reflected transnational forces at work in the global market for metalworking. However, constant focus on divisions in everyday discussions prevented workers in ITAS from engaging in political work that could harmonize their interests across generational and other lines.
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Notes
I have replaced personal names with pseudonyms, unless otherwise indicated.
The questions of ownership and of the relationship between blue-collar workers and management go beyond the scope of this article. While only around a third of the employees were shareholders in the company at the time of my research, which distinction was not pronounced on an everyday level, somewhat surprisingly. The division between blue-collar and management workers was pronounced, but in ways that were different from the logic of divisions on the shop floor. Thus, I focus narrowly on the horizontal relationships among workers in this article.
Wine cellars (klijeti) serve both as places to store wine and as holiday cottages (vikendice). According to my interlocutors, the trend of expanding wine cellars by adding a room or two for social gatherings took off in the 1980s.
In early 2017, the management board of ITAS decided to make all salaries public. Regardless of that decision, it was common for workers to get their pay slips hand delivered and to open them while surrounded by their coworkers. Thus, salary differences were not a secret. That, however, does not mean that workers spoke about those differences accurately: sometimes they forgot actual amounts that individuals earned and sometimes they employed hyperbole to make their point.
The C.E.O. at the time of my research, Božo Dragoslavić, was an engineer who was brought on in 2012, after ITAS workers had ousted his predecessor, Zoran Belač (real names). Dragoslavić had worked in ITAS many years before, but he had left the company before the tumultuous history with the majority shareholder began, in the early 2000s. Dragoslavić himself was ousted in late summer 2018.
An appendix of a collective bargaining agreement from 1996 shows that coefficients for workers employed in production ranged from 1 to 2, and work white-collar and managerial jobs from 2 to 3.2. Furthermore, jobs were sorted according to their complexity. For example, there were three levels of complexity for turning (coefficients 1.65–1.9) or four levels of complexity for milling (coefficients 1.5–1.9). The ranges of coefficients have widened since then in subsequent collective bargaining agreements.
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Acknowledgements
I express my deep gratitude to the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the University of Pittsburgh European Studies Center for generously supportingmy research. Some of the material in this article was presented at the conference “Workers beyond Socialist Glorification and Post-Socialist Disavowal: New Perspectives on Eastern European Labour History,” held at the University of Vienna; many thanks to the conference organizers, the panel discussant, and other participants for their thoughtful engagement with my presentation. I also owe gratitude to Patrick Beckhorn, Nicole Constable, Alexandra Dantzer, Neha Dhole, Carolina Forgit-Knerr, Robert M. Hayden, Lauren Krishnamurti, Sean Nonnenmacher, Tomas Matza, Camilo Ruiz, Fangyuan Zhang, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.
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Kojanic, O. “We’re all here for the money”: solidarity and divisions in a worker-owned company. Dialect Anthropol 45, 151–168 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-020-09616-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-020-09616-z