Project number: 792833
Project acronym: Worldsoflabour
Project title: Entangled Worlds of Labour: The Advance of Flexible Capitalism in Eastern Europe
Period covered by the report: from 01/08/2019 to 31/07/2021
Entangled worlds of labour tackles the conundrum of flexible capitalism in East-Central Europe by investigating the incorporation of the Romanian car industry in global commodity chains and its impact on labour regulation, working conditions, and the social fabric around the factory. My research focused on the case of an automobile factory located in the Southern part of Romania, in the city of Craiova. The car factory was opened in 1981 as a joint venture between the French automotive company Citroën and the Romanian socialist state, then taken-over by the South-Korean conglomerate Daewoo in the 1990s. In 2007, Ford became the factory’s main stakeholder and the factory got rapidly expanded. For decades now, the factory has been the most important employer and the biggest taxpayer in the otherwise deindustrializing region of Oltenia, being now placed in a position of “too big to fail” and central in local networks of political clientelism.
The central aim of the project was to offer a historical account of the advancement of flexible capitalism in the Romanian car industry in the last five decades, focusing on its impact upon workers’ biographical openings and imaginaries of the future. This aim translated into three specific objectives: to map the global production networks in which the Romanian car industry has been part of and the associated transformations in the field of labour regulation since the mid-1960s; to reconstruct the generationally specific life courses and the associated possibilities of imagining a “future” for the workers in Craiova, from late socialism into the present; and to analytically relate these generational narratives to technological changes, shifting managerial ideologies, and an increasing flexibilization of labour in other locations.
My findings suggest the following preliminary conclusions. First, against of a superficial reading of “socialism” against “capitalism”, a series of continuities mark the functioning logics of the shopfloor at the factory in Craiova. I argue that these logics are not as dissimilar as previously conceptualized in the literature on the region and can be understood only in relation to the global dynamics of capital accumulation within which Eastern Europe has been absorbed as cheap and controlled labour in the last forty years. Second, workers’ biographical possibilities are rooted in another set of continuities: stubbornly reproduced kinship structures. These structures link the workplace and the home in two fundamental ways: multiple generations from the same household working in the same factory, with familial dynamics extended to the shopfloor; and families pulling financial, temporal, and affective resources for counteracting precariousness and making (inter)generational “futures” possible. Third, a fracture does emerge though at the level of work/life nexus. As the place of wage labour in the universe of social reproduction changes, as visions of “tomorrow’s good life” become blurred and unsustainable, a barrier gets erected to the possibility of mutual understanding between the mobile, fragile generations of today and the more stable late socialist generations, who could refer to a path to “the future” in a linear way. My observations show that radically different generational experiences and the corresponding fracture in future imaginary affect workers’ positioning in every negotiation of the collective contract, in every cat strike attempt, and in any conversation that concerns shopfloor hierarchies or the moral economy of wages. And fourth, the forms of shopfloor conflict encountered during my fieldwork are heavily impacted by the delegitimizing of class as a coagulant of labour’s political imaginary.
