Overview

Labor regimes under communism in East-Central Europe were complex, shifting, and ambiguous. This collection of sixteen essays offers new conceptual and empirical ways to understand their history from the end of World War II to 1989, and to think about how their experiences relate to debates about labor history, both European and global. The authors reconsider the history of state socialism by re-examining the policies and problems of communist regimes and recovering the voices of the workers who built them. The contributors look at work and workers in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. They explore the often contentious relationship between politics and labor policy, dealing with diverse topics including workers’ safety and risks; labor rights and protests; working women’s politics and professions; migrant workers and social welfare; attempts to control workers’ behavior and stem unemployment; and cases of incomplete, compromised, or even abandoned processes of proletarianization. Workers are presented as active agents in resisting and supporting changes in labor policies, in choosing allegiances, and in defining the very nature of work.

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9789633863374

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Reviews

Siefert ist unbedingt zuzustimmen, wenn sie in ihrer Einleitung darauf hinweist, dass die sozialistische Arbeitsgeschichte integraler Bestandteil der europaischen Arbeitsgeschichte ist. Wie sehr all die Anknupfungspunkte auf der Hand liegen, stellt dieser Sammelband eindrucklich unter Beweis. Nun mussen die westeuropaischen Historiker die Osteuropaerinnen nur noch lesen. Bleiben wir optimistisch. -- Alexandra Oberlander * Zeitschrift fur Geschischtswissenschaft * This book can be included in the currently developing dynamic field of state socialist labour history, whose pioneering studies were published approximately 25 years ago. It continues the exploration of the dictatorships from the perspective of workers' experiences while insisting on taking the promises and practices of state socialism seriously . Both approaches are more than appropriate in the context of the decades-long politicization of state socialist labour history by both communists and anti-communists. The book is a relevant and useful contribution to global labour history. The authors provide accessible but also in-depth factually oriented texts. They introduce new ideas and use a great variety of sources. In sum, the book provides thorough and inspiring groundwork for further reflection. -- Lucie Duskova * Connections * c , 1996 .: ? . . , . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/841211 -- * Ab Imperio * The crux of the book is uncovering why and how, crucial top-down levers of organising and managing labour were circumvented by workers, with the management's tacit acknowledgement. By drawing on previous studies that had centralised the role of agency, the main argument, which gives coherence to the breadth of individual case studies, is that labour laws, employment contracts, and social welfare policies and benefits were essentially derived by means of 'negotiation from below.' https://esreview.soc.cas.cz/pdfs/csr/2021/06/07.pdf -- Sergiu Delcea * Czech Sociological Review * Labor in State-Socialist Europe is a coherent edited volume, focusing on the tensions and contradictions that work, the labor movement, and policies toward them posed for state socialist societies in East-Central Europe. In the forty-four years of their existence between the end of World War II and 1989, these societies had to find a position for work, workers, and workers' demands within nations that defined themselves as 'workers' states.' As several of the authors remark, workers' states are sometimes overlooked in global histories of work. This volume convincingly argues that they are an interesting special case and should be included. It also shows that socialist workers and industries were often in contact with their Western peers, the political isolation of the Eastern bloc notwithstanding. -- Lex Heerma van Voss * Aspasia *

Siefert ist unbedingt zuzustimmen, wenn sie in ihrer Einleitung darauf hinweist, dass die sozialistische Arbeitsgeschichte integraler Bestandteil der europaischen Arbeitsgeschichte ist. Wie sehr all die Anknupfungspunkte auf der Hand liegen, stellt dieser Sammelband eindrucklich unter Beweis. Nun mussen die westeuropaischen Historiker die Osteuropaerinnen nur noch lesen. Bleiben wir optimistisch. -- Alexandra Oberlander * Zeitschrift fur Geschischtswissenschaft * This book can be included in the currently developing dynamic field of state socialist labour history, whose pioneering studies were published approximately 25 years ago. It continues the exploration of the dictatorships from the perspective of workers' experiences while insisting on taking the promises and practices of state socialism seriously . Both approaches are more than appropriate in the context of the decades-long politicization of state socialist labour history by both communists and anti-communists. The book is a relevant and useful contribution to global labour history. The authors provide accessible but also in-depth factually oriented texts. They introduce new ideas and use a great variety of sources. In sum, the book provides thorough and inspiring groundwork for further reflection. -- Lucie Duskova * Connections * c , 1996 .: ? . . , . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/841211 -- * Ab Imperio * The crux of the book is uncovering why and how, crucial top-down levers of organising and managing labour were circumvented by workers, with the management's tacit acknowledgement. By drawing on previous studies that had centralised the role of agency, the main argument, which gives coherence to the breadth of individual case studies, is that labour laws, employment contracts, and social welfare policies and benefits were essentially derived by means of 'negotiation from below.' https://esreview.soc.cas.cz/pdfs/csr/2021/06/07.pdf -- Sergiu Delcea * Czech Sociological Review * The revival of labour history in the West since the 1990s has been characterized not only by global perspectives but also by a move away from organized labour and towards the history of workers and their everyday life-worlds, a tendency that is also characteristic of the present volume. However, the volume under review here manages to explore the interaction between organized labour, in this case ruling communist parties, and the life-worlds of ordinary workers. In addition, it pays due attention to the repercussions of the interactions between a transnational capitalism and a transnational communism during the Cold War. What therefore can be seen as characteristic of many of the contributions in this excellent book is the combination of micro-perspectives with large-scale questions, onto which those micro-perspectives often throw a revealing light. -- Stefan Berger * Labor History * As a volume of essays, Labor in State-Socialist Europe is noteworthy for its clear, probing, and focused contributions that derive not just from a single historical event but from scholars who had an opportunity to interact with one another and who convincingly argue for a postwar history of labor and workers that transcends the Iron Curtain and contextualizes these themes on a comparative basis. It is worth reading across the volume to collect the rich knowledge about, for example, workers' agency, since this aspect is a topic in nearly all the book's contributions. Other topics frequently addressed are gender, race/ethnicity, and disability, which have hitherto been treated separately in the historiography of the region. Central Eastern and Southeastern European communism can be understood as an engine of modernity that shares more similarities with Western Europe than with other regions of the world. Labor in State-Socialist Europe offers rich arguments and approaches and therefore will inspire further research in social and labor history. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php -- Frank Henschel * H-Net Reviews * Labor in State-Socialist Europe is a coherent edited volume, focusing on the tensions and contradictions that work, the labor movement, and policies toward them posed for state socialist societies in East-Central Europe. In the forty-four years of their existence between the end of World War II and 1989, these societies had to find a position for work, workers, and workers' demands within nations that defined themselves as 'workers' states.' As several of the authors remark, workers' states are sometimes overlooked in global histories of work. This volume convincingly argues that they are an interesting special case and should be included. It also shows that socialist workers and industries were often in contact with their Western peers, the political isolation of the Eastern bloc notwithstanding. -- Lex Heerma van Voss * Aspasia *

Siefert ist unbedingt zuzustimmen, wenn sie in ihrer Einleitung darauf hinweist, dass die sozialistische Arbeitsgeschichte integraler Bestandteil der europaischen Arbeitsgeschichte ist. Wie sehr all die Anknupfungspunkte auf der Hand liegen, stellt dieser Sammelband eindrucklich unter Beweis. Nun mussen die westeuropaischen Historiker die Osteuropaerinnen nur noch lesen. Bleiben wir optimistisch. -- Alexandra Oberlander * Zeitschrift fur Geschischtswissenschaft *

Siefert ist unbedingt zuzustimmen, wenn sie in ihrer Einleitung darauf hinweist, dass die sozialistische Arbeitsgeschichte integraler Bestandteil der europaischen Arbeitsgeschichte ist. Wie sehr all die Anknupfungspunkte auf der Hand liegen, stellt dieser Sammelband eindrucklich unter Beweis. Nun mussen die westeuropaischen Historiker die Osteuropaerinnen nur noch lesen. Bleiben wir optimistisch. -- Alexandra Oberlander * Zeitschrift fur Geschischtswissenschaft * This book can be included in the currently developing dynamic field of state socialist labour history, whose pioneering studies were published approximately 25 years ago. It continues the exploration of the dictatorships from the perspective of workers' experiences while insisting on taking the promises and practices of state socialism seriously . Both approaches are more than appropriate in the context of the decades-long politicization of state socialist labour history by both communists and anti-communists. The book is a relevant and useful contribution to global labour history. The authors provide accessible but also in-depth factually oriented texts. They introduce new ideas and use a great variety of sources. In sum, the book provides thorough and inspiring groundwork for further reflection. -- Lucie Duskova * Connections *

Author Information

Marsha Siefert is Associate Professor of History at Central European University.

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