Broken Glass, Broken Class: Transformations of Work in Bulgaria 9781805390374

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Translation and Transliteration
Introduction. ‘We Are Like Broken Glass’
Chapter 1. Multiple Temporalities and Shifting Ideologies in Mladost
Chapter 2. Global Inequalities in Close Proximity: Workers’ Divisions, ‘The Market’, Managers and Clients around the Conveyor Belt
Chapter 3. Home-Work: Gender, Household and Intimate Relationships across and beyond the Production Line
Chapter 4. The Rigidities and Elasticities of Flexibility
Chapter 5. Smoking and Idle Chimneys: (In)Visible Labour and Workers’ Identifications in Dilapidating Industrial Spaces
Chapter 6. Change, Continuity and Crisis
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Broken Glass, Broken Class

Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Series editors: Stephen Gudeman, University of Minnesota Chris Hann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Definitions of economy and society, and their proper relationship to each other, have been the perennial concerns of social philosophers. In the early decades of the twenty-­first century these became and remain matters of urgent political debate. At the forefront of this series are the approaches to these connections by anthropologists, whose explorations of the local ideas and institutions underpinning social and economic relations illuminate large fields ignored in other disciplines. Recent volumes: Volume 12 Broken Glass, Broken Class Transformations of Work in Bulgaria Dimitra Kofti Volume 11 Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future: Stories from Global Frontiers Joost Beuving

Volume 7 Work, Society, and the Ethical Self: Chimeras of Freedom in the Neoliberal Era Edited by Chris Hann Volume 6 Financialization: Relational Approaches Edited by Chris Hann and Don Kalb

Volume 10 Thrift and Its Paradoxes From Domestic to Political Economy Edited by Catherine Alexander and Daniel Sosna

Volume 5 Market Frictions: Trade and Urbanization at the Vietnam-China Border Kirsten W. Endres

Volume 9 Wine Is Our Bread: Labour and Value in Moldovan Winemaking Daniela Ana

Volume 4 Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism: Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject Edited by Chris Hann and Jonathan Parry

Volume 8 Moral Economy at Work: Ethnographic Investigations in Eurasia Edited by Lale Yalçın-­Heckmann

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/max-planck

Broken Glass, Broken Class

Transformations of Work in Bulgaria

° Dimitra Kofti

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Dimitra Kofti

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kofti, Dimitra, author. Title: Broken glass, broken class : transformations of work in Bulgaria / Dimitra Kofti. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Max planck studies in anthropology and economy ; 12 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023002698 (print) | LCCN 2023002699 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805390367 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805390374 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Glass trade--Bulgaria. | Labor--Bulgaria. | Equality--Bulgaria. Classification: LCC HD9623.B93 .K64 2023 (print) | LCC HD9623.B93 (ebook) | DDC 338.4/76661509499--dc23/eng/20230616 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002698 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002699 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-­1-80539-­036-­7 hardback ISBN 978-­1-80539-­037-­4 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390367

° Contents List of Illustrationsvi Acknowledgementsviii Notes on Translation and Transliterationxi Introduction.  ‘We Are Like Broken Glass’

1

Chapter 1. Multiple Temporalities and Shifting Ideologies in Mladost35 Chapter 2. Global Inequalities in Close Proximity: Workers’ Divisions, ‘The Market’, Managers and Clients around the Conveyor Belt

70

Chapter 3. Home-Work: Gender, Household and Intimate Relationships across and beyond the Production Line

120

Chapter 4. The Rigidities and Elasticities of Flexibility

143

Chapter 5. Smoking and Idle Chimneys: (In)Visible Labour and Workers’ Identifications in Dilapidating Industrial Spaces168 Chapter 6. Change, Continuity and Crisis

194

Conclusion219 References227 Index243

° Illustrations All pictures were taken in the period between 2008 and 2015.

Figures

Figure 0.1. Nadia in her sewing room. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 0.2. Train view from Pernik to Sofia, a daily commute to Mladost. © Nicola Zambelli Figure 1.1. An aspect from Mladost’s entrance. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 1.2. Nelly’s living room decorated with objects from the ‘old production’, where her father also worked. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 1.3. Nikolay, an ‘old’ worker, making an ashtray out of glass material for a bottle. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 2.1. The Cold End: A general view. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 2.2. The Hot End: A general view. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 2.3. Casual workers are often visible as they do not wear a uniform. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 2.4. A view from the 24/7 production at the Hot End. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 2.5. One of the quality control tasks. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 2.6. The Cold End: Placing the carton correctly a few seconds before the arrival of the next level of bottles. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 2.7. Synchronizing with the machine. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 3.1. Gergana’s old bookcase. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 3.2. Gergana’s new bookcase made out of the materials of the old one, together with Kolio. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 3.3. Commuting: from Mladost towards the railway station. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 4.1. Disagreement over the speed. © Dimitra Kofti

2 7 36 53 58 72 73 84 86 95 102 106 130 131 136 157

Illustrations  *  vii

Figure 4.2. Glass recycling material lying in the plant’s back yard. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 5.1. One of the abandoned rooms that workers used to socialize and rest before or after the shift. They would often describe it as ‘my office’. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 5.2. Casual work in the old buildings. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 5.3. Casual work in the old buildings. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 5.4. A room used by a brigade. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 5.5. Preparing to celebrate a colleague’s birthday with ‘old production’ glasses in a changing room inside the ‘in use’ premises. © Dimitra Kofti Figure 5.6. The ‘Informal Museum’ of the Old Production Exhibition. © Dimitra Kofti

163 170 178 180 184 187 189

Map Map 5.1.

Mladost drawn by a Mladost engineer. © Dimitra Kofti

176

Graph Graph 1.1. Mladost’s changing workforce. © Dimitra Kofti

46

Tables Table 2.1. General characteristics of regular and casual labour contracts.82 Table 2.2. General characteristics of shop floor job positions. 83

° Acknowledgements This study is based on research that took place during different periods in Sofia and Pernik, starting in 2008, and its writing was also shaped through discussions with colleagues at different places and institutions. I am indebted to many people for their time, ideas and critiques. My gratitude is to the employees in Mladost factory and their families and friends in Sofia and to workers in Pernik for sharing their thoughts and stories and for sharing their time. This endeavour would not have been possible without their kindness, support and interest. Getting to know them and hanging out with people in Sofia and in Pernik was an enriching experience that extends beyond the writing of this book. I am especially thankful to Milena, Mimi, Irena, Veni, Emil, Boris, Kalin, Elena, Nadia, Gergana, Nikolai and Katia for their trust, kindness and friendship over the years.1 An important part of this study has been sharing and discussing work with colleagues and friends. I am greatly thankful to Deema Kanef, Detelina Tocheva, Victoria Goddard, Frances Pine, Chris Hann, Jonathan Parry, Mao Mollona, Don Kalb, James Carrier, Olena Fedyuk, Theodora Vetta and Alexandra Bakalaki for engaging critically with my writings at different stages of this book. I owe much to colleagues at University College London, where this project first took shape and, especially to Michael Stewart, Charles Stewart and Allen Abramson for their feedback and encouragement at different stages of this project. During my fieldwork in Bulgaria, I had the opportunity to learn from scholars who showed a warm interest in my subject and inspired many of the ideas of this work. I particularly wish to thank Varban Todorov, Cvetana Manova, Iskra Baeva, Ilia Iliev, Liliana Deyanova, Georgi Medarov, Rossitza Guentcheva and Ivailo Dichev, each of whom introduced me to discussions in the literature and drew my attention to important topics. Moreover, I am especially indebted to Cvetana Manova not only for posing challenging ethnographic questions but also for being a true companion during my fieldwork time in Pernik and ever since. Riki Van Boeschoten, Andreas Lyberatos, Aliki Angelidou and Miladina Monova have been very helpful and inspiring in various ways since the beginning of this study. I owe much to the members of the ‘Industry and Inequality’ group at the Max Planck Institute: Dina-­Makram Ebeid, Michael Hoffmann, Tommaso

Acknowledgements  *  ix

Trevisani, Eeva Kesküla, Andrew Sanchez, I-­ Chieh Fang, Christian Strümpell and Catherine Alexander for all the stimulating discussions and for the fun, as well as to the members of the ‘Financialization’ group: Charlotte Bruckermann, Hadas Weiss, Natalia Buier, Marek Mikus and Tristam Barett. I am especially thankful to Jonathan Parry and Margaret Dickinson for visiting me in Bulgaria during my fieldwork; Johnny for asking difficult questions and Margaret for providing insightful views on visual aspects of the ethnography. I would also like to thank Neda Deneva, Mariya Ivancheva, Luisa Steur, Martin Fotta, Meixuan Chen, Mihn Nguen, Li Zhang, Alice Elliot, Catalina Tesar, Gorkem Akgoz, Katrin Seidel, Steve Gudeman, Lale Yalçın-­Heckmann, Martin Holbraad, Geert De Neve, Athena Athanasiou, Anna Matthaiou, Giorgos Aggelopoulos, Ritsa Deltsou, Efi Voutira, Susana Narotzky, Ivan Rajkovic, Nina Vodopivec, Ulf Brunnbauer, Martin Petrov, Jana Tsoneva, Katerina Markou, Dina Vaiou, Christina Koulouri, Bettina Mann, Karolos Kavoulakos, Manos Spyridakis, Penelope Papailias, Ioanna Laliotou, Mitsos Bilalis, Jennifer Cash, Manuela Pellegrino, Nicolette Makovicky, Nicola Zambelli, Milena Kremakova, Katerina Rozakou, Athina Simoglou, Christina Korkontzelou, Daniela Ana and Carina Rosenlof for the inspiring discussions at different stages of this work and in different contexts and academic environments. George Koumaridis, Gaelle Tavernier, Carina Rosenlof, Ivo Stefanov, Natasha Kotsala, Elena Makarona, Tasoula Platsa, Maria Siganou, Maria Tzika, Ergina Sampathianaki, Matthew Duncan,Tania Filiopoulou, Kostas Kouretas, Christina Adamopoulou and Despina Kosmoglou for their friendship and support. All of them transformed the lonely process of writing into a collective experience. The Department of Anthropology at Panteion University in Athens has provided a warm working environment during the final stages of writing. Thanks to Eirini Tountasaki and Niki Maroniti for reading and commenting on my work, and to all members of the Department for their collegiality. Research for this book has been supported by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, by the Marie Curie Fellowship for Social Anthropology (hosted at the Central European University) and by the University College London Research Fund. I am particularly thankful to the library and administrative staff at the institutions I have been affiliated with, and especially to Anett Kirchhoff, Anja Neuner, Jutta Turner, Anke Meyer and Berit Eckert at the Max PIanck Institute in Halle. Finally, thanks to Robert Parkin and Timothy Carroll for their insightful editing at different stages of this work, and Anthony Mason, Caroline Kuhtz and Tom Bonnington at Berghahn Books for taking care of the editorial process. Thanks to my parents, Vassiliki and Giorgos, and my sister Chrisa for their unconditional encouragement. And finally, my thanks extends to

x  •   Acknowledgements

Dimitris Charitatos for his supportive companionship, and to my son, Giorgos.

Note 1. Their surnames are not mentioned here, in order to maintain consistency with the anonymization of people who appear throughout the chapters.

on Translation and ° Notes Transliteration This monograph is based on fieldwork research conducted primarily in Bulgarian and secondarily in Greek. All interviews and archival material have been translated into English by the author. Original quotes in Bulgarian and Greek were transliterated in the text in conformity with the Romanization standard adopted by the Bulgarian Transliteration Law (2009) and ISO 843 (for Greek).

° Introduction ‘We Are Like Broken Glass’ ‘Once we were unified; now we are like broken glass’, workers at the Mladost glassworks in Sofia would often repeat while pointing to the shards of broken glass scattered about the shop floor. This image encapsulates the intense fragmentation of workers in Bulgaria over the past three decades and points to the newly formed hierarchies that have been established through the division of labour into a wide range of work categories, most prominently those of regular and casual work, which are intertwined with inequalities of gender, ethnicity and age. A disparate spectrum of benefits, different degrees of precarity and often conflicting interests have played a major role in this newly formed fragmentation based on post-­Fordist managerial techniques. Mladost was formed out of small pre-­socialist glass workshops in Sofia, which were unified and nationalized in 1953. It became one of the basic providers of glass products during socialist times in Bulgaria. After a long period of economic hardship, which started gradually in the late 1980s, it was privatized in 1997 during a period of intense privatization projects and factory closures around the country. Workers and managers who continued working in Mladost after privatization spent their entire working lives in the company and participated in a plethora of managerial, production and technological transformations that occurred along with larger economic and political shifts. For 15 years, starting in 1982 at the age of 31, Nadia tailored employee uniforms in Mladost.1 She had previously studied, after high school, at a year-­long tailoring school and worked for a couple of years as a tailoress in a clothing firm. Before joining Mladost, she spent three years working at a circus as a cashier and as an assistant, along with her partner. Although she enjoyed travelling with the circus across the country, she decided to get a more stable job in Mladost when her first child was born. She was laid off during the period of Mladost’s privatization in 1997 when her section closed down and the production and repair of uniforms was outsourced,

2  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

Figure 0.1.  Nadia in her sewing room. © Dimitra Kofti

like many other sectors unrelated to the factory’s core production of glass. She returned to the plant after two years of unemployment as an ‘external worker’ on a casual contract, first packing beer and beverage bottles for a couple of years and later cleaning the shop floor. Nadia was the only one of the five original tailors to be re-­employed on the premises. She managed to re-­acquire one of the old sewing machines and took over an empty room in the plant, which she decorated with plants and personal items. In her room, she informally continued her previous job of patching uniforms and other clothes for her colleagues during her breaks or at weekends. She would often say, ‘I am still a tailoress; I never actually became a cleaning lady only’. Her ‘actual’ colleagues ‘are not here’, she would also say, referring to those who had been laid off and had never returned to the factory. She finally received a pension in 2018 after working as a tailor in the company for 15 years and as a cleaning lady on a casual contract for another 19 years. Nadia continued to work for another two years on a casual contract, a usual practice for low income pensioners. Broken glass was a metaphor for the workers’ period of upheavals that included processes of fragmentation in relation to past and present conditions at work, the changing trajectories of people’s working lives, newly formed divisions and a future of uncertainty. This book tells a story of the flexibilization of production, precaritization of work, shifting managerial practices and the ways in which people with different employment statuses live and work together. The ethnography

Introduction  *  3

looks at how a variety of global and local forces, temporal and spatial regimes and workers’ divisions meet at the rapidly moving conveyor belt of a glass factory and analyses how gender, age and employment status inequalities are intertwined and reproduced both at the production site and back home. It is based on my long-­term study of the everyday postsocialist politics of labour in the wider context of flexible and financial capitalism at a time of intense socio-­economic transformations in Bulgaria, when two successive and entangled hegemonic ­teleologies – ­socialism, then its successor, ­capitalism – ­and successive economic crises shaped the experience of work in various ways. The ethnography is mostly based on fieldwork in Mladost Glassworks,2 with a focus on the restructuring of work and production after privatization and on the ways these transformations intertwine with the workers’ lives. The new era in the factory was followed by a dramatically intensified course of neoliberal downsizing, labour outsourcing and a focus on core production. My account of the shop floor is complemented by a broad ethnographic scope extending to kinship and intimate ties within and outside the plant, the new conditions of precarious work, new discourses of individuality and flexibility that interact with pre-­existing ones in respect of collective productivity, the alternative ways in which workers use abandoned factory buildings, perceptions of the past, changing temporalities and meanings of time and the experience of ongoing ‘crises’.3 The presence of ‘the market’ on the shop floor has been rendered permanent and menacing. Practices of flexible management, consultants’ discourses, changes in technology and the omnipresence of the clients’ and stockholders’ control over production intertwine with the everyday politics of labour. This book engages with these circumstances while grasping the relationships in production along the conveyor belt. It further discusses issues of transformation and memory, as well as the temporalities of production in relation to continuities and discontinuities, from Fordism to post-­Fordism, and from socialism to postsocialism. Mladost employees make sense of radical upheavals in daily discussions about continuity and change; for them, ‘the past’ is constantly present. Along with daily complaints about ‘the changes’, visions of ‘no change’ encapsulate a perception of everlasting oppression and enduring structural power bridging socialism and capitalism, as well as Fordism and post-­Fordism. Discussions about intense changes often began with the phrase ‘everything has changed’/’nothing is as it used to be’.4 However, employees would also comment on things by saying that ‘everything is the same’/ ‘always the same’,5 underlining enduring structures of power and employees’ sense of powerlessness.6 Far from being contradictory, these phrases pointed to a diversity of conjunctural and intersecting structures (Sahlins 1985). I view

4  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

them as aspects of people’s ‘historicity’, of ‘the manner in which persons operating under the constraints of social ideologies make sense of the past while anticipating the future’ (Hirsch and Stewart 2005: 262). ‘Everything is the same’ and ‘everything has changed’ situationally coexist, revealing the paradox of transformation. This sense of ongoing continuity and change is at the heart of the ethnographic exploration in this study. My fieldwork began just over a decade after Mladost’s privatization. One of the main themes of daily conversation, both in the administrative offices and on the shop floor, was the ongoing process of the changing relationships at work, particularly those that took place after privatization in 1997. From a state company, Mladost became part of the global market with significant changes in its production practices and organizational structure. This process included the restructuring and flexibilization of production and labour, which was followed by ongoing redundancies and changing managerial practices and discourses. Transformations in management and in the organization of work followed the larger shifts that took place in postsocialist countries, where the dominant ideologies of economy and labour had been in a process of intense change since the early 1990s. Since the summer of 2008, a new ‘crisis’ was added to the main topics of daily preoccupation, as the international banking crisis brought memories of previous ‘crises’ in Bulgaria and further changes on the shop floor. Given that the plant was now owned by a Greek company, the repercussions of the ‘Greek crisis’ were also gradually felt on the shop floor. During my follow-­up fieldwork in Bulgaria in 2013–2015, I expanded my research to include the experience of deindustrialization, transformations of work and production, and changing urban and rural relations in Pernik, an industrial town close to Sofia. I then began research among Pernik’s steel, mining and garment workers, while I continued to visit Mladost in Sofia, as well as meeting with Mladost workers who lived in Pernik. The recent and still ongoing period of ‘crisis’ had been crystalized for workers as one that included more redundancies, salary cuts and further indebtedness. Moreover, political mobilization to campaign for better or ‘decent’ standards of living and against high energy prices and ‘corruption’ (Kofti 2018a) took place in 2013 and 2014 in Bulgaria (Ivancheva 2013; Tsoneva 2013; Dinev 2016), resulting in the fall of two governments in two subsequent years. During this new turbulent period in the mid-­2010s, another crucial global aspect of work became more apparent in workplaces in Sofia and Pernik. The workplace was somewhere that not only produced products for the market and (re)produced ideologies of work, it was also a place that prepared and produced itself as a potential product. Mladost not only had to produce glass, but it also had to appear to do so in ways that would

Introduction  *  5

attract the stock market or potential buyers of the plant, if needed. The ethnography looks at how this double aim of the c­ ompany – t­o produce products as well as promote itself as a ­product – ­influenced the everyday politics of work and production and, most importantly, workers’ daily lives. The importance of financialization and the repercussions of the market in the everyday politics of production, as well as the constant threat of the workplace being sold, affected workers’ lives in multiple ways to which the ethnography draws attention. Mladost was indeed eventually sold to another transnational company in 2017, a plan that was not explicitly communicated to the workforce during the previous years, though this possibility played a crucial role in disciplining workers and hung in the air throughout the previous decade, preparing the workers for further changes and uncertainties. This new condition proved previous workers’ fears of ownership being changed once more, with further restructuring and lay-­offs prophetic. Nadia mentioned that she was relieved to receive her pension finally, as she experienced this new period as one of intensified stress. After the 1980s, intense changes in production and in the organisation of labour in Bulgaria and the postsocialist world more generally were part of a larger shift within capitalism towards the ‘global factory’ (Blim 1992). This was characterized by investments over national borders, the mobility of people and capital, new communication technologies and the significant rise of multinational corporations. This global shift in the capitalist economy has been described variously as ‘disorganized capitalism’ (Offe 1985; Lash and Urry 1987), ‘flexible specialization’ (Piore and Sabel 1984), ‘flexible accumulation’ (Harvey 1989), globalization and flexible capitalism. Moreover, financialization, or the impact of financial markets over production spaces, households and daily lives gradually grew to become a global economic trend from the 1990s. Mladost’s transformation occurred in this context of the parallel processes of the flexibilization and financialization of capitalism. A particularity of these processes in the postsocialist context is that such transformations were intense and dramatic, coming as they did after the collapse of the socialist regimes. They were accompanied by strong economic crises and the dispossession of previously stable jobs and state-­provided services related to work. These conditions resulted, inter alia, in new forms of poverty (Pine and Bridger 1998a; Humphrey and Mandel 2002; Kaneff and Pine 2011). Eastern Europe provided the conditions for low-­cost production for western European markets (Smith 2003) and attracted capital fleeing deindustrializing Western countries. This meant that factories in the postsocialist countries often did not follow the path of closure as in Western deindustrialized countries, but were sold to foreign investors and continued

6  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

to operate under shifting conditions. In the case of Mladost, the company was bought by the Greek company Arethusa. Historically, both Mladost and Arethusa participated in state economies, the former in a socialist economy, the latter in a capitalist one. Both companies became parts of a common group of transnational capitalist enterprises on the margins of Europe producing low-­cost glass for the European market. These transformations of work and production on the geographical periphery of Europe are at the centre of my anthropological investigation. New flexible forms of production and outsourcing in the context of flexible and financial capitalism generate new global and local hierarchies and inequalities that are geographically extended in comparison to previous ones. While Mladost’s transformations are situated in the context of global capitalism, local aspects are integral to these processes. Socialism and its legacy continued to be important in Mladost, even during the third decade after its collapse in Bulgaria. It was important not only as a memory of the past: socialism was often blamed for a variety of problems that occurred under the market economy. Another commonly held reason for the difficulties in production was the character of ‘Bulgarian’ and ‘Greek’ or ‘Balkan’ culture, associated with ‘corruption’ and ‘wildness’ and reproducing discourses of ‘balkanism’ (Todorova 1997). Managers would blame the socialist past and ‘Bulgarianness’ rather than neoliberal axioms for the difficulties Mladost faced. In the following sections, I look at anthropological approaches to postsocialism and explore the extent to which this framework of analysis may still be useful in an understanding of everyday politics of labour in Bulgaria three decades after the collapse of socialism. Yet, the ethnography of this Bulgarian industrial setting may inform broader issues in the anthropology of work and labour as it looks at how its production site is spatially and geographically interconnected with global processes and politics of labour and production. It also explores how global interconnections become tangible at the production site and how tensions between the impersonal conditions brought about by corporations and personal lives (Hart and Hann 2011) and the new advocacies of the market interact with the shop floor of a postsocialist factory. The ‘we are broken glass’ metaphor of the working class as broken points to intense transformations among Mladost workers and newly formed divisions and underlines fragmentation as a shared condition among workers with different employment statuses, as expressed by many. The ethnography pays attention to conditions and senses of fragmentation, which I approach as complex processes rather than as an accomplished class formation (Carbonella and Kasmir 2014: 5) and points to the processual character of class (E.P. Thompson 1963). Although scholarly attention to class has been relatively neglected in the period of post-­Fordism (Kalb 2015),

Introduction  *  7

Figure 0.2.  Train view from Pernik to Sofia, a daily commute to Mladost. © Nicola Zambelli

anthropological studies have underlined the importance of exploring relations and understandings of class in the context of dispossession (Kasmir and Carbonella, 2008), intense fragmentation of the workforce (Narotzky and Smith 2006; Mollona 2009b; Carbonella and Kasmir 2014; Parry 2018; Parry 2020), new relations of privatization and ongoing transformations of global relations (Zhang 2010; Neveling and Steur 2018; Vetta 2018; Weiss 2019). By looking at different sites of workers’ action and everyday life in relation to broader politics of labour, the ethnography pays attention to multiple connections between various forms of waged, unwaged, regular, casual and unpaid work and ways those are interconnected with peoples’ divisions and alliances (Kasmir and Carbonella 2014: 6). It begins on the shop floor, and from there, extends to the company’s management, to employees’ households and lives outside work, and to everyday life in derelict industrial buildings.

Mladost’s Global Conveyor Belt Mladost, like other postsocialist privatized factories (Dunn 2004; Müller 2007; Vodopivec 2010; Rajković 2018; Trevisani 2018; Kesküla 2018), did not move geographically in the context of deindustrialization, but was

8  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

significantly transformed through its reorientation to the global dimension. I argue that this situation enables one to take an ethnographic view of dislocation processes as they occur in one place, which I describe as local dislocation. Furthermore, it allows us to grasp the interconnections between shifting moral and political economies and ways in which those intertwine with workers’ lives. The ethnography looks at how diverse global and local forces converge at Mladost’s production line and attends to intense mobilities and immobilities, as well as the visible and invisible forms of work and transformations occurring in one place. Since the 1980s, the new conditions of the world economy and labour market have resulted in new spatial connections and dislocations of people, capital and industries. Large industries in the industrial north have followed the path of redundancy and/or moved their premises to countries abroad. The disintegration of production units and the transfer of capital have some characteristics in common. Outsourcing, subcontracting and downsizing, or what Piore and Sabel (1984) have described as a ‘second industrial divide’, have led to the displacement of production and people. These new characteristics have triggered numerous anthropological discussions about the locus of culture and social relationships in a changing world. Geographical changes certainly brought new socio-­cultural formations, as many have argued (e.g. Appadurai 1996; Ferguson 2006). One important shift is the changing relations of spaces and dislocations as a result of the movement of migrant workers and capital. Deleuze and Guattari (1983) described workers’ detachment from the means of production, often accompanied by a loss of control over space, as deterritorialization. One example is the privatization of land (‘enclosures’) in eighteenth-­century England that excluded peasants from the land. They also used the term to describe flows of finance and the ways in which power is deterritorialized through financing and then reterritorialized through the central banks (ibid.: 258). In their analysis, deterritorialization and continuous reterritorialization are aspects intrinsic to capitalism, which ‘is continually reterritorializing with one hand what it was deterritorializing with the other’ (ibid.: 259). The ideas of space dispersion and deterritorialisation have been widely used in anthropology to describe phenomena related to post-­Fordist economic restructuring and to neoliberalism (Saskia Sassen 1991; Low 1996; Ong 2006). The global space is thus perceived in terms of flows of capital, people, goods, services and ideas. This body of literature has underlined the importance of the detachment of space from local places, but in underlining this aspect of the global economy, it has often overlooked new territorializations of capital (Low and Lawrence-­Zúñiga 2003).7 While many analyses of global deterritorialization have focused on ideas of a world without borders, research related to work settings has

Introduction  *  9

suggested that the idea of mobility introduces new global inequalities and that borders are dynamic but still define strong global inequalities that take place locally (Rothstein and Blim 1992; Burawoy et al. 2000; Narotzky and Smith 2006; Smart and Smart 2006). The process of deindustrialization, relocation and reindustrialization in other parts of the world, although intensified in recent decades, has been both a practice and a subsequent threat for workers’ communities since the early twentieth century.8 The authors of a volume on the anthropology of industrial work (Mollona et al. 2009) have emphasized the importance of an ethnographic understanding of global inequalities and how they are manifested both on the shop floor and in workers’ communities. Mollona argues that much of the literature on the ‘New Economy’ has neglected old class stratifications and inequalities while focusing on multi-­sited ethnographies of ‘fast capitalism’. Instead, Mollona concentrates ‘on the slow, monotonous grind of making a livelihood for the majority of people stuck “on the dark side” of globalization’ (Mollona 2009a, xv). Furthermore, he advocates an anthropology that will ‘look at the spatial and temporal interconnections between the visible, stable and ‘respectable’ labour at the core and the precarious, invisible, and degrading labour at the margins’ (ibid.: xxi). In accordance with this literature, which places the emphasis on the articulations of political and moral economies, I focus on the relationships between visible and invisible work in attempting to make sense of the global dynamics and mobilities that meet around the conveyor belt of a single factory. The rest of this section focuses on how to make sense of global interconnections in Mladost and how its circumstances may add to comparative anthropological discussions of work. The privatization process in Mladost is part of an intense geographical reordering that occurred after the collapse of socialism. One characteristic, which is important for understanding postsocialist production within this global restructuring, is that postsocialist factories often followed the path of a process I describe as a local dislocation. While capital movements in the post-­Fordist context have often been associated with the dispersal of local production into smaller units of production elsewhere, in the case of postsocialist factories like Mladost, large-­scale industries have become parts of foreign companies. Large industrial units that were once run in the interests of their national economies changed their geographical orientation, while their place, production, machinery, expertise, and more importantly, people, remained the same, although the latter were significantly less numerous after redundancies. Mladost followed a re-­ordering of its industrial space which reflects a larger shift in its production. Privatization was followed by a reduction in the range of products, thus leading to the abandonment of a large amount

10  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

of industrial space, a topic I return to in Chapter 5. Moreover, it became an outsourcer: its entire production came under the full inspective view of, and became absolutely dependent on, its clients. Then, a new control system was introduced: its clients began controlling the production lines electronically and in real time. This new kind of supervision and surveillance, linking it to its clients via an electronic system, brought about another level of dislocation. This particular dislocation was enabled by new technologies in ways that call on us to analyse how electronic communication in real time has impacted the working lives of people in diverse ways, a condition that is still relatively undertheorized (Eriksen, 2014: 4). Mladost was still at the same place, yet in a state of dislocation. Thereafter, some previously crucial features of this place where the industry had formerly been installed played a minor role. For instance, the highest level of management was now the owner living abroad, while inspection of production was taken over, to some extent, by the clients via the real-­time electronic system of control at Mladost’s production line to which they had access. Mladost, in its turn, made attempts to reduce costs and to introduce practices recommended by distant consultants, by outsourcing parts of its production to minor outsourcers. Mladost is already a smaller company than its clients (mostly drinks producers), and in its turn, it has had recourse to even smaller outsourcers, thus contributing to the phenomena of dislocation at high levels of intensity, where the pressures on the smaller company below inevitably become accentuated. This new rearrangement is complicated by the fact that these minor outsourcers operate inside the Mladost factory under modes of casual employment. Workers who once worked together were now divided between those working for Mladost and those who worked ‘outside’ the company, but with minor outsourcers working within Mladost’s premises. The geographical vicinity of this type of outsourced production has certain prominent features: as it involves the workers’ physical presence, it is significantly different from distant outsourcing and offshoring. For example, the computer operators in India, as described by Huws (2003), work for remote companies in the US, and while the salary of a computer operator in Bangalore is much smaller than that of a computer operator in the States, it may nevertheless be much larger than the salary one can earn working for the Indian state. This adds new dimensions to global and local inequalities. In the case studied here, the physical presence of the casual workers whom the smaller company employ on the main production site generates interactions within the production space between those who are paid at different rates and under different terms of employment. In geographically distant dislocated production, as in the comparison between the US and India, the outsourcer’s worker, who is low or minimally paid,

Introduction  *  11

makes a living from her wage in the socio-­economic context of where she lives and works. In Mladost, the outsourcer’s worker who is located in close proximity to the main employer makes a living from her wage in the same economic context as the main employer’s workers do. The proximity between the casual workers in Mladost and the main employer’s regular employees generates direct dynamic relations and practices of competition and/or solidarity between the two groups of workers. The particularity of this case rests on the fact that it involves former colleagues, relatives, friends and members of the same household who are in the opposite group, thus tending to fragment social relations. I view this as a case of a locally based dislocation of production and of social relationships. Privatized postsocialist factories offer strong examples of such local dislocations and the ethnography in this book takes a close look at the dynamics of work practices and social relations within this context. The distinction just described is first and foremost one between casual and regular work, a growing distinction that appears in various forms, it has been discussed in various places worldwide and is not a ‘new’ characteristic of production (e.g. Gill 1999; Parry 2013, 2020; Spyridakis 2013; Trevisani 2018; Kofti 2018b; Vetta 2020; Strümpell 2023;). Yet, in Mladost, this was a newly introduced condition as there were only regular employment contracts up until the period of its privatization, similar to other socialist countries, where full regular employment policies were implemented in most workplaces (Rajković 2022). In Mladost, the articulations of casual and regular work divisions share many similarities with practices of geographically distant production that often occur through outsourcing. Yet, there is a substantial condition that Mladost workers experience on an everyday basis, which shapes their worlds both at work and at home. Mladost has a Fordist-­type production line: a conveyor belt connects and synchronizes the Hot and Cold Ends of the process. It is also run using post-­Fordist practices of labour organization with diverse types of employment and levels of outsourcing. The lines between Fordist and post-­Fordist production are blurred on the shop floor: workers bound together around the conveyor belt who, once employed by the same company, are now employed by different companies, yet synchronize their bodily movements around the same speedy machines. This has resulted in clashes of interests, as well as practices of cooperation. Furthermore, the postsocialist experience is of great ethnographic interest here because an ethnography of it can add a new perspective to the broad analytical framework of industrial modernity. Employees, especially older ones, have lived during various phases of two distinct, yet interconnected, political systems of industrial modernity. They often make various comparisons between them, as well as between different epochs within

12  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

these periods, as discussed further in Chapter 1. In doing so, they make insightful criticisms of both. Their views, rather than being nostalgic for the previous era or mystified in their understanding of the current one, are often highly critical, cynical and ironic. The experience of socialism and capitalism is also lived out as an experience of discrepancies between teleological discourses of future prosperity and the actual conditions of industrial modernity. The time that has elapsed and the accumulated transformations now open up increased possibilities for irony, an irony that provides diverse perspectives of the world, while it captures ambiguities and contradictions (Fernandez and Taylor Huber 2001). The ethnography of this book attempts to grasp visions of flexible capitalism through the lenses of those who have also lived during socialism and experienced a wide range of transformations and crises. Outsourcing and different types of employment and remuneration create new, fragmented worlds, though they work on the same site, often live in the same households, and more generally, have lived under the same economic and political regimes. This is a condition that underlines the importance of looking at the processes of localized disembedding and re-­embedding social relations in a compressed and interconnected world (Eriksen 2014). Their experiences of flexible capitalism is of a spatiotemporal unity that has been painfully fissured by the workings of the same managerial technologies as those practiced in geographically distant global dislocations. While these changes have been intense, there are also continuities with past practices that call for a careful view of ‘new’ and ‘old’ practices at the work setting and in workers lives, as Victoria Goddard has underlined (Goddard 2017: 3). Similarly, critical views on the concept of precarity and the ‘precariat’ (Standing 2011) have pointed out that much of the discussion on the post-­Fordist casualization of work has accentuated similarities in relation to precarious work and lost sight of historical and geographical variations (Breman 2013). This line of critique has also underlined that views of precarity, as a new phenomenon, run the risk of reproducing ethnocentric ideas, given that precarious work has been the norm for several parts of the world, long before the post-­Fordist period (Munck 2013; Millar 2014; Matos 2019), and that Fordism should be seen as a parenthesis to this norm for some places of the Global North (Neilson and Rossiter 2008) and for some types of visible labour. Yet, the twentieth-­century politics of work included struggles over workers’ rights and employment stability, and as Rajković describes, it included both ‘subordination and relative emancipation from previous forms of exploitation’ (2021: 158). In understanding shifting conditions at work and historical processes towards new forms of casual labour, the ethnography attempts to view global interconnections without losing site of Mladost’s sociohistorical context and complex transformations.

Introduction  *  13

‘Communism’ as a Keyword of the Capitalist Era The communist past was present in many ways in Mladost. When I first met Ms Nikolova, the 44-­year-­old Human Resources manager in Mladost glassworks, she explained to me that an important part of her work was to shift people’s mentalities away from previous ‘old’ and ‘communist’ work practices. She gave examples of conspicuously overstaffed posts in the plant and emphasized how redundancies were aimed at more ‘reasonable’ job allocations in the plant. She advised me not to focus my research on the views of those who had been laid off, or on those workers who complained about current conditions as they were ‘merely’ being ‘nostalgic’. When I started working at the end of the production line, I became aware of the intensity of the work and the speed of the machines, which often reminded me of Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times. Workers often remembered how the factory was, indeed, overstaffed during socialist times, and how the pace of the machine allowed moments of relaxation. By contrast, they would also mention that, under the new conditions, the line was understaffed in relation to the pace of the machines. Nevertheless, their complaints were often described by the management as ‘nostalgia for communism’. Greek shop floor managers would say that Bulgarian workers were not productive because they were ‘nostalgic’ and ‘lazy because of communism’, and that they needed ‘deep training’ to get used to the new conditions of production. Such images of continuity from the socialist past legitimated neoliberal practices in the new work settings. Moreover, the concept of nostalgia often contributed to static images of people’s views and of the socialist past (Todorova 2010).9 I view ‘communism’ as a ‘keyword’ (Williams 1985 [1976]) of the neoliberal transformations of the postsocialist era. As Raymond Williams pointed out, during periods of intense transformation, the meanings of words and the rhythms and tones of utterances may change slowly or more rapidly; that is, words and concepts referring to values and ideas may have various and sometimes contradictory meanings. While social change is not linguistic change, language use is an important register of change (ibid.: 17). In the third decade after the end of the socialist regime in Bulgaria, ‘communism’ remained a keyword for political ideas and ideological vocabularies that legitimize practices against its continuity. An ongoing discussion among scholars who work on postsocialist settings is whether postsocialism is still a useful framework of analysis (Hann 2006a; Dunn and Verdery 2011; Thelen 2011; Chelcea and Druta 2016; Kojanic 2020, Tocheva 2020). The end of the socialist regimes in eastern Europe attracted the attention of anthropologists who have conducted research on a wide range of topics related to the experience of the

14  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

collapse of the socialist regimes. Similarities in people’s responses to the transformation from planned economies and Marxist–Leninist ideologies to free-­market economies and new dominant discourses of neoliberal capitalism informed a body of literature which also took into account diversities in their histories and cultures (Pine and Bridger 1998a). Furthermore, anthropologists have criticized the dominant discourses of the ‘transition’ (Hann 1995; Verdery 1996), often expressed by economists and political scientists, which assumed a teleological transition to capitalism. Such discourses accompanied shock therapy economic policies, most notably in Poland, and reforms involving the intervention of the IMF and the World Bank. It has been pointed out that such transition discourses assume the existence of a point of departure and a point of arrival, which leaves little space for dynamic analyses of people’s responses and of their survival and coping strategies in collapsing economies (Pine and Bridger 1998a: 5). While anthropologists considered socialism and postsocialism useful as broad analytical frames, they also insisted that peoples’ life experiences cannot be so neatly dissected to conform to such categories (Kaneff 2004: 3). In exploring the direct confrontation between market mechanisms and people’s lives, moralities and daily practices (Humphrey and Mandel 2002), anthropological studies conducted in ex-­socialist countries have not merely documented practice on the ground; they have also criticized and refined larger analytical frames. Anthropological research conducted during socialism revealed a variety of socialisms and a variety of responses to them (Hann 1980; Humphrey 1983; Kligman 1988; Pine 1993; Stewart 1993). This heterogeneity was not transformed into the economic homogeneity that neoliberal reformers envisioned and that celebrators of neoliberalism viewed as the only possible historical development.10 Moreover, neoliberal rhetoric often saw the individuals participating in the ‘transition’ as being driven by rational choice alone. Scholars more concerned with the actual developments engaged with the social embeddedness of the economy and focused on the complex ways in which individuals took decisions and acted in relation to continuities and discontinuities with the socialist past (Hann 2005: 555). One then wonders what constitutes the unity of postsocialism, given the diversity of socialisms and the heterogeneity of responses to the postsocialist era. A body of studies conducted in the 1990s suggested that people in ex-­socialist countries had to confront similar neoliberal policies and often employed the same strategies (Kideckel 1995; Burawoy and Verdery 1999b; Pine and Bridger 1998b), which were not ‘economically rational’ but were shaped in relationship to a diversity of cultural meanings (Pine and Bridger 1998b: 11). What seemed to be common in many of the ethnographies was the time horizon of action: ‘Because the postsocialist

Introduction  *  15

moment means constant change in the parameters of action, actors tend to strategize within time horizons that are short’ (Burawoy and Verdery 1999a: 2). Creed observed this in Bulgaria in the 1990s: ‘As the transition proceeded, it moved from being a temporary inconvenience on the road to capitalism to a seemingly permanent discomfort’ (Creed 1999: 224). Uncertainty became a central topic in early postsocialist studies, a concept that grew to be of great use in contemporary anthropology, as economic crises and recessions have had a gradually greater impact worldwide. The focus of postsocialist studies on the concept of uncertainty since the early 1990s might inform broader anthropological discussions today. This is particularly relevant for discussions regarding employment and precarity (e.g. Procoli 2004; Standing 2011; Parry 2013; Prentice 2020) that are creating conditions of uncertainty and insecurity for a growing number of employees. The experience of loss connected with the gradual demise of the welfare state, the flexibilization of labour and movements of capital did not occur only in eastern Europe but they are phenomena that are characteristic of a new era of capitalism and globalization (Piore and Sabel 1984; Harvey 1989, 2005). In the European context, the experiences of these changes transcend East/West boundaries. Taking into account the tremendous upheavals in the East allows one to understand better the modalities of this process as an interaction between the East and West of Europe. Several comparative studies have tackled this issue. For instance, a collection edited by Procoli (2004) scrutinizes the effects of these economic processes on workers’ survival strategies, whereas Kaneff and Pine (2011) focus on the links between poverty and migration out of eastern Europe. Similarly wide patterns have emerged from the two collections. For example, the mobility of people and capital has followed complementary logics and directions. While companies moved to eastern Europe to reduce production costs, migrants from eastern Europe moved westwards. The latter often worked informally in childcare and care of the elderly for West European families, fulfilling the needs created by the shrinking of the welfare state in western Europe, while they worked to fulfil their own families’ needs, impacted by the demise of the welfare state in their own countries back home (Anderson 2000; Deneva 2012; Fedyuk 2015). In Mladost, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 6, workers often see themselves as those who did not migrate. As in Manolova’s (2018) ethnography of migration from Bulgaria to the UK, migration provided an imaginary of a better life elsewhere and a topic that opened up discussions about the current difficulties of life in Bulgaria. Migration among Mladost’s workers was mostly presented as a potential option they had not finally chosen, or not yet. Therefore, although not homogenized, postsocialist societies often shared similar features from

16  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

their past, as well as common experiences of loss, fragmentation and geographical reordering after the 1990s. Analyses of postsocialist contexts also illuminate processes and intertwinements with other contexts, such as the complexities of coping with a shrinking welfare state and the associated issue of ‘care’, increasingly defined as a problem within both western and eastern households in Europe. Some characteristics of labour and production were common to most postsocialist labour settings. First, employment under socialism was a right embedded in the notion of citizenship (Stenning et al. 2011: 81). Secure employment also provided workers with a variety of services. Under socialism, the factory work environment was typically organized as a ‘total social institution’ (Humphrey 1995), providing access to housing, childcare and health care, as well as holidays. Workers’ annual and daily schedules were, to a great extent, shaped by factory-­related activities that took place both within and outside the work place.11 Official discourses on labour were associated with images of the ‘model’ worker as a protagonist in the collective task of ‘building socialism’. According to the dominant discourses, labour was the main activity granting one social status as a full member of society (Stewart 1993), with the workers being defined workers for society (Müller 2004). During the period of postsocialism, the unemployment that followed the closing down of enterprises and staff redundancies resulted in the previous status of the employee being lost, along with the attached services. Mladost followed a similar path. More importantly, the experience of this history of loss was important to the factory’s daily life and to the formation of new relationships among employees during the period of my fieldwork, as discussed in Chapter 1. Moreover, the work settings in the postsocialist world shared similar experiences of the end of a totalizing ideology of socialist modernization. This was accompanied by teleological discourses of industrial modernity that pointed to the prosperity that production would bring. This was a common official discourse in the socialist countries that can be found in Mladost’s historical archives during the period of socialism, as also discussed in Chapter 1. However, this also had its variations in different countries and different periods of socialism. For example, Boym has argued for Russia that the hegemonic socialist ideology was based on future discourses in which there was no space for nostalgia for a past capitalism. After the first years of the October Revolution, nostalgia for the past was condemned as a ‘counterrevolutionary provocation’ (Boym 2002: 59). Further research has demonstrated that the history of discourses of the future under socialism in Russia has changed over the course of the years and that discourses on the present became stronger towards the period of late socialism (Yurchak 2006). Research in Bulgaria has demonstrated that

Introduction  *  17

a variety of past discourses were also dominant during socialism (Kaneff 2004; Scarboro 2010). Despite the differences and variations, all studies seem to agree that the socialist states based their ideologies on temporal evolutionary discourses with a particular focus on industrial modernity. The end of the hegemonic discourses of socialist teleologies enabled new teleologies of postsocialist capitalist prosperity to be produced. New managerial discourses in work settings often emphasized that the socialist politics of production had failed and that new discourses, which often accentuated their distinction from the earlier ones, had to be put forward (Dunn 2004; Müller 2004; Vodopivec 2010). Based on her research with textile workers in Slovenia, Vodopivec argued that, although postsocialist transformations were presented as new modernizing plans, many people have experienced them as a step backwards (2010: 167). My research in Bulgarian industrial settings suggests that similar discourses of capitalist teleology were employed by new managements and partly resonate with the above ethnographic studies. Moreover, in private discussions, Mladost managers often remarked that these were the dominant discourses they had to use as part of their job, revealing their conscious performativity. The experiences of successive ‘crises’ since the 1980s generated a general mistrust of the hegemonic teleologies of both socialist and capitalist modernity in Mladost. Another characteristic attributed to postsocialist e­nterprises – ­ as Verdery (1996) has argued, based on Kornai (1980) – is that the earlier socialist economies were based on economies of shortage. As a consequence, raw materials were often lacking in factories, resulting in periods of idleness followed by periods of very intense work in order to meet the plan (Creed 1998; Dunn 2004; Vodopivec 2012). Dunn (2004) has argued that this resulted in workers adopting a flexible approach to work and that the transformation to a more flexible form of production was, accordingly, not so abrupt in postsocialist settings. Nevertheless, this was not the case in Mladost, where, during both socialism and capitalism, the sand and chemicals needed to make glass were always made available and production was always intense and relatively smooth. Here, I am not claiming that there was an abrupt change to ‘flexible’ production, but that there were variations in relation to shortages in socialist factories. In Chapter 4, I explore ways in which ‘flexibility’ and ‘individual responsibility’ as new managerial discourses and practices were responded to both by managers and on the shop floor, and how they interacted with notions of ‘collective production’. While global changes to labour and production provide the wider framework of this ethnography, the importance of the socialist past is also taken into account, not only because many of these postsocialist

18  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

characteristics are found in Mladost, but also, and maybe more importantly, because the socialist past was still relevant in daily life in Mladost. As Caroline Humphrey has argued: ‘If “actually existing socialism” comes to be relegated into a largely forgotten past of yellowing newsprint, then it will be time to lay the category “postsocialist” finally to rest’ (Humphrey 2001: 15). The relevance of the socialist past was important as employees drew constant comparisons with different epochs of both the socialist and postsocialist pasts. However, my ethnography does not make use of past in order to reconstruct its actual reality. As I discuss in Chapter 1, it mainly focuses instead on peoples’ daily comparisons with representations of past conditions of labour in Mladost, which I view as ways to comment on the present ones without explicitly addressing them. Furthermore, I view the socialist past as one of the multiple temporalities found in Mladost and approach the representations of time as processual, similar to what Pine has described for postsocialist Poland: ‘More than a world moving forwards or even a world turned upside down, we seem to have before us a world moving sideways and backwards, simultaneously and often skewed’ (2001: 98). While socialism is an aspect of industrial modernity, its consequent postsocialist experiences are one of decline for workers’ lives that contradicted earlier aspirations to this modernity. As such, early postsocialist phenomena are comparable to other, similar phenomena of economic decline in circumstances of modernity, such as Ferguson’s ethnography (2009) of Zambia focusing on experiences of the abrupt economic decline in the 1980s. Therefore, while I take into account the particularities of the postsocialist context, I also look at work emphasizing that socialism and capitalism have shared many similarities (Brown 2001; Buck-­Morss 2002). Susan Buck-­Morss has argued that socialism and capitalism share a common utopian ‘dreamworld’ based on similar future aspirations. In industry, both socialism and capitalism shared shop floor practices of calculated body movements based on scientific Taylorism. Burawoy’s (1985) comparisons between socialist and capitalist factories also highlighted the similarities and differences of the factory work, as discussed in Chapter 2. Therefore, while I position this study in a postsocialist framework, I see it primarily as a study of complex transformations of work with continuities and discontinuities between Fordism and post-­Fordism.

Anthropological Approaches to Work in Eastern Europe While industrialization and industrial work have been of great importance throughout the twentieth century in eastern Europe, studies by both local

Introduction  *  19

and foreign ethnographers have mostly focused on economic life in rural areas. Research on collectivization, decollectivization and changing land property relations have been among the most influential (Humphrey 1983; Hann 1993; Kideckel 1993; Lampland 1995; Creed 1998). Moreover, earlier studies conducted in the first half of the twentieth century in eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia have greatly contributed to shaping core theories of agricultural production and peasant societies. Chayanov’s theories of the peasant economy (1986), based on research in Russia in the 1920s, have influenced economic anthropology in general. On a far more modest scale, Sanders’ (1949) research on rural Bulgaria in the 1940s had an impact beyond the boundaries of regional academic discussions. However, there has not been an equal interest in industrial labour in this part of the world, even though industrial developments have been among the structuring forces in these societies for more than a century. Rural life itself can only be understood in relation to these industrial developments, as demonstrated by Gerald Creed (1998) for late-­socialist rural Bulgaria. Kaneff has also discussed the permeability of the boundaries between rural and industrial life in Bulgaria during socialism and their changing relationships during postsocialism by focusing on household production practices, community projects and kinship networks (Kaneff 2002). Here, I take industry as a focal point, but I attempt to do so without losing sight of practices such as the domestic agriculture of industrial workers in order to shed light on connections with industrial labour. As research on the history of anthropology in Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia indicates, ethnographic work during socialism was mainly influenced by folklore studies that focused on traditions and were largely based on nationalist discourses (Mihăilescu, Iliev and Naumović 2008). In Bulgaria, research in industrial settings was conducted by Bulgarian sociologists during the period of socialism and was mostly based on quantitative methods. The topic of industrial labour is also absent from western ethnographies. While one reason for this could be the difficulty in gaining access to industrial settings, there is a general absence of urban studies, not only industrial ones. This focus, mostly on rural settings by both local and foreign ethnographers, continued during the early period of postsocialism. The reasons for this particular focus require research on the history of the discipline, which goes beyond the scope of this book. However, it is important to mention that, while the Balkans and eastern Europe have attracted a variety of other topics, such as nationalism and ethnicity, religion and gender,12 urban life and industrial work attracted less interest up until the early period of postsocialism. Studies on postsocialist workplace settings in Poland (Dunn 2004; Trappman 2013), East Germany (Müller 2007), Hungary (Czeglédy 1999),

20  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

Croatia (Bonfiglioli 2020), and Serbia (Rajković 2017) have focused, inter alia, on the privatization of local companies that had been bought by foreign ones. Nina Vodopivec studied a Slovenian textile plant in which there were similar issues related to processes of privatization that followed a different pattern of shareholding among workers and managers (Vodopivec 2010). A shared characteristic of all these studies, including this one on Mladost, is that they focus on the ways in which new managerial discourses or new ideas about labour interact with other ideas about work that derive mainly from the socialist past. Two studies of the early postsocialist period have focused on the mining industry in Russia (Ashwin 1999) and on mining and the chemical industry in Romania (Kideckel 2008). Ashwin’s study sets itself the difficult task of explaining the lack of a phenomenon, namely workers’ resistance to capitalist reforms through unionism. She argues that the unions remained weak during the larger political processes in the 1990s and that workers relied mainly on networks of solidarity based on their households. This ethnography, as well as Kideckel’s, stress the loss experienced by workers who had enjoyed privileged positions under socialism. Kideckel points to the worker’s significant loss of job security and health services and documents in detail their daily difficulties as a result of the reforms. Apart from the material consequences of these transformations, the loss included one of belonging to the workplace. More recent ethnographies of work in Eastern Europe suggest that although those experiences of intense transformations and loss were, to a large extent, still relevant, opened up their focus on a variety of topics, including work ethics and value (Rajković 2018; Ana 2022), gender and masculinity (Morris 2018), populism (Bujalka and Ferencová 2017), migration and employment dependencies (Meszmann and Fedyuk 2019) and ethnicity and kinship at work (Kesküla 2014). Dunn’s (2004) detailed analysis of how ideas of personhood are being transformed, based on flexibility, niche marketing, quality control and new ideas about consumption, has opened up a discussion on flexibility. She described the new management’s attempts to transform ‘rigid’ production into ‘flexible’ production and documented workers’ responses and resistance to this. Her analysis nonetheless avoids the power/resistance dichotomy. She describes workers as ‘trapped between socialism (which most people remember as difficult and degrading) and the new structures of capital (which are radically disempowering for most non-­managerial employees)’ (ibid.: 160). Furthermore, Dunn’s analysis is critical of neoliberal ideas of ‘choosing’ individuals within the free economy. Rather, she analyses the ways in which this new ideology of ‘freedom of choice’ is actually one that offers its subjects only constrained choices. These choices

Introduction  *  21

are nonetheless found in consumption and production practices, as well as in larger macro-­economic structures. Like the Polish workers in Dunn’s ethnography, workers in Mladost demonstrated that they were neither merely nostalgic for the socialist past, nor content with their current situation. Rather, as I shall discuss throughout this book, they focused more on the continuities of constraints in both periods and underlined continuities of power from the socialist past. However, my ethnography differs from Dunn’s in that it pays more attention to the process of production. Ideas about individualism and collectivities will be viewed in relation to discourses on labour, as well as shop floor practices. The division between casual and regular workers, a result of the restructuring that has accompanied managerial ideas about flexibility, will be my main focus. This division is a process that began after privatization in Mladost and is, I argue, crucial to an understanding of today’s politics of production and workers’ lives within the new regime of labour. Building on Dunn’s work, I argue that, although a focus on neoliberal governmentality adds to our understanding of postsocialist transformations of work, these can be even more comprehensively grasped in relation to the production process and the division of labour. While Dunn (2004) conducts an analysis that takes into account the continuities and discontinuities in relation to the socialist past, Müller (2004, 2007) shows an image of a more direct confrontation between eastern and western managerial practices in three companies she studied in East Germany that also involve a more abrupt shift from socialist to multinational ideas and practices (Müller 2004: 169). Based on research conducted from the late 1980s until the mid-­1990s, a period of intense change, Müller describes the new Western management as having a ‘civilizing mission’ (2007) to fulfil in the east and describes workers’ responses to and confrontations with the new managerial discourses. Her ethnography is one of the very few accounts of these processes during the early 1990s. Narratives from Mladost seem to agree more with Dunn’s analysis rather than with Müller’s account of a ‘radical break’. This may differ not only due to the geographical difference, but also to the elapse of time. Changes might have been felt more abruptly in the 1990s, but usually they are in a constant relationship with continuities, as Müller’s later work on the continuities of power suggests (2007). Epochal change and their related dis/continuities was a central topic of daily discussion in Mladost. This included practices of work, management and production and, most importantly, relations of power. There were different types of ‘old’ and ‘new’ power, as well as various types of ‘old’ and ‘new’ employees that were situationally viewed as indicators of continuity of different and changing forms of power, as I discuss in Chapters 1 and 6.

22  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

The categories of ‘old’ and ‘new’ were further complicated by the category of ‘communist’, which was attributed to those who used previous important positions in order to get positions of power in the present. Nadia was an ‘old’ worker who used to underline her oldness and her belonging to the group of tailors, a profession that did not formally exist in Mladost under the new regime. She made use of her oldness when she occasionally passed the doors of the administrative building in order to spend her break with people with office jobs, whom she knew from the past, rather than with the cleaners. Nevertheless, for her colleagues, her current position was not an indicator of an obscure acquisition of ‘old’ forms of power, as was the case with other employees in higher positions. Müller’s study of three East German companies provides an ethnography of how those who were in power during socialism reproduced their power in the 1990s, while workers remained in the lowest positions in both periods; she also provides detailed examples of how communist managers became company owners (Müller 2007: 109). Similarly, in Bulgaria in the 1990s, former communist managers often became involved in buying companies, and there were also cases when a director of a state company was simultaneously the president of a private company, which was an extension of the state company (Konstantinov 2000: 140). Such phenomena occurred during the transformations of the 1990s towards a market economy, and they have inspired a wide range of literature dealing with ‘corruption’ and ‘informal networks’ in eastern Europe (e.g. Ledeneva 1998; Chavdarova 2001b; Henig and Macovicky 2016). Discussions of informal networks and ‘corruption’ related to privatization are at the centre of Bulgarian maritime workers’ narratives in the late 2000s (Kremakova 2012). A general lack of trust in the economy and in relations of power is indeed pervasive, and my research in Mladost resonates with this observation. Workers largely talked about continuities of power and the role of personal connections (vrazki) in economic and political relationships. Ragaru’s (2003) ethnography of the practice of exchanging favours in order to achieve day-­to-­day services (uslugi) convincingly demonstrates that these were continuities from the socialist past. As a result, politics is perceived as a ‘distant and corrupt universe where petty party interests took precedence over the common good’ (ibid.: 208–9). By looking at how ideas of continuity in relation to power and to obscure ways of its acquisition were prominent in Mladost’s daily talk, the ethnography in this book does not aim to provide a historical account of the continuation and discontinuation of power; nevertheless, it underlines the importance of this daily preoccupation with ‘old’ and ‘new’ power and with widespread ideas about the continuation of ‘communist’ power to the implementation of neoliberal practices of production and to the growing fragmentation among the workers.

Introduction  *  23

A wide range of sociological studies in Bulgaria have focused on several aspects of the intense postsocialist transformations and have suggested continuities in informal networks after the collapse of socialism (e.g. Dimitrov 2004; Tchalakov et al. 2008), a ‘common truth’ discussed by many people in Bulgaria, including people in Mladost. Mutual accusations of informal practices were very common, as I discuss in the last chapter. I do not merely view this as a ‘survival’ of the socialist past; instead, I go back to Smith’s (1999) suggestion that often our insistence on continuities with the past might have, in fact, interpreted aspects of the current political and economic regimes as mere remnants of a previous one, thus preventing stronger critiques of current economic and political conditions. For instance, several contributions to the volume on The State Against Reforms (Dimitrov 2004), a collection of studies on the intense postsocialist transformations, assert that continuities with the socialist past are important reasons for the market economy ‘reforms’ not having been ‘properly’ implemented in Bulgaria.13 This emphasis on continuities often includes an underlying assumption that the market economy would otherwise operate differently. Tania Chavdarova, a sociologist specialising on informal networks, suggested in the early 2000s that ‘corruption as a practice and a model for public relations threatens not just the market reforms and the growth of the Bulgarian economy but might also turn out to be a factor that seriously threatens the possibility of the successful establishment of a democratic legal order’ (Chavdarova 2001a: 14). Market ‘reform’ appears to be a rather independent process that does not include the informal economy and is transparent. Here, I do not assert that there is no ‘corruption’ in Bulgaria, or in any other economy, or that there are no informal networks ensuring the reproduction of politico-­economic clientelism at all levels or that the economy of favours is not widespread,14 nor do I imply that there are no continuities of power between past and present. However, the focus on informal economy often seems to attribute the general economic decline of the early period of postsocialism in Bulgaria, and by extension, an incomplete success of democratic forces, to the obstacles created by such practices. Otherwise, such views assume, the reforms would have almost naturally led to a thriving economy, an approach to informal economic relationships which seems to essentialize ‘socialism’, ‘the past’ and ‘market reforms’. Recent anthropological and sociological studies of work in Bulgaria provide analyses that move away from essential views of socialism and capitalism to look at ethnicity and the power relations developed among Bulgarian and non-­Bulgarian employees in outsourcing service companies in Bulgaria (Hristova 2014), the current precarious working conditions in call centers (Kirov and Mircheva 2009), changing notions and employment

24  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

strategies among young workers (Neykova 2017) and among families (Tocheva 2015; Petrova 2017) and work and citizenship inequality (Nedeva 2014), offering dynamic views of contemporary work in relation to the mobility of companies and people. An anthropological view of Mladost’s shop floor also suggests that older and newer ideas and practices of work are intertwined in various ways: workers use discourse categories to express complex perceptions of ‘old’ and ‘new’ power; managers who are aware of widespread suspicions about power relationships emphasize their distance from illegitimate means of the acquisition of power; and people who feel they have no power to accuse others of gaining ‘communist’ power. My study suggests that, along with the continuity of informal relationships of power and/or ‘favours’, there is a continuity of suspicions of such connections, suspicions that mobilize relationships, everyday life in the workplace and politics of labour and contribute to the legitimation of neoliberal managerial practices. Therefore, I consider such phenomena neither as paradoxical nor as local peculiarities that tight modelling should seek to expel from an aesthetically purified analytical framework, but as fully constitutive to what the global market economy, supported by elective democracy as its usual partner in this widely cited dyad, can actually enable.

Research Context The research for this book is primarily based on fieldwork in Sofia since 2007 and in Pernik since 2013. However, it also draws from my first study in Bulgaria in 2003, which focused on the history of political refugees from the Greek civil war (1946–1949) in Bulgaria. I then lived with Greek refugees and their families in Druzba, a working-­class district in Sofia where refugees were allocated apartments in neighbouring apartment blocks. Through their life stories and community archives, I became aware of the importance of people’s working lives. Many of their narratives focused on their factory work and their social lives, which were strongly connected to work-­related events. Moreover, their stories revealed the importance of political positions, personal connections and family background for employment status during socialist times and their continuing importance during postsocialist times. Mladost seemed a suitable place in which to explore transformations of labour, as it had a long history dating back to the pre-­socialist period in the 1930s, later growing into a mass production company during socialist times before belonging to those postsocialist privatized industries with high levels of profit that implemented new managerial and production techniques and participated in global economic trends.

Introduction  *  25

While fieldwork took place in several settings that were connected with employees’ lives, it began in Mladost. In researching globally connected phenomena, the ethnography focuses on a single site in order to open up a view to the complex convergences and dynamics that meet there. As Candea suggested, a bounded site can be a partial ‘window to complexity’ (Candea 2007) rather than a site that may offer holistic explanations. My focus on wokplace ethnography takes its inspiration from previous studies of the experience of labour by primarily scrutinizing the process of production (Beynon 1975; Haraszti 1977; Burawoy 1985; R. Harris 1987; Ong 1987; Ngai 2005; De Neve 2006; Mollona 2009b). Workers’ experiences, formed during long hours spent standing around machines, are central to an anthropological understanding of the connections between macroeconomic processes and daily life. As De Neve argues: ‘a particular organization of work generates relations of authority, friendship and conflict in production, which turn the more hidden and exploitative relations of production between employers and workers into embodied experiences on the shop floor’ (2006: 135). Moreover, workplace ethnography may also help us revisit dominant ‘rational’ ideas about the economy and their implementation. Here, I am researching ideas about flexibility, individuality and competition as the management gives expression to them and as they are practiced on the production site. Managers argue that competition among workers raises productivity, a principle they implement through a system of unequal payment to different workers. However, in practice, the implementation of pay inequality, allegedly to increase ‘productivity’, misses its objective. Instead, in Mladost, work in the spirit of ‘collectivity’ and more equal pay are more likely to lead to improvements in production, as managers and engineers themselves would also indicate. Focusing on the work setting and its interconnections provides a means of questioning such commonsensical ‘rationalities’ of global capitalism with research discussants directly. Getting access to the factory to do research and to temporarily occupy a position as an employee was a challenging task. Factories are spaces placed under specific security and safety regulations, and it requires permission from the management to enter their premises. After several attempts, I managed to get an appointment with the director, Mr Ioannidis, during which I explained that I would like to have long-­term access within the factory and, ideally, some kind of work experience. I also explained that in accordance with the ethics of anthropological practice, any personal data I collected would be treated as confidential and that their use would not affect the lives of the people involved. As such, I made it clear that, in the event I would be allowed to do research, I would not convey any information I gathered between different individuals in the factory. Therefore, I

26  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

would not provide any information about the plant’s management to the shop floor, nor vice versa, nor share any information among any of those involved during my research. Maintaining this discretion was one of the most difficult challenges of my fieldwork, as both workers and managers would sometimes ask what I knew about different groups of people in different positions. After several discussions about my doing fieldwork, Mr Ioannidis suggested that I could be employed at the end of the production line, the Cold End, which, as he said, was a ‘women’s position’, where women packed the final product. Nevertheless, he told me again that both he and Ms Nikolova, the human resources (HR) manager, were very sceptical about the usefulness of such a study. From the very first discussions with the management, I realized that I had to find ways of striking a balance between all the various people and groups involved and to try to gain the trust of both the workers and the administrative staff. Given that my access to the factory depended on the management’s decision, I was careful to be discreet and make myself as invisible as possible. On my first day as a worker-­ researcher or worker-­ fieldworker in Mladost, I was offered a worker’s uniform and an office key by the Human Resources manager who offered me this space. This was already a novelty in the factory and revealing of my in-­between position. A particularity of research in a factory requires that the ethnographer has official permission and is given a kind of allocated ‘position’. Petar, the 36-­year-­old Cold End manager, was already aware that I would be working on his sector. Since I would only stay for a limited period, he would prefer not to give me a machine because this would cause problems in scheduling the shifts. Instead, after I had received some training from them, as all newcomers do, I would assist all the workers at the end of the four production lines. According to the regulations, for safety reasons, I was not allowed to stay at the premises after 5pm, so I would not be able to follow the normal shifts, which run 24/7 (morning, afternoon and night). He told me that the work was quick, dangerous and demanding, and that he did not see the point of me doing it, but he would allow me to do my research. My fieldwork was to a large extent shaped by the factory’s regulations and my peculiar position in between the workers and managers, as well as in between an office and a uniform. During my first days in Mladost, I was told by older workers that there was an existing precedent for research in Mladost, conducted during the socialist period; they recalled a historian from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAN) spending some months in the factory in 1981 in order to write a history of Mladost.15 Research in work settings seemed to be a practice familiar to the older generations. My new position was a peculiarity in

Introduction  *  27

itself, since I did not follow the actual shifts but had my own seven-­hour shift, from 9 to 4. Workers would have to change shifts at 2pm, and as a result I would meet two shifts a day. The office space was located at the production building, and I only used it to leave my personal things during worktime as I preferred to spend all the time at the area I was positioned, as well as hanging out at lunch and coffee breaks with employees. My first days were permeated with feelings of perplexity and loneliness on the shop floor, since I was working on the machines without belonging to a particular shift and without being part of any other department, as I had access to various spaces. I started working on the machines along with the women, who very soon started teaching me how to operate them. This teaching process became an important period of bonding which included not only the transmission of skills, but also helping each other and sharing thoughts about various topics during the repetitive machine work. As soon as I started learning the work, I was able to give the workers some rest or allow them to focus on another task with relative ease. I learned their job in detail, but I also learned how this job was taught to the younger workers by the older ones. The help I provided brought back memories of previous labour conditions. Female packing workers would tell me that the machine at which I was positioned used to have two workers before the redundancies. This actually made sense, given the extremely high production speed and the multiple tasks one had to perform at the machine. However, gaining the employees’ trust would not be easy, since my research was connected to political topics, and on top of this, I came from the same country as the owners. It required an effort to demonstrate that I did not have any previous connections with any member of the management or the owners. After the company was sold again in 2017 to a Portuguese company, some of the most suspicious of my interlocutors eventually showed more trust in our communications. Gradually, I also started to learn additional skills from the workers, skills that were related to their lives outside the factory, visiting their houses and accompanying them in activities such as gardening or preparing canned food. Prentice (2008), through her research of a garment factory in Trinidad, has emphasized the importance of learning workers’ skills related to their activities both inside and outside the space of wage labour. Similarly, the experience of work outside the factory gave me a better understanding of daily working lives, of the permeability of the boundaries between home and work, and of household practices that were connected with shop floor practices. During the period I lived in and around Mladost, I met people with various positions both inside and outside their work space. The initial suspicions about my intentions had been dissipated to a large extent. I was lonely for a few weeks when I arrived, but I had made

28  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

some good friends by the time I first left in 2009. During my last days, workers on a shift with whom I was particularly close invited me to their night shift; a shift I was not allowed to go on since I only had access until the afternoon. They organized a farewell party with food and non-alcoholic beverages, and we celebrated by the machines until the end of their shift early in the morning. Although the machines worked 24/7, the workers had developed several ways of celebrating special occasions alongside the machines during the night shifts. After my first six months at the production site, I started conducting life story interviews. These included both women and men with both regular and casual positions on the production line, as well as cleaning personnel, engineers and managers from the sectors of production, administration, finance and human resources. A semi-­constructed questionnaire encouraged narrators to tell me about important parts of their lives, beginning with their childhood, while it also left much space to take different directions. In doing this, I was aiming for an understanding of the topics that were important to my interlocutors (cf. Thompson 2000). The narratives included family and school memories, teenage years and secondary education, as well as important turning points in their lives, such as meeting their partners, having children, getting a new job and experiencing economic hardship. Most of the narrators emphasized their work experience, although I did not necessarily encourage this particular focus. One may think that this focus was the result of the interviewee’s positionality in relation to the interviewer, since we first met at their work environment. Nevertheless, the particular focus on the experience of work was widespread among narrators from a wide range of backgrounds, and it constituted one of the most frequent self-­representations in life stories in Bulgaria (cf. Koleva 2008: 42). The collection of life stories provided me with important information about the interactions between life trajectories and larger socio-­historical changes and resulted in interesting narrative forms that were based on various overlapping periodizations. The most repetitive were ‘before’ and ‘after’ ‘socialism’, ‘democracy’, ‘privatization’ or ‘the Greeks’, ‘the crisis’ of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the crisis in 1996 to 1997 and the most recent global economic crisis since 2009. Given that the company was Greek-­owned, the ‘Greek crisis’ was also an additional source of insecurity from 2010. ‘The crisis’, and successive other ‘crises’, created narratives of the normalization of critical times and transcended binaries such as that between socialism and postsocialism. Research in the Bulgarian State Archives provided a body of data on Mladost’s history from the early 1960s until 1996. The available archive16 indicates that financial and organizational data was systematically recorded

Introduction  *  29

until privatization. However, the available material is not complete or systematic because the majority of the factory’s archives were kept on its premises, only a few copies being sent to the state archives. After privatization and the abandonment of factory spaces, the old archives remained in a room that was flooded in the early 2000s, and most of the material was damaged. The data that are still available provide sporadic but important quantitative information on the size of the workforce, salaries, the extent of production, financial data and yearly ‘collective labour agreements’. There were interesting silences in the available written sources. Besides a few speeches praising workers’ heroism in a general manner, mostly praising the engineers’, and less often the economists’ achievements, there were hardly any references to employees’ experiences from ‘below’; mostly, the reports contained analyses of the production process from ‘above’. One may wonder whether this was the result of the lack of available material or a general failure actually to give voice to the workers’ experiences. However, there was no indication that any such sources were available within the archival catalogues. Using the available material, one can nonetheless create a general image of production in past decades and on the larger ideological shifts and hegemonic discourses, as I shall discuss further in Chapter 1. Silences and discrepancies between oral stories and archival material may also reveal the complex ways in which transformations were viewed and represented. As a consequence, I consider all my sources interestingly rich and elliptical. By combining them, I attempt to present an image of the factory, which provides an introduction to Mladost’s general socio-­ historical context and to how transformations of the economy and production were perceived, renegotiated and experienced by employees. This will be the subject of further analysis in the following chapters.

Outline The ethnography begins with historical accounts of Mladost (Chapter 1), which are important for understanding present-­day relations at work and the politics of labour as well as the complex ways multiple temporalities are important in Mladost’s daily life. Then, the story moves to the shop floor (Chapter 2) to discuss the interconnections between different types of employment, gender relations and the coercive presence of the clients and ‘the market’ throughout the production line. The ethnography follows the production of bottles on the conveyor belt. From the production line, it extends to life outside the factory and analyses kinship ties and household practices in order to understand employment status, age and gender

30  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

inequalities back on the production lines and the interconnections between power relations both at work and at home (Chapter 3). The ethnography then goes back to the factory, but this time with a closer focus on managerial practices as presented from ‘above’ and as they are implemented on the shop floor (Chapter 4). It follows how the word ‘flexibility’ is used from the administration building and the human resources (HR) department to the production line, while it also explores the interconnections between the discourses and practices of flexible capitalism, as well as continuities and discontinuities in relation to the socialist past. The ethnography continues inside Mladost’s spaces (Chapter 5) by focusing on the relationships between officially used and unused, dilapidating industrial buildings, the latter being used informally by both workers and the company. The analysis then moves to the interconnections between the visible and more official shop floor and the invisible spaces of production, as well as other, more hidden daily practices. Finally, the ethnography focuses on employees’ discourses (Chapter 6) on ‘what has changed’ and ‘what is the same’ by exploring temporal connections and interpretations. In the first chapter, I discuss Mladost’s history since the 1950s based on oral testimonies I collected in the form of employees’ life stories and on archival material at the ‘Central State Archives’ in Sofia. I then position this local history within Bulgaria’s wider socio-­historical context. I argue that, although socialism collapsed three decades ago, and that calls to abandon the term ‘postsocialism’ are understandable, employees’ daily talk about ‘the past’ ensures that the experiences of socialism and, more importantly, of privatization in the 1990s, are still relevant. In the second chapter, I focus on the production process on the shop floor, where a new inequality is emerging from a newly formed division between regular and contract workers. This division is critical to understanding the new labour conditions. It is coupled with a consideration of the inequality between workers at the Hot End and those at the Cold End of the production line, as well as gender hierarchies. I have also taken inspiration from Haraszti’s (1978) description of the shop floor and his call for closer attention to be paid to the machinery and object of production (Spittler 2009). Through an ethnography of the production line that follows the bottle’s itinerary along the speedy conveyor belt, I introduce the various stages and describe the shop floor’s positions, relations and inequalities. Workers who once had the same regular status now work with different labour statuses, employed either by Mladost as regular employees or by the outsourcer on casual, short-­term contracts. In spite of these differences, however, they are all connected to the same machine and its speed and have to perform the same tasks in bodily synchronization, despite the significant differences in salaries and benefits. Regular workers

Introduction  *  31

gain power in relation to casual workers and underline their positions by assessing themselves as ‘cleverer’, as those who ‘made it’ after privatization. Global inequalities become tangible on the production line where Fordism and post-­Fordism meet. The third chapter follows employees outside Mladost, during their secondary labour activities and leisure, in search of the interconnections between the shop floor and other spheres of social life. My participation in household activities contributed to an understanding of the lowest positions in which workers ‘consent’ to inequality (Burawoy 1979) on the shop floor. Rather than exclusively attempting to understand relationships through the structure of production, I attempt to explain inequalities in gender and employment status in relation to kinship among employees and gender and family relations outside the factory. The latter relationships reveal connections between daily life outside the factory and relationships developed on the shop floor: casual workers and female low-­paid workers at the Cold End often reverse their relations of power back home, where the latter are the household’s main breadwinners. Employing a moral economy approach, I discuss how these kinship ties between members of the same household contribute to the factory’s production. The next chapter focuses on practices and discourses of flexibility at work and variations of individuality and collectivity in the workplace. It examines the new managerial discourses voiced by Mladost’s higher management and follows their use from the director to the HR department to the middle manager, and finally, to the shop floor. Unlike existing literature on the region (Dunn 2004; Vodopivec 2010), such discourses do not reach the shop floor, where collectivity is necessary for the flow of production given the shortage of workers due to redundancy and the nature of glass production. Nevertheless, managerial techniques of making diverse payments, based on the rhetoric of flexibility, are practiced. By focusing on the production process and its relationship to the diversity of payments, I show ethnographically that these do not necessarily yield the desired productivity levels, which are based on the assumption of the ‘naturality’ of competition, but are often detrimental to production. However, they are productive in preparing the enterprise as a potential product in the market and are also effective in fragmenting the solidarity of workers and muting potential collective action. Furthermore, the analysis suggests the argument that neoliberal governmentality can be traced not merely in workers’ subjectivities, but also in the production process and the division of labour. Mladost’s multiple spatio-­temporalities as inscribed in spaces and buildings are discussed in the fifth chapter. Approximately 40% of the buildings are seemingly abandoned. I follow the ‘secret’ paths the workers take inside the ruined buildings. The workers create personal spaces and deploy

32  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

informal economic activities, as well as maintaining an old exhibition, which I describe as an informal museum of past products. These industrial buildings are being reclaimed and re-­used by their previous users, who perform old workers’ identifications there. Accordingly, the chapter discusses literature on architecture, abandonment and postsocialism. The old buildings are not only experienced and described by workers as reminders of a previous era but are also constant reminders of imminent changes and staff lay-­offs and of the threat and, often, inevitability of downward mobility. I describe this use of space as daily practices of resistance that enable employees to perform parallel temporalities and to cross the conventional divisions of time. Employees compare the situational temporalizations of ‘now’ (sega) and ‘in the old times’17 (edno vreme) to make sense of these transformations. They repeat the seemingly contradictory phrases that ‘everything is new’ and ‘everything is the same’. In Chapter 6, I analyse how, after successive ‘crises’, powerful representations of abrupt change (‘everything is new’) and of the lack of change (‘nothing has changed’) coexist. I address these temporalisations as vernacular expressions of the main turning points: the collapse of socialism, the Bulgarian financial crisis in 1996, the period of privatization since 1997, and the ‘global economic crisis’ that started in 2008. Keeping in mind the continuities and discontinuities of shop floor politics and managerial practices, I view these multiple temporalities as employees’ criticisms of socialist and neoliberal power relationships. I also argue that workers largely view and experience these inequalities as produced by ‘communist’ structures of power, now being reproduced by their heirs, and that this shared vision of enduring power limits larger political claims and open criticism of current labour conditions. Gerald Creed, who has conducted long-­term research in Bulgaria since the 1990s, pointed out that Bulgarians described postsocialist transformations as ‘the changes’ (Creed 2011: 7), thus underlining the plurality of these processes. During my fieldwork in Bulgaria, workers would bitterly point out that ‘the changes never stop’. This was a reference to the dynamic transformations of global capitalism, which were described by different people on different occasions as ‘the changes’, ‘wild capitalism’ or ‘democracy’, and sometimes as ‘so-­called democracy’. This observation was followed by comments that, despite their previous expectations and hopes, especially up until the early 2000s, they might not see any improvement to their lives under the new regime either. Rather, they expressed disappointment with both aspects of industrial modernity that they had experienced in their lives. The following joke, which was widespread in 2014 and 2015, was indicative of how, during the third decade after the collapse of the previous political regime, there was a similar sense of collapse, a sense of

Introduction  *  33

the unpredictability of the near future, coupled with the possibilities of the start of a new period: ‘Chicago -20, feels like -40. Sofia 2015 feels like 1989’.

Notes  1. All names of people and companies are pseudonyms in order to protect their anonymity.   2. It is mainly based on my nineteen months of fieldwork in Mladost (2007–2009) and on my follow-­up fieldwork in Bulgaria in 2013–2015 as a member of the research group on Industry and Inequality in Eurasia at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. In 2013–2015, I began fieldwork in Pernik, a nearby industrial town where Mladost workers also lived, but I also continued to visit Mladost in Sofia.   3. The ethnography is written mostly in past tenses. However, it is also sometimes written in present tenses, in describing the present of the referred period or context. For example, the use of present continuous in Chapter 2, aims to describe the repetitive work around the machines. Therefore, the use of present tenses does not imply that things have not changed. Rather, the ethnography focuses on intense transformations and on changing temporalities.   4. Всичко се промени/нищо не е както преди (Vsichko se promeni/nishto ne e kakto predi).   5. Всичко е едно и също/все едно и също (Vsichko e edno i sushto/vse edno i sushto).  6. The combination of these phrases is similar to Alphonse Karr’s often quoted epigram, ‘The more things change the more they remain the same’ (Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose). However, in Mladost, the two phrases do not go together so systematically, though they were situationally expressed on different occasions.   7. As Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga put it: ‘Although capital has become more mobile and thus placeless to some extent, it has become more territorial in other places as a result of uneven development. Global flows bypass some poor residents without access to capital, entrapping them in disintegrating communities while entangling others’ (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003: 26).   8. For example, June Nash argued that the US based company General Electric used the threat to relocate after the strong union strike in 1946. She analysed the company’s global investment not only as a way to reduce labour costs but also as a means to control union action in the domestic plants (Nash 1989, 324).   9. Maria Todorova (2010: 2–3) further argues that media as well as academic representations of post-­Communist nostalgia underline the ‘uniqueness’ of the phenomenon of nostalgia in the postsocialist world. Such discourses usually do not situate their examples in a wider comparative context of nostalgia with other parts of the world. Lack of comparison may result in essentialist analyses of phenomena taking place in the postsocialist world. 10. The end of existing socialism triggered Fukuyama’s well-­known theory (1992) of ‘the end of history’. He proposed that the historical outcome of the end of the

34  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

socialist regimes signified that human history had reached the final phase of its development, that of western liberal democracy. For a historical approach to the workplace as an institution and the changing politics of work in late socialism in Yugoslavia, see Rajković (2022). There is a variety of research on, for example, nationalism and ethnicity (Stewart 1993; Khazanov 1996; Tishkov 1996; Cowan 2000), religion (Duijzings 2000; Hann 2006b; Mahieu and Naumescu 2009) and gender (Pine 1993; Gal and Kligman 2000a, 2000b). Moreover, a common argument from this period of scholarly work was that a ‘Bulgarian’, ‘socialist’ or even ‘Ottoman’ past is the reason for ‘corruption’ and for an ineffective market economy. Rather, research in economic anthropology since the 1970s has suggested informality as integral part of every economy (Hart 1973; Hann and Hart 2011). This historical research project resulted in a short history of Mladost (Anonymous 1982), which I discuss in Chapter 1. The name of the archive, at the State Archives of Sofia, which belong to the Central Bulgarian State Archive, and the number of the archival fond have been anonymized throughout the text. Although this is not a usual practice for archival research among historians, I have kept the anonymity of the archive, in order to be consistent with the practices of anonymity followed with names of research participants and companies in the ethnography of this book. Therefore, references to the archive will appear as ‘Mladost Archive’, in State Archives, Sofia. Едно време (edno vreme).

1

Temporalities and Shifting ° Multiple Ideologies in Mladost

The statue of a robust male glassworker stands at the entrance to the Mladost Glassworks in Sofia’s industrial zone. Behind the worker there are four flags: first a Bulgarian one, the second representing Mladost Glassworks, the third a Greek one, and finally that of the European Union. The chronological order in this composition seemed quite ‘obvious’ to me when I first visited Mladost in September 2007: the statue was reminiscent of a plethora of similar ones made across the socialist world during the socialist era, representing the heroic figure of the ‘socialist model worker’. Positioned at the centre of the public space, it accentuated the centrality of the production and the importance of the hardworking man to it. The Greek flag indicated the new era and would have been added after Mladost’s privatization in 1997, when the factory was bought by the Greek-­ owned multinational company Arethusa. Finally, the flag of the European Union would have been a later addition, when Bulgaria entered the EU in 2007. It seemed like a chronological composition that included strong symbols from both periods of socialism and postsocialism. However, contrary to my initial interpretation, the statue had been positioned there after privatization by the new management. Workers would say, in an ironic tone, that it represented the owner, Mr Hatzopoulos, in his youth, when he was a ‘low-­paid glass worker’. He was such a talented and hardworking glassmaker that he gradually managed to succeed, founded a glass company in Greece and later expanded into four other countries. Narrated with bitter humour, it was a success story of a capitalist ‘model worker’ who achieved personal success and became a millionaire. However, the tone in which the story was delivered negated its credibility as a success story, also being a comment on the narrators’ own positions as ‘poor glass workers’, stressing that no matter how good they were as glass-­makers, they could not move upwards in similar ways. This chapter brings the socio-­historical context of Mladost into the broader context of Bulgaria’s contemporary socio-­economic history. This

36  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

Figure 1.1.  An aspect from Mladost’s entrance. © Dimitra Kofti

is done to deepen the ethnographic understanding of the transformations that mainly took place over the last three decades as they are reflected in the lives of its employees. I start with a brief history of the plant’s changing ownership, production and markets before describing Mladost’s architectural and material

Multiple Temporalities and Shifting Ideologies  *  37

conditions, where multiple temporalities are made manifest and are also experienced in various ways by its employees, as I show in Chapter 5.1 Sites of action beyond the factory’s doors where employees spend their daily lives, such as their houses, neighbourhoods, leisure venues, holiday places and secondary work spaces, are also important in understanding their experience of their labour (Hareven 1982; Nippert-­Eng 1996). As such, the discussion will begin with Mladost and continue beyond its doors. The focus on transformations in ownership, production, use of space and, most importantly for this study, staff will be complemented by an exploration of shifting ideologies and social values, such as those of ‘employment’ and ‘the worker’. In this chapter, I also explore ways in which employees and their families relate to variations of social and historical time by looking at their responses to epochal change, their own ‘historicity’ (Hirsch and Stewart 2005). Various narratives of different and overlapping periods of ‘once in the past’ (edno vreme) were central to Mladost’s daily life and significantly shape the ways in which employees participated in present practices of production and management. In addition, the successive transformations of Mladost’s workforce were important among employees in defining them as ‘old’ and ‘new’ in diverse ways. In the second part of this chapter, I discuss the complexities of these past narratives and of the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ groups, narratives which were not necessarily based merely on either the conventional temporal distinction between socialism and postsocialism or divisions within the workforce before and/or after privatization. Furthermore, these distinctions did not define generations based merely on age: an ‘old’ worker could be someone in her thirties whose parents were also employed in the factory and who started working in her early twenties. More important than age, being ‘old’ and ‘new’ had various significations that impacted on both power relationships and the hierarchies within the plant. By investigating the multiple significations of ‘the past’ and the diverse ways of being ‘old’ and ‘new’, I will discuss the relevance of the postsocialist experience in a capitalist work setting during the third decade after the collapse of socialism. An important concept in Mladost’s history is that of modernization, a concept often accompanied by a belief that science and technology are capable of transforming and controlling nature (Kaneff 2004: 40) and that could make lives more prosperous. Industrialization under both socialism and capitalism shares similarities in the sense of teleological discourses that emphasized the prosperity that industrial production would produce. Yet, there were some significant differences in these hegemonic discourses. In state socialism, they were related to the ultimate goal of reducing the differences between the classes and of creating a classless society. Therefore, although industrialization was, in practice, implemented in similar ways

38  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

in both capitalist and socialist societies, there were important differences in the ideological discourses that supported it. The linearity of time in respect of these two aspects of modernity was also politicized in various ways. Employees in postsocialist settings, such as Mladost, have experienced linear views of history as different forms of socialist and capitalist ‘progress’. Diverse and overlapping ‘old’ and ‘new’ categories in Mladost point to a non-­linear modernity. The first part of this chapter discusses transformations in the plant since the 1930s. The second part discusses the diverse ways in which Mladost’s recent history has shaped current relationships within the workforce by focusing on how workers draw multiple periodizations and define different generations of employees inside the plant.

Changing Ownership, Production and Markets Mladost was founded in 1931 by a wealthy Bulgarian family as a glass workshop in Sofia. Its first machinery was imported from Austria and Germany during the 1930s, as were its first engineering staff. At that time, there were four other privately owned glass workshops in Sofia producing glass for domestic and medical purposes for the Bulgarian market. These plants were all nationalized, along with the remaining small-­scale glass workshops in the Sofia area soon after the introduction of Bulgaria’s new socialist constitution in 1947. It was named ‘Mladost’ because the word means youth, a name that socialist modernization projects often assumed.2 According to a celebratory brochure narrating the history of Mladost, called ‘Fifty years of Mladost’ (Anonymous 1982),3 the owners were represented as strong exploiters of the workforce, while nationalization was seen as achieving ‘new ways in modernizing industrial production’ through ‘collective work’ (Anonymous 1982: 19).4 Breaking with the pre-­socialist past was a common idea, especially in the early period of socialism, in the 1950s and the 1960s. The capitalist industrial and agricultural past was often represented as a burden for the workforce, while the new socialist economic project was represented as the new hope for the people’s power, which would be achieved through the radically new quality of socialist labour (Koleva 2008: 28–29). Gradually, all glass workshops across Sofia became part of the same state company ‘Mladost’, and they were given joint management and administration in 1955. Control of the production and coordination of mechanical maintenance was then transferred to Mladost. Until then, some of the workshops across the city did not necessarily employ engineers, and machinery maintenance was undertaken by the older and more

Multiple Temporalities and Shifting Ideologies  *  39

experienced workers (maistori). This centralization process also included Mladost’s cooperation with state-­conducted research on the needs of the Bulgarian market and the demand for bottles and jars by the food and drink industry, an industry that also grew in the early 1960s. From 1965 until 1968, the company was also geographically centralized when the old workshops were gradually closed down and all production was transferred to the premises where the Mladost factory is still situated today, in one of Sofia’s industrial zones. Mladost thus became a large-­scale industry in the country’s capital. Elsewhere in Bulgaria, the glass industry included four more factories in Pleven, Plovdiv, Novi Pazar and Beloslav. This relatively widespread glass production throughout the country was the result of an emphasis on small, geographically decentralized enterprises with greater independence with regard to their internal structure, an economic practice described as ‘small is beautiful’ (Malkoto e hubavo) during the 1960s and 1970s (Kalinova and Baeva 2002: 155). These other sites were a source of constant comparison and ‘emulation’ in relation to the quality and quantity of their production, as Mladost’s archives and narratives indicate. ‘Emulation’ between enterprises that belonged to the same industry was common during socialist times (Koleva 2008: 30). A further centralization of the Bulgarian glass industry occurred later, after their privatization in the 1990s, when the factories in Sofia, Plovdiv and Novi Pazar became part of the same large international group of factories with a centralized general management and a board of directors based abroad. During the modernization projects of the 1960s and 1970s, Mladost was one of the fastest growing factories in Bulgaria in terms of machinery, production and personnel, producing a variety of domestic glasswork and handmade glass. It also began to mass-­produce beverage bottles for both the Bulgarian market, mainly in the country’s south-­east, and the Soviet market. The development of glass production was also connected to mass agricultural production in Bulgaria and the standardization of food (Yuson 2009). Although agricultural goods had been exported since the 1930s, the mass production of fruit and vegetables for foreign export was intensified during the socialist period (Creed 1998). The large demand for glass and the standardization of food production required a standardization of the packaging and its production, which in turn required constant innovation of and changes to the factory’s machinery. Due to the relatively short life-­ span of a glass furnace, roughly ten to fifteen years, Mladost was constantly updated with the latest glass technology. After the company’s nationalization, the geography of the imported expertise changed. Technology formerly imported from Austria and Germany now came from the USSR and Poland. Engineers from these

40  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

same countries now led the installation of this new machinery, and Bulgarian engineers began to be sent for apprenticeships within the Soviet bloc during the 1960s. This was in accordance with a general shift in socialist Bulgaria, which saw strong economic and political ties maintained with the Soviet Union throughout the period: Bulgarian–Soviet relationships were, in fact, stronger than those the USSR had with other East European socialist countries (Kalinova and Baeva 2002: 176–77). Soon, Bulgaria gained a reputation ‘as the most loyal of the East European satellite states’ (Katsikas 2010: 17). Strong ties between the two countries included subsidized energy at prices below market prices for Bulgaria and a secure Soviet market for Bulgarian products (Crampton 1997: 206–8; Katsikas 2010: 11–12). Mladost began to export to the Soviet Union, and a stable market relationship was maintained until the late 1980s. Economic relationships between Bulgaria and the Soviet Union supported the Bulgarian economy, which, compared to other countries in eastern Europe, remained stronger during the economic crisis of the late 1970s and 1980s (Braun 1983: 200–208). In fact, the archives on finances and production suggest that Mladost’s production remained relatively stable throughout the 1980s. During the early 1990s, the company faced economic difficulties, mainly due to the fall of the socialist regime and the loss of the Soviet market. Additionally, falling food and wine production in Bulgaria significantly affected glass production and the company’s finances. Another factor in Mladost’s difficulties was the general international shift to the use of plastic bottles instead of glass, especially for water and beverages.5 Mladost acquired loans from two banks at high rates of interest that it was increasingly unable to pay back.6 However, while both production and sales significantly decreased,7 exports began to neighbouring countries, and increasingly, since 1993, to Serbia and Greece, where the costs of transportation were low. However, competitive glass exports from Turkey resulted in a gradual but significant market loss for Mladost prior to its privatization. The crisis of the Bulgarian economy seriously hit Mladost beginning in the early 1990s, and discussions on its privatization started in 1994. This time, new notions of breaking with the socialist past were central to discussions of production and the economy. According to a 1994 financial statement by the committee of the factory’s directors, ‘The only realistic way to achieve modernization is privatization.’8 While the economic and the political regimes were changing, ‘modernization’ as a process was still a strong discourse evincing continuity with the past. It was the process of ‘modernization’ that now required privatization. Similar discourses of the continuity of modernity were also expressed by managers in Mladost during the period of my fieldwork. The new company’s decisions were

Multiple Temporalities and Shifting Ideologies  *  41

driven by the inevitability of ‘modernization’, which was now driven by the idea of the inevitability of the demands of the market. The decision to privatize the plant was taken by the Bulgarian ‘Agency for Privatization’ (agentsia za privatizatsia) in 1996, and was then sold a few months later in 1997.9 The Bulgarian economy faced hard times in 1996 and 1997, when hyperinflation resulted in banks collapsing,10 as well as both state-­owned and private companies. Employees who had been working at Mladost during 1996 and 1997 would often recall those days of economic hardship. A narrative that was often repeated told about the surplus of unsold products lying around open spaces at the factory since the warehouses were already full. After the economic crisis of 1996 to 1997, new privatization projects occurred in all sectors of the Bulgarian economy, especially in large-­scale production companies and banks.11 In this context, a large number of foreign companies in search of cheap labour and low taxes bought former state-­owned companies in Bulgaria or founded new companies in the country and moved some or all of their production there, or even their entire premises. A significant quantity of foreign investments in Bulgaria up until the first decade of 00’s came from neighbouring Greece.12 In this context, Mladost became part of ‘Arethusa’, a Greek company that owned glass production factories in Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine. Since 1997, Mladost has been selling glass packaging products to mass-­production bottling companies, mainly in Bulgaria and other Balkan countries, and to a lesser extent in other European countries. Arethusa also acquired the glass factories in Plovdiv and Novi Pazar, which gradually came under Arethusa’s general management and administration. The general and financial management of Arethusa’s production in Bulgaria was then based in Mladost, Sofia, while the other factories around the country continued to have local directors and their own local administration. This way of centralizing glass production across the country was new. As employees from the new management would often say, Mladost’s long history of ‘competition’13 with the other glass factories had to be transformed into a practice of ‘cooperation’. According to the new management, new managerial practices based on ‘teambuilding exercises’ among managerial staff from all the Bulgarian factories were intended to break both this past ‘competition’ and any ‘antagonistic’ relationships between the company’s employees from different factories. The story of Mladost contradicts conventional narratives about socialist centralization, postsocialist decentralization and the novelty of competition. Part of the hegemonic discourses in favour of the market in the 1990s was that production needed ‘competition’, a quality that was often presented as being absent from state enterprises. Nevertheless, the narratives

42  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

of the managers often told a different story. During the first years after privatization they had difficulties in organizing meetings with employees from the other glass factories in Bulgaria and in discussing production as a common task that included all the production units. During these meetings, according to the new managers, the legacy of past ‘competition’ was still there, and people from different factories were mostly attempting to show that they had higher quality production, and more of it than the other factories. Although these practices could be construed as a form of resistance to the new project of privatization and centralization, they still relied on ideas of ‘emulation’ or ‘competition’ between the companies, drawing on the socialist period to reveal ways in which these notions and concepts cut across periods in complex ways. Historical accounts of socialism in Eastern Europe have shown that forms of competition and/or emulation existed in production sites and in other domains of social life (Miklóssy and Ilic 2014). The concept of competition pointed mainly to negative ‘selfish’ capitalist practices, while the concept of emulation described ‘unselfish’ efforts in order to achieve collective tasks (ibid: 2). In describing the employees’ relations between the group’s different factories, Mladost’s Greek chief manager mentioned ‘competition’ in a negative tone: ‘Initially, they competed with each other as if they could not understand that we were all part of the same company’. Moreover, the Bulgarian financial manager, who had previous experience of work during socialism, would also use the concept of ‘competition’ in a negative tone when referring to the relations within the group of factories. Nevertheless, on other occasions, he would also proudly mention how ‘emulation’ contributed to the past production. Nevertheless, the concept of competition was not mentioned in a negative tone when it described market practices and relations with other companies. Rather, the concept of ‘competition’ was situationally associated with negative or positive meanings, according to different contexts. Managerial ideas and practices that enabled competitive relations among shop floor workers, as well as discourses on the competition of the market seemed naturalized and took positive meanings, often expressed by the same managers who spoke about their trouble with the ‘competition’ between the factories. Since privatization, Mladost has undergone an intense transformation in its production process. The geography of the imported technology changed yet again, and machinery was imported mainly from Germany. Engineers and some ‘skilled’14 workers travelled to do apprenticeships in the company’s factory in Greece and to acquire training in the new company’s production techniques, while a few others were chosen to travel to Germany for training in other companies. Arethusa decided that Mladost would focus exclusively on the production of bottles, which would be more

Multiple Temporalities and Shifting Ideologies  *  43

profitable than the drinking glasses and glass ornaments previously produced in Mladost, while domestic glass would now be produced at one of the other Bulgarian sites. This was followed by a gradual closing down of previous production units in Mladost and a fundamental restructuring of production. Parts of the production and some services previously housed within the Mladost premises have been outsourced, a decision which has had significant consequences for the workforce, as I discuss in the following chapters. There have also been important changes in the sales sector. The new owners signed contracts with alcoholic and soft drink production companies in Bulgaria and with multinational companies abroad, mainly in European countries.15 Mladost shares many similarities with industries that went through post-­Fordist capitalist transformations of the sort one may find in many companies worldwide, with characteristics such as downsizing, subcontracting and a focus on core production. Although the story presented here belongs to a particular plant in Bulgaria, it is by no means an isolated case: a large number of former state companies went through such transformations across eastern Europe. I will continue this story by finally entering Mladost’s premises, presenting these changes and generating employees’ narratives of the past and present of production.

Shifting Production Practices Inscribed on Mladost’s Space A mixed range of industrial buildings, some new, some old but still in use and some deteriorating, form the dominant view of Mladost and the surrounding industrial area in Sofia, where various levels of temporalities vie for dominance. Upon arrival each day, employees are met by this mixture of architectural witnesses, each speaking of different economic conditions, both old and new. Old public transport buses, trains and private cars full of commuters going to work, many lorries and a few expensive large cars, often with chauffeurs driving bosses or general managers around, converge daily in Sofia’s industrial zone. The entrance to Mladost’s plant is in front of a rusty bus stop named after the factory. When one enters through the main door, one faces a rich juxtaposition of buildings. Some are old and have been abandoned to decay, some have been renovated, and still others are new and well maintained. Each of them, without apparent order, lay together in a spacious industrial setting.16 The importance of the plant’s multitemporality soon became evident during my fieldwork because employees would often refer to them as a starting point for discussions of the ongoing transformations of the company’s production, managerial politics and ownership. These buildings were seen as both remainders and reminders of past politics

44  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

of production and of everyday life, and as such, as constant reminders of the continuous changes that take place. Many employees’ narratives would begin with ‘what used to happen in the old production building’. Most of the older buildings used to be production spaces; a few were used before privatization for sports and recreation. During my fieldwork some of them were used as warehouses, while others were gradually evacuated and have remained abandoned since. According to a map (see Map 5.1) that the plant’s mechanical engineer drew to describe the changes in the plant and its current uses, most of the old and seemingly abandoned buildings are labelled as ‘not in use’, accounting for approximately 40 percent of the plant’s buildings. Moreover, some rooms or floors inside the ‘in-­use’ production buildings had also been abandoned, providing space for alternative activities to take place that played an active role in the factory’s life, as I shall discuss in Chapter 5. Mladost’s material conditions offered activities and services that extended the factory’s life beyond production and put it in a broader social context. The transformation of Mladost’s buildings vividly inscribes a general postsocialist shift in work spaces from a ‘total social institution’ (Humphrey 1995) to a postsocialist production space focusing on core production. The majority of the ‘not in use’ spaces in the plant were used to accommodate the sectors that closed down during the downsizing of some production after privatization. This process included closing certain services provided previously by the factory. Thus, a library, a sports centre and a gardening sector inside the plant were closed, while restaurants, cafes, uniform sewing services and cleaning services previously managed directly by the company were divested and contracted out. There was also a reduction in the medical services that had been provided previously, though they did not stop entirely; some health checks continued to occur until the period of my field research, but according to employees, they had been significantly reduced. In addition, a building with rooms for vacations at a Black Sea resort, which had belonged to the company since the 1970s, was sold shortly after privatization. However, the company began to offer cheap vacations again in the early 2000s by renting rooms at another Black Sea resort, where a number of employees were entitled to spend their summer vacation every year, paying only a very small amount of money for the rent. According to Mr. Ivanov, the company’s head financial manager, the resort Mladost owned during socialism was one of ‘unnecessary expenses of the previous period’. During another discussion I had with the very same financial director, he proudly said that: ‘What is nowadays considered to be an organized, progressive Japanese factory with sports centres, etc., we Bulgarians managed to do it much earlier … this factory used to have such

Multiple Temporalities and Shifting Ideologies  *  45

facilities and a vacation resort by the sea’, without this time mentioning the ‘unnecessary expenses’ of such a facility in a factory or his active participation in the significant changes brought about by ‘modernization’ after privatization. Socialism was represented situationally as a failed economic model and a successful project of modernity. Given the continuity of the idea of modernization under both socialism and capitalism, discourses that pointed to the modernization that had occurred since the previous period were common among the higher managers. Privatization was presented as a necessary act to serve a new teleological, neoliberal form of modernization. It was in this context that renegotiations of the socialist past were often carried out by the management. Such renegotiations were central to the factory’s life and were widely discussed in relation to the changing workforce.

Changing Mladost’s Workforce In these buildings there were 1500 people … the yard was full of flowers, it was full of life, we were like a family … now you see how many remain here … (2008) (Anna, 58 years old, worker in Mladost since 1987) ‘There were so many unreasonable expenses during the previous period. Imagine, the factory even had to pay for gardeners! We had to stop this … why should a factory have a gardener? It’s crazy, we are here to produce glass, not to make flowers!’ (2008) (Elena, 50 years old, on the administrative staff since the late 1990s)

Discussions about the ongoing transformation of production and related changes to the workforce were at the very centre of daily life on Mladost’s shop floor and offices during 2008–2009. Mass lay-­offs were among the central themes discussed by employees and were a source of constant stress. Mladost’s workforce began to increase in the 1950s and continued to increase during the mass industrialization of the 1960s and 1970s, the period of the ‘economic leap’ (скокa) (Kalinova and Baeva 2002: 149). The number of employees remained relatively stable until the late 1980s. It then decreased rapidly in the early 1990s, followed by a more gradual reduction in numbers until 2009, the rate of job loss varying at different times. For example, from 337 employees in 1960, there were 1027 in 1990.17 During 1990–1992, there was a significant reduction to 740 members of staff, a number which remained relatively stable until privatization in 1997, while between 1995 and 2009, the number fell from 685 to approximately 311. Another gradual reduction occurred during the first period of my fieldwork in 2009, although it is hard to give exact figures because there was no available documentation of casual workers (seeTable 1.1).

46  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

Graph 1.1.  Mladost’s changing workforce. © Dimitra Kofti

There are some interesting discrepancies between the figures for the workforce indicated in the archives and the employees’ narratives. Rather than merely attempting to reconstruct a ‘real’ history by cross-­checking oral and written sources, I have made use of these interesting discrepancies in order to better understand how the neoliberal restructuring of work was experienced on the shop floor (Thompson 2000b; Steedman 2001). Many workers told me that until privatization the workforce figure was stable and that abrupt staff reductions only occurred after 1997. This information was often repeated, and people would mention that before p ­ rivatization – i­.e. ‘before the Greeks’ or ‘before Arethusa’ – there were approximately 1000, 1300 or 1500 employees (the numbers quoted varied). However, the archives indicated that staff reductions also occurred in the period 1990–1992 due to the harsh economic difficulties Mladost was facing during this period. This staff reduction was not the result of lay-­offs, but mainly through positions being scrapped after people retired. Of the 1027 employees in 1990, 740 remained in 1992 (approximately 27 percent less) and 685 were employed in 1996. During the first period of my research in 2010, the factory directly employed 231. Another 79 (this is an approximation, as this group varied in number due to constant staff turnover) were in the factory daily, but working for Litex, the main subcontracting company that provided Mladost with most of its external workforce. Another, smaller number of approximately ten to fifteen people would work in the factory for Litex on short-­term contracts, usually a few days per month, brought in in cases of need. Thus, since privatization in 1997, staff numbers had gradually been reduced

Multiple Temporalities and Shifting Ideologies  *  47

by 55 percent, from 635 to approximately 310.18 Staff reductions after 1997 were due to the lay-­offs that followed the introduction of new automated machinery, the closing down of the domestic glasswork unit, and the closing down of the previously mentioned sectors and services. In addition, positions serving the remaining core production were gradually minimized; some machines that were operated by two workers on a shift were eventually operated by one, a significant change to factory life that I discuss in Chapter 2. Mladost’s workforce went through not only significant staff reductions, but also restructuring through the practice of subcontracting labour from external companies and making use of casual workers. These significant changes and their centrality to Mladost’s life explained for me the supposed ‘exaggeration’ of employees’ testimonies in relation to the decline in the size of the workforce after privatization. Such statements were much more than inaccurate numerical information; they were statements indicating the importance of these processes. They showed that neoliberal restructuring with layoffs after privatization had a more painful effect than the immediate postsocialist downsizing that had been mainly effected by a freeze on new hiring. In addition, such discrepancies in the narratives relating to the workforce reductions were also made by employees in administrative and decision-­making positions, like Elena, quoted above. These often pointed to the ‘unnecessary’ expenses of the previous management and were mentioned in legitimating the decisions of the new management. According to the workforce lists available in the archives, Mladost employed only one gardener to take care of the factory yard, its vegetation and its open spaces, not ‘gardeners’. Elena’s s­ tatement – m ­ entioned during a discussion about staff reductions, a decision in which she was also i­ nvolved – ­stressed that there were a number of employees who were not ‘productive’ and who had to be laid off in order to cut costs. She also referred to the new ideological shift in relation to factory work and life, where services not directly related to the production belonged to the mistakes of ‘the past’, as she said, mistakes that resulted in economic decline. Both Elena’s and Anna’s quotations echoed voices often heard in the factory: Elena’s point of view more often emphasized by those occupying the higher positions in the factory, and Anna’s by workers in lower positions. However, their views did not always contradict each other but were both expressed situationally, sometimes by the same people. The second period of redundancy after 1997, conducted through active dismissals that included numerous firings and a simultaneous process of labour restructuring, brought about issues regarding who would stay and who would leave, and what criteria would be used to make such decisions.

48  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

It also raised issues about who would make the decisions concerning the reductions. The Greek owners took the overall decisions regarding staffing cuts and the restructuring of production, but the operational and other decisions at the local level involved people in the plant. The downsizing after privatization did not simply occur by reducing the numbers of the old workforce but followed a selection process which almost everyone described as difficult and often painful. A great number of the old workforce were laid off and a smaller number remained on the production line, while newcomers were gradually introduced as well. In general, workers in key positions from the sectors that did not close down remained on the production line, while many of those who were regarded as ‘unskilled’ were laid off. Nevertheless, it did not follow that the ones who remained were ‘skilled’ in the new context. For example, some female workers in the quality-­control unit formerly defined as ‘skilled’ remained in the same position but were now considered ‘unskilled’ because a new automatic machine was added to their work procedures. Conversely, ‘skilled’ male positions in the glass production Hot End were still considered ‘skilled’, despite further automation also occuring there. The restructuring produced new inequalities of gender, which had been less sharp during the previous regime. Although the neoliberal restructuring of labour affected both men and women, it increased female poverty, a gender contrast that became common in Bulgaria (Daskalova 2000; Dimova 2010) and other postsocialist countries after the collapse of socialism (Gal and Kligman 2000a, 2000b; Pine 2001; Dunn 2004). Intense staff reduction also occurred at the administrative and managerial levels, where, with the exception of some ‘old’ people in key administrative and financial positions who kept their jobs, the new management replaced them with newcomers. An important number of high managerial positions, including the general manager, were now occupied by Greek employees (four in total) who had previously worked for the company in Greece or had received training there. Therefore, the new positions of power were now held by a combination of older Bulgarian employees and newcomers, the latter consisting of both Bulgarians and Greeks. The new casual workforce doing manual jobs consisted mainly of ‘old’ workers, but also some people who had previously been employed in the administration. Previously ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ workers and administrative staff who had been laid off were gradually re-­hired by Litex to fill positions temporarily by doing ‘unskilled’ manual work. This constituted a significant restructuring of positions and dynamics among employees who previously used to work under the same contractual terms and generated important transformations of workers’ life trajectories. Moreover,

Multiple Temporalities and Shifting Ideologies  *  49

this history of the formation of the two groups of permanent and casual workers significantly shaped the dynamics between them, as discussed in the following chapters. As a result of this restructuring, some of the workforce was employed on  permanent contracts, while another group, though employed continually, had only temporary status. Workers with different labour statuses often performed almost or even exactly the same tasks, but with significantly different incomes and benefits,19 a significant change compared to the previous period when, until 1996, all employees in Mladost used to have the same contracts agreed under yearly ‘Collective Labour Agreements’. My archival research on Mladost’s payrolls indicated that until 1996 people working in the same positions would earn the same salaries, though with a few variations based on the number of years in employment. They also indicated that there were no significant differences in the salaries among the different positions in Mladost’s hierarchy. This does not seem to have been exceptional for Bulgarian industry. During socialist times in the country, although there were inequalities related to differential access to resources that were the ‘property of the people’, the incomes of different groups of employees were stable and level (Topalova and Hristov 2010: 160), although there was, in addition, a network of non-­ monetary exchange (Kremakova 2011). Similar inequalities occurred in other socialist countries based on access to goods and to other privileges such as documents; Anderson (1996) describes these inequalities as practices that led to different ‘citizenship regimes’. In Bulgaria, the inequalities of access to goods, services and connections under socialism were often transformed into inequalities of wealth after socialism, though those who were well positioned close to the party came to control the state’s resources and often privatized them to their own benefit (Konstantinov 2000). Soon after the collapse of socialism in Bulgaria, inequalities in respect of incomes and employment increased, as did poverty levels, while salaries and social welfare declined (Dimitrov 2001, 62–63). In Mladost’s case, the shift to the new unequal salaries did not occur during the early 1990s,20 but happened soon after privatization, when new managerial techniques specifying diverse salaries were introduced. Employees in the same positions found they would not now get the same salaries and that their payments would vary according to their ‘performance’; as the HR manager would say, this was an aspect of employee flexibility that aimed at encouraging employees’ motivation at work through salary differentiation and competition between them. In some cases, this difference resulted in salaries that varied by up to almost 50 percent for employees doing exactly the same job.21

50  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

Thus, although significant reductions in staff numbers occurred not only after privatization, but also during the first period after the collapse of socialism, narratives mostly focused on the second period of redundancy that followed privatization. I consider that this is partly due to the proximity of the second period to the narrators’ current experiences and also because of the fact that not all the narrators experienced the first period. However, another reason for not mentioning the first period of staff reductions while pointing to that after privatization was apparently the different ways in which this occurred and the general restructuring of the labour process that happened in parallel to it. The reduction after privatization caused power relationships to be renegotiated and produced various clashes of interest among employees, a process that was still being played out at the time of my fieldwork. Regardless of whether these narratives were ‘true’ or not, they indicated the importance these processes played in the lives of the workforce. The reduction in workforce numbers was still so central to Mladost’s daily life during the period of my fieldwork up until 2015 that it must be taken into account to make sense of the ethnographic material discussed in this book.

The Geographic Mobility and Economic Activities of Mladost’s Staff The process of industrialization in Bulgaria throughout the twentieth century significantly changed the country’s main economic activities. However, compared to E.P. Thompson’s (1967) history of a clear shift from agriculture to industry in England, in Bulgaria, workers’ parallel agricultural activities and their ties with rural places of origin have not ceased until today. Due to the increasing need for an additional workforce to serve industrial development since the 1950s and the aim of the socialist regime to transform the Bulgarian economy primarily from agriculture to industry, peasants had to move to industrial areas. This movement occurred under state regulations on seasonal mobility requiring peasants to work in factories during the winter months (Kalinova and Baeva 2002: 149) and with regulations providing for permanent obligatory labour mobilization to industrial settings (Koleva 2008: 38). The process of industrialization resulted in a gradual decrease in the peasant population from 75.30 percent in 1946 to 35.20 percent in 1985 (Topalova and Hristov 2010: 159). Official demographic figures counted the population on the basis of distinctions between workers, peasants and the intelligentsia (ibid.: 160). This kind of categorization, although strongly indicative of wider social change to an emphasis on industry, does not consider the second-­economy

Multiple Temporalities and Shifting Ideologies  *  51

work activities that were widely practiced at this time in the country (Chavdarova 2001b), such as industrial workers working on agricultural production, often in owned plots of land in villages of their origins, for self-­consumption. The transformations of the glass industry in Bulgaria in recent decades are intertwined with the life stories of the employees in multiple ways. A great number of the older workers who worked in Mladost since the 1970s or 1980s were born in rural areas or the smaller towns and migrated with their families to Sofia during the process of industrialization and urbanization in Bulgaria after the 1960s. However, most of them maintained constant ties with their places of origin and would spend time there during the weekends and on vacation. Some of them, or members of their families, used their plots of land to produce food for the home,22 the kind of production for the household carried out by many wage labourers in Mladost during socialist times. While domestic food production did not cease during socialism in Bulgaria, as an activity it has mainly been analysed as a way of maintaining kinship networks (Smollett 1989). Yuson (2009) discusses new attitudes to consumerism among Sofia’s urban consumers, where domestic food production was significantly reduced, but in contrast to the wealthier consumers in Sofia, a significant number of Mladost workers continued their own food production as a response to their insecurity of incomes. Production for home consumption by workers’ families grew during the ­1990s – ­a period of economic ­insecurity – ­and was still common practice during my fieldwork, particularly among workers, though less so among managers. Since the 1990s, Mladost’s employees who lost their jobs and could not find a new post elsewhere, in Bulgaria or abroad, returned to their places of origin, where life would be cheaper compared to Sofia and they could also produce some food for their own consumption. Most of those who remained in Mladost also maintained ties with rural areas of origin and often commuted to help take care of food production, while many family members who were also unemployed would also return to their villages and produce food for those in Sofia. Not only did the older employees demonstrate some familiarity with this kind of production for their own consumption, but also the younger ones, and in many cases, employees spent a significant proportion of their day undertaking this parallel economic activity. Another group of new employees followed an opposite route from country to town during the postsocialist period. They used to live in villages near Sofia and worked for small state factories or for agricultural production there. During the successive economic crises in the 1990s, the companies they worked for closed down, and they began searching for employment in Sofia. ‘Unskilled’ low-­paid workers, mainly

52  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

female, came from these villages, usually commuting in groups by train for approximately an hour and a half each way. Another new kind of mobility to Sofia was that of the Greek managerial staff, who constituted a very small but significant and rather powerful minority among the employees. They would often commute to their places of origin in Greece at weekends or when on vacation. Working for Greek companies that moved to Bulgaria first in the early 1990s and then mainly after the economic reforms of 1997, Greek employees were given key managerial positions, often being transferred from the companies’ Greek counterparts. Quick career promotion and the promise of a higher position in Sofia, as well as a better position if and when they returned to Greece, led many to take part in this kind of ‘elite’ migration to the neighbouring country. Nevertheless, their initial hopes of returning to Greece usually changed after a few years in Sofia; as temporary stays gradually became more permanent, the lack of opportunities in the Greek economy caused many to change their plans of moving back home again (Angelidou and Kofti 2013). Although Mladost is situated in an urban industrial setting, it would be misleading to view its Bulgarian employees as merely urban wage-­labourers. Mobility between countryside and city was a very common practice for most of them, workers and administrative-­managerial staff alike. Wage labour within the factory was complemented by other economic activities that were equally important to their households. Some of the more low-­ paid workers would use their networks inside the factory to sell some of their families’ domestic products, such as honey, or to exchange home products, such as sauces and fresh vegetables, as gifts among themselves. The secondary economic activities of workers also included freelance sales of products such as cosmetics and services such as repairing dresses and hairdressing. Thus, the factory was not only the site of their wage labour, but also of additional market activities performed during breaks or just before and after the shift. Some workers had additional incomes from second jobs, such as driving a taxi after their shifts or working as freelance electricians, plumbers or at similar handyman jobs. The boundaries between urban and rural experiences, as well as between wage labour and entrepreneurial activity, were porous. Another important feature of Mladost’s staff is relatedness among employees. One may find up to three g­ enerations – a­ nd in rare cases, even ­four – ­of people from the same family who have worked there since the 1950s. Some of them met their partners at Mladost, and some of their children also worked there later. However, it is not only older workers who had such kinship ties inside the factory. Newer employees, such as those who commuted from rural areas, were often related to each other

Multiple Temporalities and Shifting Ideologies  *  53

as married couples, brothers and sisters or close friends, and would pass on information about new positions and helped their relatives and friends to get employed. Most often, these individuals worked in different positions and had different contracts and employment statuses. Moreover, the members of one family would also be pursuing some sort of secondary economic activity either inside or outside the factory. In such cases, a multiplicity of labour statuses, secondary economic activities and gender roles in the family were at work at the factory, which was not only space of wage labour, but also of workers’, family and household reproduction. The dynamics of kinship in Mladost not only involved the household, but also the relationships among groups of employees and the politics of production, as I discuss in Chapter 2. Changes in housing have also affected employees’ relations of kinship and economic activities in postsocialist Bulgaria. In line with the politics of housing in socialist Bulgaria, after the 1960s workers, would be given apartments for relatively low prices, and factories often built apartment blocks for their workers, who would pay for them in easy instalments. The arrangement was rife with tensions concerning apartment allocation priorities, as well as what type and size the apartment would be. The

Figure 1.2.  Nelly’s living room decorated with objects from the ‘old production’, where her father also worked. © Dimitra Kofti

54  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

number of family members played a key role in this decision, as did the position at the factory and the ‘connections’ (vrazki) an employee had to the Party; a reason, as many life stories suggest, why some families got a place much earlier than others. Nevertheless, in one way or another, those workers in Mladost who worked there or elsewhere during socialism managed to own an apartment or house in Sofia. Mladost built a block of approximately fifty apartments in the late 1970s in a working-­ class neighbourhood very close to the factory. During the period of my fieldwork, many of the flats had been sold or were being rented out by the original owners, some of whom had been laid-­off and had returned to their villages of origin, although some of the ‘old’ workers in Mladost were still living there. Workers’ extended families lived in apartments that were initially made to accommodate nuclear families during the period of socialist modernization, as working-­class Bulgarian families returned to more extended kinship households, following a pattern common in the context of privatization and the decline of the welfare state in countries across the ex-­ socialist world and beyond.23 During the period of my fieldwork, it was very common for three generations to live in the same dwelling, which came as a result of the housing market becoming expensive after the 1990s and state subsidies to housing being cut. Older employees now lived with their children, and often with their children-­in-­law and their grandchildren; similarly, younger employees often lived with their parents or their in-­laws, as well as their children, in the same apartment or house. For example, a two-­bedroom apartment could be used for grandparents, who would often live in the living room on a sofa bed, and two of their children, often with their spouses and children, allocated one of the bedrooms each. This was a common housing arrangement for employees at all levels of production, including non-­manual jobs. The lack of space was more often an issue for those who were employed in the lowest positions, but in general, it cut across the factory’s hierarchy. As a result, the money earned from one’s salary was often used to contribute to the expenses of the extended family’s household, a condition that not only affected relations of kinship but also relations at work, as discussed in Chapter 3. Up to now, I have attempted to give a general overview of the socio-­ historical context of Mladost’s changes to ownership, production and shifting ideologies of labour, with an emphasis on the processual character of its staff’s employment statuses, relatedness, geographical mobilities and economic activities. I have placed the emphasis on those aspects that were important to employees’ lives as they were elicited from my ethnographic data. In the final part of this chapter, I will discuss the ways in which these transformations shaped narratives of the ‘past’ and employees’ groups into

Multiple Temporalities and Shifting Ideologies  *  55

‘old’ and ‘new’, an important distinction of people with strong indications about relations of power within the company.

‘Edno Vreme’: Comparing the ‘Past’ with the ‘Present’ As the successive transformations since 1989 in postsocialist Bulgaria suggest, although privatization started in the early 1990s, the vast majority of large-­scale companies were privatized in the late 1990s, following the economic crisis of 1997. Employees in Mladost, especially those over fifty, as in many other large companies in Bulgaria, had experienced work in a socialist factory, followed by work in a state company in the context of the newly formed capitalist economy, and later by work in a private company. The experience of successive production regimes led to daily comparisons at work, with a particular focus on changes to the production process and on relationships of power; Bulgarian employees constantly compared the present with various periods of ‘the past’, which often transcended the boundaries between the socialist and postsocialist periods. Comparisons between diverse regimes of production are often found in ethnographies of work settings, where intense transformations of production and ownership are at play. For example, Alexander’s (Alexander 2002) ethnography of privatization in Turkey shows that workers in the sugar industry often compare the conditions of production with those of the period before privatization. I suggest here that the successive but distinct political and economic reforms in postsocialist Bulgaria generated complex views of continuity and change in which ‘the past’ was very present and thus significantly shaped life on the shop floor, while a comparison between a number of different periods was present in a wide spectrum of daily life. Repeated views of what was ‘old’ and what was ‘new’ in the factory were central to daily conversation in Mladost. The distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ personnel, machinery, products and managerial techniques was important enough for almost everyone in the factory to mention and to take for granted while explaining something related to the production, narrating something that happened at the shop floor, during interviews, or while chatting with colleagues or with their family members and friends. Drawing various ‘before’ and ‘after’ lines in relation to the ‘old’ and ‘new’ conditions resulted in diverse narratives and temporalities. These were often crystallized in the frequent repetition of the common Bulgarian phrase ‘edno vreme’, which means ‘once in the past’ or ‘there was a time’, and indicating that the speaker is making reference to a past period. In daily conversation, the phrase implies a comparison with another period, usually today. It is almost true to say that it cannot survive without a

56  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

subsequent or implied comparison. For example, female workers often said ‘edno vreme we used to sing altogether at work’. Furthermore, the phrase ‘but now …’ (a sega) would follow, and would often simply be left hanging. The adversative ‘but’ was enough to imply a distinction with the present. I view and make use of these statements primarily as descriptions of the present, rather than of the past conditions of work. Often people in Bulgaria used ‘edno vreme’ to refer to the period of socialism, comparing it to ‘nowadays’. However, it is not restricted to this comparison alone but can refer to any other period according to the context. It was not always clear which period was being referred to in every case. This often changed according to the subject being mentioned and to the narrator’s work experience and position in the factory; often the ‘edno vreme’ would be repeated, but with a reference to different temporalities expressed by the same narrator. However, inside the factory, equally frequent distinctions were made, such as between socialism and what came afterwards, or between before and after the period of privatization. ‘Old’ production workers, as well as those who started working there after privatization, often referred to this temporal division as ‘when the Greeks bought us’ (kogato ni kupiha Gartshite). Employees in higher positions, however, would not say ‘before Greeks bought us’ but ‘after privatization’ or, more often, ‘during the previous management.’24 Nevertheless, as I realized from employees’ narratives, many people referred to the period three to four years after privatization, when new machinery was introduced and the rate of redundancy increased. Thus, this distinction did not exactly coincide with ownership changes, but rather with transformations in the production process. In other cases, the ‘before’ and ‘after’ period referred to the regime’s changes in the early 1990s, e.g. ‘before/after (this) democracy’ (predi tazi dimokratsia). ‘Edno vreme’ would take on more complex meanings, according to the context in which it was used. It required great effort to understand the temporal context of reference, and only after asking several questions would I get a response. An initial response would often be a date, rather than naming a period, especially when people would speak about the first period of privatization. Some would give 1997 as an answer, others ‘around 2000’, a time when the company’s politics significantly changed. In many cases, employees would associate these dates with personal experiences they had had and avoid referring to these larger processes. For example, a phrase I heard some workers say a few times was: ‘Edno vreme I was calmer …’.Then, I would have to ask when they started being less calm, and the period of intense redundancy 1997–2000 would be a common response. Soon, I realized that many people, especially from the less privileged groups, would indicate the 1997–2000 period obliquely by referring

Multiple Temporalities and Shifting Ideologies  *  57

to changes and difficulties in their personal lives, such as financial hardship and the psychological pressure they felt due to the increasing poverty. These changes were seen as responses to the general erosion of their life conditions, prospects and relationships. People seemed to become more circumspect when the discussion would come around to such periodizations, especially when they were speaking before large groups of people. The expressions ‘after privatization’, ‘during the previous management’, ‘during communism/after democracy’ and ‘when Greeks bought us’ would come afterwards, usually when people would be more comfortable in private conversation or when they finally grasped that I did not understand the various temporal frames that their use of ‘edno vreme’ might suggest. Interestingly, I had the chance to talk with workers who had resigned during my stay in the factory or had been laid off. They would talk openly about such distinctions without having to be careful any longer, since they were no longer part of the company. This indicated that people preferred to talk about personal experiences that would imply several broader comments on larger transformations, though transformations they would avoid naming. As discussed in the final chapter, such silences were broken during the period of the new ‘global economic crisis’ in late 2008 and early 2009. Another aspect of the silences related to comparisons introduced by the phrase ‘edno vreme’ was that an explicit second part of the comparison was often lacking. Throughout the ethnography in the following chapters, I discuss several such elliptical comparisons in relation to production and the daily life of the factory. As an example, I will return to the memory of the flowers and the frequent comments about gardening on the factory’s premises. One morning, while having coffee in the factory yard, Sasho, a 42-­year-­old worker, told me ‘edno vreme there were flowers here, but now … [silence]’, that is, not explicitly defining the period or why there were no flowers the anymore, nor who used to take care of them, nor whether it was an unnecessary expense and how the decision was taken to stop gardening, etc. His tone was both nostalgic and ironical; I could not even understand whether he was being critical of the fact that there were such costs like gardening at a factory or whether he missed the flowers. It was almost both, or even more. Often people would avoid adding more information to such statements about the past, and it required an effort and time to understand what such silences could hide. On this occasion, Sasho just turned his head towards the administration building and told me, ‘ask there …’. In such cases, silence was almost a statement of powerlessness and of carefully avoiding directly expressing political views regarding the present management. Rather than reconstructing images of the past, these comparisons, silences, implications and direct statements about ‘now’ revealed much about the workers’ present experiences of production and management.

58  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

‘Old’ and ‘New’ Employees ‘Old’ and ‘new’ employees were characterizations often used by people in describing other employees or in some cases themselves. These informal, fluid categories are crucial to understanding further formal and informal divisions among employees, such as regular and casual, manual and non-­ manual, ‘communist’ and ‘non-­communist’, all of which will be discussed in the following chapters. The use of ‘old’ and ‘new’, based on transformations to Mladost’s production and management, included a variety of meanings. The ‘oldness’ and ‘newness’ were mainly associated with years of experience working in the factory and, more importantly, with relationships with the ‘old’ or ‘new’ management and mode of production. Therefore, these groupings were not necessarily connected to the worker’s age, and they could be understood in daily practices and personal stories. Furthermore, in drawing these categories, I pay attention to those who used these definitions in describing others. The ‘old’ employees can be viewed as falling into two rough groups. The first includes those who used to be in key positions before privatization and who gained or kept their power after privatization by using their knowledge

Figure 1.3.  Nikolay, an ‘old’ worker, making an ashtray out of glass material for a bottle. © Dimitra Kofti

Multiple Temporalities and Shifting Ideologies  *  59

of the previous system. Workers would often describe these people in managerial positions as ‘old’, often implying or directly referring to relationships involving the obscure acquisition and continuation of power. The second group of ‘old’ employees includes those who either had lower paid jobs than they had before, or who remained in the same low positions as before privatization. There were two strong uses of this ‘old’ category in the company. Workers often referred to their own ‘old’ status with a pride in their long history in the plant and their specialization in glass-­ making. People in higher managerial positions referred to the ‘old’ workers in two seemingly contradictory ways. Sometimes managers presented their ‘oldness’ as a sign of nostalgia for the previous management, combined with an inability to get used to new managerial practices. Nevertheless, at other times, ‘old’ workers were also viewed by the managers, and by other workers, as those who could transfer their knowledge and long-­term experience of glass-­making to others. The ‘new’ employees can be divided into three rough groups. One group consisted of those newcomers who had managerial positions and therefore had power from the outset of their employment. Workers would often refer to them with suspicion, asking how they had acquired this new power. Employees in high managerial positions, including those who belonged to the ‘new’ ones, would mention the ‘newness’ of the newcomers mainly by emphasizing the changes to managerial practices after privatization. The second group of ‘new’ workers consisted of those who occupied low-­ paid, heavy, ‘unskilled’ jobs after privatization, many of whom had started working for a short period, although they often ended up working there for years. These peoples’ ‘newness’ was not mentioned so often, although sometimes, in daily conversations among workers, it was referred to as a sign of powerlessness. Finally, the third group of ‘new’ workers consisted of those who were usually young and who had had various positions on the production line, where they did the same work as older and more experienced workers, but were paid more than their older colleagues, in spite of not necessarily having any more qualifications.25 These groups were not always distinct. I have attempted to document who defined them as such in each case and how these definitions were important in daily socialising among employees. ‘Old’ and ‘new’ were used by employees to indicate relations of power. There was no unilinear connection between the categories; ‘new’ did not necessarily equate to power, nor ‘old’ to powerlessness, nor vice versa. Rather, it was the type of ‘oldness’ and the type of ‘newness’ that influenced such power relations. In the following section, I introduce some ethnographic examples to illustrate the importance of these temporal categories.

60  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

Maintaining a Status as ‘Old’ Rumi, a cleaning lady at the factory, often spent time during her lunch break in the administration building. I would bump into her many times while she was going from the production building where she worked, and she would repeat proudly, albeit in a conspiratorial tone, that she would spend her time at the ‘White House’, a blue-­grey building situated at the entrance to the factory from where one has a view of the production buildings. The description of the administrative building as the ‘White House’ was also used during socialist times in Mladost, and during my research, workers still associated it with negative connotations related to the power of those who were employed there and to their distance from workers’ desires and needs. Managers knew that workers called the building the ‘White House’, but they never used this name themselves. The same sarcastic expression was common in various enterprises in Bulgaria during the period of socialism and continued to be used in postsocialist enterprises (Petrov 2009). Whenever a worker entered this building, many fellow workers suspected that this person either had some connections to power or was in trouble. However, this was not the case for Rumi or for some other people classed as ‘old’ who were just visiting their friends. Rumi worked in the administration from the 1970s until privatization in the late 1990s. She worked in the telephone exchange, a position that no longer exists now that internal and external communication is achieved through mobile phones and emails. During the lay-­offs in the early 2000s, she lost her job and was unemployed for two years. She would often say that when the new technology arrived, she could see that her position had no meaning any more. While she was unemployed, she searched for a job in Sofia but did not manage to find one, and so in 2003, already in her late fifties, she returned to the factory on a casual contract as a Litex worker. Rumi, like other women employed by Litex, is one of the returnees at Mladost who could not easily apply her skills and use her experience elsewhere. However, Rumi, who had ‘connections’ (vrazki), as she would say, to the administration, having worked there for almost thirty years, managed to get on the waiting list for the cleaning position. Although she emphasized her experience of downward mobility, she also felt ‘privileged’ compared to other laid-­off employees because she had managed to find a job again in the same factory. During the lunch break, she spent half her time in the changing room with her ‘new’ colleagues, the other cleaning ladies, and half of it with her friends in the administration. The first half hour spent with the other cleaning personnel was an informal extension of the formal thirty-­minute

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break they are allowed, during which they would secretly rest altogether in the changing room, where their male boss could not enter. Whenever we met during her official break, she wanted to make it clear to me that she was going to spend her ‘actual’, official break time, with her ‘actual’ colleagues at the administration, and not with the cleaning staff. When I first visited her in her one-­bedroom apartment, she showed me every room and explained how she and her husband had bought most of the furniture and equipment. Finally, she told me: ‘This is my life, this is my home … I made it by working thirty years in the administration … I come back here after work, and I am myself again, I leave the cleaning job behind the factory door every day I leave … please don’t tell my new colleagues how my house is; they are not my colleagues, I don’t want you to think they are … please don’t tell my children how difficult my job is now …’. She used to sleep in the kitchen in the flat, as her son lived with his wife and two children in the bedroom, and her daughter, who lived some kilometres away from Sofia, often slept over with her children in the living room. Rumi therefore lived in parallel ‘old’ and ‘new’ temporalities. During working hours, she worked with her ‘new’ colleagues, whom she did not fully recognize as colleagues, although she spent her unofficial break with them, during which time they shared daily news and had various discussions. Rather, her ‘actual’ colleagues were those she met during the official break, and her ‘actual’ life was what she lived in her ­flat – ­the life she made with her work in the administration. She kept this ‘old’ status in order to prove to herself, her family and people at the factory that she did not merely belong to the position she was working in the present. In this context, being ‘new’ was something she wanted to avoid, since her old status was the one that seemed to give her a better position. Besides Rumi, who worked in the administration a long time ago, Nadia, the former factory tailoress who was now employed on a contract as a cleaning personnel, mentioned in the introductory chapter, had access to a room, which was ‘her own’ room, where she kept one of the old sewing machines, various other personal things and plants she grew. Nadia was fixing used uniforms on Saturdays and, informally, some clothes for people in the administration. During the official half of her break as a cleaning personnel, Nadia would occasionally visit colleagues at other departments but most often went to ‘her own’ room, where she had lunch while sewing clothes for some extra money. The other four cleaning ladies were all Roma. One of them, Yiana, was as old as Nadia and Rumi and has worked as a cleaner in Mladost since the early 1980s. She spent her break with the other three young cleaning ladies and with the other Roma workers employed in various precarious jobs in the factory, most of them through subcontracting companies. Nadia would

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also describe her position as ‘new’ in terms of her employment status, since she used to have a permanent contract, whereas now she was employed by an external agency. She did not draw distinctions between old and new statuses and relationships so often, perhaps because, unlike the other two women, her position did not dramatically change: she continued to be on the lowest rung of the hierarchy. Rumi’s and Nadia’s practice of dividing their lunch breaks into two is revealing about the ‘old’ and ‘new’ relationships, differences that are also apparent in other sectors of the factory. Rumi and Nadia would draw on their previous status every day. Nadia did not invite other people into her own room, she took a rest by ­herself – I­ never saw one of her current colleagues in there. Rumi, wearing her dirty uniform, went to the administration building for half an hour, spending her time in one of the ‘respectful’ spaces, the financial division, where her best friend still works as an accountant. The other ladies hung out in the public space of the factory yard, outside the restaurant where people have lunch and where I joined them sometimes during their breaks. Their small wages did not allow them to spend money in the factory’s restaurant, even though it was quite cheap, something that applied to other low-­paid employees as well. However, by using their previous ‘connections’, Rumi and Nadia avoided the uncomfortable situation of having to stand outside the restaurant during their break, a situation brought about because their current jobs did not allow them any other use of communal space. There were some small rest rooms for workers breaks close to the production line, but they were occupied by the regular workers. For Rumi and Nadia, maintaining their ‘old’ status seemed to be a way to cope with their new jobs and social positions. Those employees who experienced downward mobility and deskilling tended to evince their ‘oldness’. Nevertheless, those who kept relatively high positions or acquired better ones tended to avoid evincing their ‘oldness’, as I shall demonstrate by describing another group of daily lunch companions in the next example of ‘old’ and ‘new’ employees working and socializing together. The lunch break was different for Maria, Petar, Yanka and Eli. The four of them took their break together every workday, spending time in the factory’s restaurant eating and having coffee. Eli, 58 years old, is a shift manager in quality control, having been employed in the company since 1974, and Maria, her 44-­year-­old colleague, has been employed since 1988. Yanka, their boss, joined the factory at the age of 28, in 2000, becoming the boss of the Cold End sector, where she had to manage a large group of people. She replaced another woman who had worked in the same job for more than twenty years. When she joined the firm, Yanka had a degree in chemistry and some work experience, but more importantly, she was young

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and ‘new’. The new management chose to bring people like Yanka into higher positions, believing that it would make it easier for them to change managerial practices and to take decisions about redundancies.26 However, she had to encounter many difficulties in managing much older workers, who would often resist any kind of change, especially when introduced by a younger woman. She remained in this position for five years until, as I was often told by those involved, workers signed a complaint about her being very ‘unfair and strict’. After some time, she was replaced by Petar, and then she became the manager of a smaller quality-­control section, working in close cooperation with Maria and Eli. Petar, the other lunch companion, is also ‘new’ and young. In his early thirties, he joined the factory in the same period as Yanka, working as an engineer in the mechanical sector. He soon became the manager at the ‘hot end’ of the production and later on at the ‘cold end’. He had a background in the army, where he had been an aeroplane engineer, and had to leave his previous job when his unit was closed down. His military experience was seen as an advantage by the management, and he was quickly given a managerial position. Many workers often commented on this group of four people. In workers’ conversations, Petar and Yanka were seen as some of the ‘new’ people who cooperate with the management in order to develop their careers and who did not care about the workers. Often people would see them as cooperating with ‘the foreigners’, that is, with the Greek owners, for the sake of their own careers, and not with their ‘own people’ – the Bulgarians. Petar was viewed as someone who had had power from before; namely, as a ‘communist’, since he had been in the army. Consequently, workers would often say that it was his ‘communist’ background that helped him to retain power in his new job as well. Interestingly, although he went to the army school after 1990, he was still described as ‘communist’ by the workers. For Yanka, things were more convoluted. She did not have any kind of previous work experience, nor any ties of kinship with other powerful people in the company. Nevertheless, this did not prevent workers finding supposed reasons for her being a manager. There were rumours of a conspiracy about her cooperating with people at the ‘White House’, having love affairs and so on. A lot of gossip was also spread about the two other women, Maria and Eli, regarding their social relationships with the ‘new’ bosses. They were among the few ‘old’ personnel that had kept their positions, did not experience downwards mobility and survived the redundancy, whereas most of their colleagues had to leave. They did not demonstrate their ‘oldness’, as they both seemed aware that this was a topic of gossip and accusation. I spent lunch breaks with this team and also hung out with them on many other daily occasions. When they were all together, they would never

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refer to these distinctions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ with respect to themselves, nor to other people, and they would be very careful not to make any comments about the management. Their discussions would be about the practicalities of production and general conversation, jokes or other trivial chit-­chat. In private conversation and during interviews, however, they all spoke about these divisions and would give a sort of ‘response’ to all these rumours, showing that they were aware of them. Petar and Yanka would both stress the fact that they have worked hard to get these positions and maintain them, and did not use any connections or other privileges to do so. Eli and Maria would both accentuate the fact that they had also worked hard in relation to their previous colleagues and that this was the reason they had kept their positions.27 However, Eli said that she had gone through a period of great stress during the staff reductions. Having seen many changes during the last 34 years, for her the best practice was silence. She also used to have a higher position at the factory, being responsible for her unit in domestic glass production before it closed down. Her ‘new’ position, as she would also define it, was not so privileged, but it was very good compared to what ultimately happened to her previous colleagues. Being aware of rumours, though, she did not emphasize her previous status, as Rumi the cleaning lady would do. What both ‘old’ and ‘new’ have in common is that both categories had connotations of both power and powerlessness and, according to a job’s relationship with or attributed to power, they were either demonstrated or silenced through both discourses and practices. To sum up, being ‘old’ could be used to demonstrate being subject to deskilling and status degradation, and therefore it was performed by ‘old’ employees with pride in their past status. However, being ‘old’ also meant maintenance of power and was used to accuse the power-­holder of acquiring power in suspicious circumstances based on previous relations of power. Conversely, being ‘new’ could mean being insecure and powerless, but it could also mean being a power-­holder who most probably had connections in acquiring this power. The different meaning of the same description would be understood from the context and the tone used to express it. All these definitions of old and new would therefore change according to the person expressing them and the context. Is Eli ‘old’ or ‘new’, given that she has worked for the factory for so many years and also works close and socializes with ‘new’ people in a ‘new’ position? Is Petar ‘new’, since he started working at the factory after privatization? Then why do people see him as drawing power from his former power as an ‘old’ ‘communist’? Is Rumi ‘old’ for attempting to show continuity with her ‘old’ status, or ‘new’ because of her ‘new’ position with ‘new’ colleagues? No matter whether they fall into these categories or not, people do use them to describe others

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or themselves, and daily practices are influenced by renegotiations of the various meanings of old and new. People from almost all levels in the factory hierarchy view their positioning and other people’s positioning and practices in terms of these concepts and, according to the context, attempt to make them obvious or ‘hide’ them. These distinctions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ reflect the strong politicization of time and temporality in postsocialist Bulgaria. These categories show how structural power relations were couched in temporal terms. Kaneff (2004) has argued that time and the past were politicized during socialism in Bulgaria, and she showed how the state emphasized a strong revaluation of the past and underlined a socialist version of history. The history of Mladost suggests that there is continuity in the politicization of time. Successive transformations in Mladost brought about new categories of old and new. Here, time becomes the concept through which experiences of the past, as well as capitalism and privatization, are being criticized. Furthermore, this reconfiguration of temporal categories points to the non-­linearity of modernity. Employees in Mladost underline the multitemporality of time, where ‘old’ and ‘new’ are situational and dynamic concepts that bear strong political meanings.

Conclusion Mladost’s broader historical context demonstrates the relevance of the postsocialist experience in the plant, over three decades after the collapse of socialism. Transformations of the larger ideological shifts and production practices took place while the factory was being transformed from a socialist work site into a postsocialist state enterprise, and finally, into a component of a larger multinational company. While the factory’s hegemonic discourses shifted from the importance of nationalisation to the importance of privatization, according to those actively involved in the reforms, the persistence of ‘modernization’ as a form of continuity between the two often unified the two teleologies. However, significant changes in Mladost caused also important ruptures with the past. Multiple temporalities were made materially present through the empty factory spaces and were daily experienced through multiple categories of old/new production practices and old/new employees’ categories. I have paid particular attention to the changes to the workforce as the most important issue that occupied workers’ daily conversations. Reductions in staff numbers, which were presented as necessary to achieve more efficient management and earn greater profit, were achieved by passive methods during the first postsocialist years and by active ones a

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few years after privatization. The second period of constriction has been accompanied by a neoliberal restructuring that has brought dramatic changes to the lives of the workers through redefinitions of skill and a strong diversification of employment statuses and payments. Employees’ narratives describe epochal changes that have been shaped by larger historical shifts, as well as changes inside the plant. The larger shifts were from the socialist to postsocialist periods (before/after ‘democracy’ or before/after ‘this democracy’) and in the before/after of privatization, as well as the successive ‘crises’ in Bulgaria since the 1980s. ‘Crisis’ appeared as continuity and was not a new word on the shop floor in 2008. However, the most important epochal change took place after privatization, when the company began an ongoing restructuring process during my fieldwork. All these shifts generated silences, great suspicions about how power was acquired by some, daily comparisons between before and after, and also a distrust of dependence on wage earning which perpetuated alternative economic practices. More importantly, the new epochal changes brought new categories of ‘old’ and ‘new’ people into existence. Although the boundaries between them are often blurred, the categories of old or new suggest that employees in Mladost make sense of the work relations in terms of transformation in progress and that people do deal with the categories of old and new in their daily performances of various temporalities, as well as they take them into account in understanding power relations and in renegotiating their positionings in these processes. There are at least two ‘olds’ that are important in Mladost’s daily life: the ‘old’ that is continued in the present in the form of a continuation of power, and the ‘old’ that has gone, related to past labour relations and employment statuses. Rather than being mere nostalgia, these were complex evaluations of processes of continuities and discontinuities. Power relations in both the socialist and postsocialist periods are viewed, understood and criticized in temporal terms. Hence, there is a ‘good’ old and new that is worth mentioning, and a ‘bad’ old and new filled with suspicion. Employees experienced these variations in the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ in relation to the complex and overlapping socialist and postsocialist periods. Although production underwent significant restructuring, the experience of socialism and the years after the regime’s fall continued to shape relationships on the shop floor up until my last period of fieldwork in 2015. The employees’ participation in capitalist work was filtered through the experience of these ongoing and earlier transformations. It is for this reason that I view this ethnography as one of work relations in the context of global capitalism and as postsocialist and am attempting to understand the neoliberal transformations that are taking place in this dynamic context. In the next chapter,

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I will focus on Mladost’s present and the relationships that develop around the conveyor belt.

Notes  1. I use ‘employees’ to refer to the whole body of the workforce. Alternatively, ‘workforce’ and ‘staff’ are also used when I refer to employees from all levels of production and administration. ‘Workers’ refers to those who occupied manual positions, ‘managers’ and ‘administrative staff’ to those who occupied managerial and white-­collar positions respectively.  2. ‘Mladost’ is a pseudonym. However, the original name of the factory was also commonly used during the socialist times.   3. ‘Fifty years of Mladost’ (1982) (50 godini Mladost) was written by an anonymous historian. According to the narratives of older workers, it was written by a historian from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAN) who spent a few months in the factory collecting archival material and oral testimonies. This small book was then distributed to all its employees. Anonymously written stories of companies and factories were common practice in the 1980s. Sometimes historians were indeed employed by the companies to do research and to write this kind of literature. I owe this information to the historian Varban Todorov.   4. Author’s translation.   5. ‘Mladost Archive’, in State Archives, Sofia.  6. Ibid.   7. For example, in 1993, three out of the four furnaces in the factory were running, producing 63 percent of the plant’s capacity in bottles and 30 percent of its capacity in domestic glass (‘Mladost Archive’ in State Archives, Sofia).   8. ‘Mladost Archive’ in State Archives, Sofia.   9. Mladost was offered for sale by the ‘Agency of Privatization’ at the end of 1996 at the same time as other enterprises representing 20 percent of the state assets (Dimitrov, 2001: 84). 10. Hyperinflation which reached 311 percent in 1996, and the bankruptcy of one third of Bulgarian banks resulted in a large economic crisis during 1996–1997 (Dimitrov, 2001: 85). 11. On successive privatization projects in Bulgaria during the 1990s, see Dimitrov (2001: Ch. 3). 12. According to the 2009 report on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) by the Central National Bulgarian Bank, Greek investments in Bulgaria come in third, following Austria and Holland. They are primarily in banking, confection, consulting, import-­export, construction, real estate and communications (2009). 13. The new managers, both Bulgarian and Greek, described this as competition: ‘конкуренция’ (konkurentsiya) in Bulgarian and ‘ανταγωνισμός’ (antagonismos) in Greek. The word that was mostly used during socialist times to describe the relations between the different factories was emulation, or ‘съревнование’ in Bulgarian.

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14. The distinction between skilled and unskilled is historically constructed and has changed over time in different contexts (P. Thompson 1988). Linhard’s (1985) research discusses how migrant workers in the Citroen factory were classified as ‘unskilled’ to allow them to do the more precarious jobs. Here, I have placed ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ in quotation marks because this categorization was also undergoing transformation. While some sectors closed down and new automated machinery arrived, some skilled workers were either made redundant or re-­ employed in positions that were considered unskilled. Others, like those who went for the training, were considered skilled and continued to have skilled positions in the new situation. I will discuss these new categories of skilled/unskilled further in the next chapter. 15. Approximately a million bottles a day were produced in the factory in Sofia during the period of my fieldwork. 16. According to information I was kindly provided by Mladost’s engineer, in 2009, the plant had 40.146 m2 of industrial space, 4056 m2 of storage space and 2871 m2 of administrative space, both abandoned and used. 17. ‘Mladost Archive’ in State Archives, Sofia. 18. Combining both the 231 permanent workers who were employed by Mladost and the approximately 79 who worked there on a temporary basis gives a total of 310 workers. 19. In the next chapter, I discuss in detail how this dispersed workforce worked together across the conveyor belt. 20. ‘Mladost Archive’ in State Archives, Sofia. 21. For example, craftsmen from a single unit in 2007 were getting from 1200 to 650 leva per month for similar positions and duties. In Chapter 4, I discuss how these diverse payments affected production and how ‘flexibility’ included relations of inequality, antagonism and coercion on the shop floor. 22. Dunn argues for Poland that this was a form of domestic resistance during socialism (Dunn 2004: 142). 23. Similar trajectories of family practices are discussed by Pine (2001) for Poland, Stacey (1998) for the US and Mollona (2009b) for the UK. 24. The contexts implied in these two phrases and the positioning of the people who use them will be analysed further in the ethnography. There may be various levels of analysis regarding the sense of belonging, the level of involvement people believed they had in these processes, the way they self-­represent passivity or activity relation to in changes and the performance of nationalistic ideas performed, to name but a few. 25. According to management, this was done on purpose to attract young people to the production line and create the next generation of ‘skilled’ workers. 26. This practice was fairly widespread in Bulgaria during the privatization of big companies in the late 1990s. The general manager of Mladost, like the general managers of other foreign companies, often replaced people in key positions with young graduates in order to impose new managerial practices and to limit the potential for resistance (Angelidou and Kofti 2013). 27. There was an idea much repeated by the management that those employees who

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were still in the factory were those who ‘deserved it’ because of their ‘hard work’. This was also what people from HR would repeat; namely, that most workers were not used to working and were not ‘flexible’ in terms of changing positions, etc. Those workers who could get used to the new job practices and who would be ‘flexible’ were described as those who had ‘made it’. I explore this topic further in Chapter 4.

2

Inequalities in Close ° Global Proximity

Workers’ Divisions, ‘The Market’, Managers and Clients around the Conveyor Belt Working in a car plant involves coming to terms with the assembly line. ‘The line never stops’, you are told. Why not? ‘... don’t ask. It never stops’. —Huw Beynon, Working for Ford

Hundreds of bottles arrive along the high-­ speed conveyor belt every minute, twenty-­four hours a day, seven days a week, in order to be packed by workers at Mladost’s Cold End. This packing station, which was mostly filled by women, involved work that was wholly repetitive and manual and was considered by both workers and managers as one of the less prestigious jobs in Mladost. The bottles arrived from up the line as the product manufactured at the Hot End, where only men worked. During the shift, workers constantly had to cope with the bottles moving on the high-­speed conveyor. There was not enough time for unnecessary body movements while working at the packing station in this high-­speed, noisy environment. The constant preoccupation during the shift had to be almost exclusively keeping up with the speed of the line in front of them. Despite the identical moves required on the four identical conveyor belts, workers in the packing station were distinguished between those who ‘danced’ with the machine and those who ‘chased after’ it. In exploring the various meanings and understandings of labour related to the experience of the machines as dance companions and to the subsequent categories of dancers, the ethnography in this chapter looks at divisions of work in Mladost and the ways in which they are intertwined with the everyday perceptions, experiences and practices of labour. The entanglement of Fordist production practices with post-­Fordist managerial techniques and divisions added the pressure from the rapidly moving line. Although workers had to synchronize their bodies with the machines and with each other on a Fordist-­type non-­stop conveyor belt, not all of them had the same employment status, even those occupying

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the same point on the four identical production lines. On International Women’s Day, the shop floor manager would arrive at the Cold End carrying presents for the female workers. A box with glasses produced at the Arethusa Group factory in Romania would be given to three out of every four women at every identical position across the four production lines at the Cold End. The fourth one would not be given a present by the company since she was an ‘external’ worker employed by an outsourcer. She was invisible in many ways and absent from the managers’ discussions. Sometimes, as on International Women’s Day, her invisibility was made very visible. Although working one of the round-­the-­clock shifts at the Cold End was considered to be one of the worst positions in Mladost, being a casual worker was even lower in the factory’s hierarchy. In this chapter, I look at the production process and the organization of work as decisive in the relationships developed among employees (Burawoy 1985: 7) and pay attention to ideas and values related to the organization of work. In order to explore the production process in Mladost in the context of privatization and outsourcing as experienced at the workplace, one needs to pay attention to the distinction between regular and casual workers. In line with Parry’s (2005) question as to how workers are persuaded to work once at the production site, I ask what gives workers the motivation to work and how is this interrelated with their newly created positions. How do workers, who once worked with the same status of regular employees earning equal pay1, work together under new, unequal distinctions in employment status and payment? How is the casualization of labour, which is intertwined with inequalities of gender, ethnicity and age, experienced on a non-­stop assembly line? I analyse this by means of a shop floor ethnography of the production process, which, besides the regular and casual employment, takes into account intertwined divisions between Hot End (skilled) and Cold End (unskilled) workers and the controlling power of managers, owners, ‘the market’ and ‘the clients’ on the shop floor. Here, I mainly focus on workers’ and managers’ tensions on the shop floor, tensions which were significantly shaped by managerial practices derived from the ‘White House’. Although there were also tensions among the top managers, my main focus is on shop floor relationships, where managerial techniques and ideologies regarding work become entangled with production practices and the everyday experiences of work and often clash with them. Through this exploration, the ethnography demonstrates how ‘the market’ is experienced via tempos and rhythms of the production, disciplinary and surveillance techniques and how workers’ responses are intertwined with values and changing meanings of work, complex relations of coercion and consent, embodied labour and everyday practices of resistance. The ‘market’ and its global dynamics, inequalities and conflicts are

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Figure 2.1.  The Cold End: A general view. © Dimitra Kofti

not merely abstract ideas; rather, they converge and become tangible in multiple ways on Mladosts’ conveyor belt. Employees motivations to work, as well as their compliances and resistances, are related to the ways people value their work. In Mladost, this was shaped by different experiences of inequality, their positions inside the factory (Hot End/Cold End, contract/casual, management/shop floor), the kinship groups to which they belonged inside and outside the plant, gender relationships, ethnicity (Bulgarians, Greeks, Roma) and the fact that the past position/present position they had occupied, or currently occupied, created the various categories of ‘old’/’new’ workers discussed in the previous chapter. There is a wide variety and diversity of views about the value of work, but these are largely based on shared notions and criteria. To understand this in Mladost, one needs to draw from several analytical ideas: that economic value is not only quantifiable but is also related to ethical values; that value is dependent on the relative prestige of the different microclimates on the production line; and that ideas and perceptions of creative versus mechanical acts of work need to be taken into account, as well as the condition of a permanent threat of downward mobility. Ethnographies in work settings have analyzed the ways in which different domains of social life, such as gender inequalities (Ong 1987; Ching Kwan

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Figure 2.2.  The Hot End: A general view. © Dimitra Kofti

1997; Ngai 2005; Massimiliano Mollona 2009b), kinship (De Neve 2008; Mollona 2009b), relationships within workers’ communities (Fernandes 1997) and the local relationships of power that underpin coercion of the shop floor (Ching Kwan 2009) interfere with factory life and are brought onto the shop floor. These ethnographies provide a broader understanding

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of the nexus between coercion, consent and agency, but also take it further, beyond the production lines, to explain relationships at work. In exploring Mladost workers’ motivation to work, the analysis in this chapter attends to both workers values and meanings of work, as well as to conditions of production, constraints imposed by the organization of production and conditions of discipline and coercion. The analysis in this chapter takes into account anthropological discussions on the value and ethics of/at work in current capitalism (Narotzky 2015; Hann 2021; Yalçın-­Heckmann 2022) and on broader understandings of value and work (Graeber 2001; Harris 2007), as well as on the notions of consent and coercion at the workplace (Braverman 1974; Burawoy 1976; De Neve 2006; Mollona 2009), while in the next chapter, in order to explore relationships at work, the analysis transcends the workplace and engages with peoples’ lives outside work.

Relationships around Machines While anthropological studies of consumption focus on the symbolic meanings and social lives of the products as commodities (Appadurai 1986), the products themselves have scarcely been studied in relation to work and production (Spittler 2009: 169). Here, I focus on the production of bottles used by bottling companies, which are Mladost’s clients, and attempt to see the global connections as they are viewed, responded and shaped at the workplace. On Mladost’s shop floor, one would often hear a Sprite bottle being sworn at due to its shape. Sprite bottles are very small and often fall and break, thus creating problems on the production line. Moreover, working with this bottle created additional pressures on the line as it was permanently connected to the client electronically. This system was provided as an additional service for clients who could choose to have real-­time electronic reports on the speed and amount of products made at the production line. This meant that the clients could intervene to complain at any time for potential problems or delays. This system did not include cameras during the period of my fieldwork, although there were rumors among employees from various positions that this would possibly be the next step. There was a significant difference between the production of local and global brands: not all the products were connected to the clients. Local bottling clients were not permanently connected to the production line, having chosen a cheaper contract with Mladost that did not include this service. This electronic connection was mainly maintained by global brands, which paid more for this option and were thus able to inspect the

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line from a distance. Therefore, swearing at Sprite bottles was not only connected to their inconvenient shape; it also had larger implications for the client’s ability to exert coercion and control on the production line via this electronic system that further flexibilized Mladost’s space. The ethnographic description in this chapter will follow a bottle’s itinerary in its various stages of production in relation to the labour put into it at each stage. As the sand is transformed into glass, and then the glass into a bottle, the final product is packed in pallets of approximately two thousand pieces, with various groups of employees involved at different stages of production. Although I follow these different stages on the shop floor, I mainly focus on providing a more detailed ethnographic description of the points of view from the packing unit at the Cold End. Through this process, I aim to illustrate the ways in which power and inequality were experienced and performed among shop floor employees at the lowest levels of production in relation to four identical production lines, each of which produced a different bottle. My decision to look closely at a single unit was, to a great extent, inspired by Miklos Haraszti’s (1977) ethnography of the Red Star tractor factory in Hungary in the 1970s. Haraszti gives a vivid and detailed description of the daily work of a machine operator and his struggles to meet the plant’s demands. In describing the operator’s moves around the machine, he shows how the piece-­rate system created exploitative and stressful working conditions for the workforce. Contrary to the hegemonic ideological discourses of socialism, Haraszti demonstrated that the conditions at work in this Hungarian socialist factory shared similarities with capitalist factories brought about by the pressures placed on the operator by the piece-­rate system. His description also includes practices of resistance, expressed through worker’s creative ‘looting’; that is, they made pieces of artwork for themselves, revealing their agency and the creativity of their work. This chapter gives a detailed description of the daily labour on and around the packing machine by describing the pressures imposed by the speed of the machine and the pressures caused in relation to the different types of employment and payment systems found in Mladost. The ethnography starts from a specific unit and attends to relationships with other units and processes that meet at the production line. It also follows other stages in the production and provides a general overview of the structure of the employment positions, drawing on the larger context of the working environment around these machines. The first section of the chapter describes the structure and hierarchies of the job positions in Mladost and attempts to present them through the point of view of the employees at the production units. The next section, ‘following the bottle’, gives a detailed overview of the embodied experience of the speedy production

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and its interconnections with broader dynamics and dialectics of the global political economy. The analysis pays attention to the value and meanings of work, workers’ motivations, daily resistance, conflicts and consent. This close look at Mladost’s conveyor belt that is moved by Fordist and post-­ Fordist practices and techniques suggests that in this globalized factory the various forces and forms of pressure that bring coercion, discipline and consent on to the shop floor need to be analysed by taking into consideration the entanglements of diverse forms of outsourcing and the power of ‘the market’ and ‘the client’ as tangible actors.

Positions and Types of Employment in Mladost The shop floor’s daily life and the production process involved a permanent connection between different units within the production space, as well as relations with the management. An ethnographic understanding of the relations between different types of employment, beginning with the highest hierarchical position and working down from there, is important in making sense of daily life in Mladost. It is also important to explore how various people in different managerial positions were viewed at the production site and how power and decision-­making were seen from the point of view of the shop floor, as this topic occupied much of the daily discussion at the production space. In describing the geographies of these hierarchies and positions of power as they are viewed from ‘below’, I will first introduce those employed in managerial positions whose ‘importance’, or ‘non-­importance’, to the politics of production was a daily matter of discussion on the shop floor and contributed to workers’ views of the relationships of power and the multiple conflicts and solidarities at the workplace.

Shop Floor Views of Management and Power The managerial and administrative staff occupied the administration building on Mladost’s premises. Although employees in managerial posts were present on the shop floor, such as shift supervisors and production and mechanical managers, those located in the administration building were extensively described by shop floor employees as people from the ‘White House’ (Beliat Dom). These were people who, to a large extent, were viewed by workers, and often by middle managers, as those who managed the company from a relative distance and who had little or no idea about the practicalities and daily problems of the production line.

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The board of directors consisted of two brothers: the sons of the company’s founder, Mr Hatzopoulos. Although they lived permanently in Greece, one of the brothers would visit Mladost a few times per year. During these visits, they would have intense meetings behind closed doors with the country managers and a few other managers from the ‘White House’. They would also visit the shop floor to have a look at the production. These visits to the shop floor would always follow the same routine. A couple of days before the visit, the cleaning staff would work overtime to prepare the building for the inspection. Managers would remind workers to use all the obligatory equipment that the safety rules required, such as hats and earplugs, because the ‘owner will visit us’. Also, everything should look clean and orderly to please the owner. On the day of the visit, the Hatzopoulos son would go down to the production lines for long walk of approximately half an hour, during which he would be accompanied by the country director and the plant manager and would stop by a machine for a few seconds before walking to the next one. Although smoking was not allowed on the shop floor, during his short walk around the plant Hatzopoulos sometimes maintained his habit of smoking a thick cigar. While Mladost employees demonstrated their obedience to the plant’s rules, he demonstrated his almost arbitrary authority to flout the rules by holding the cigar. ‘We are Hatzopoulos’ slaves’, women in the changing room said in anger one morning while wearing their equipment for the visit, followed by sarcastic comments about his bossy behaviour and his appearance with the cigar, which was assessed as non-­attractive. These comments strongly underlined the women’s disapproval of the owner’s performance of power and symbolically reversed some of this power.2 Higher managers who rarely appeared on the shop floor, accompanied the owner, showing their interest in the production process. Unlike a normal day, workers and shop floor managers wore all the equipment required by the regulations, did not shout to each other, and the production seemed to flow relatively smoothly and without the usual tensions. During such visits, or during client’s ­visits – ­for clients would appear every once in a while to inspect the production and to decide whether they would make new o ­ rders – w ­ orkers commented a lot on everybody’s performance, including their own. In such comments, the higher managers’ ‘ignorance’ of the ‘actual’ conditions on the shop floor would occupy much space. Moreover, there was a common belief that not only the board of directors but also the ‘White House’ managers were distant and that they could not understand the difficulties of the production line; in fact, they ‘did not care’ about it; they only cared about how things appeared to those above them. Although the board of managers in the ‘White House’ had regular meetings with shop floor managers, got updates on the production process

78  •   Broken Glass, Broken Class

and gave directions, their absence from the space rendered them ‘ignorant’ of the conditions and hence, almost unable to take decisions. In daily shop floor conversation, workers mainly blamed the shop floor managers and engineers for issues related to hard working conditions and described them as responsible for the difficulties on the line, such as the speed of the conveyor belt. However, in private conversations, especially when away from the shop floor, they described a wider context of pressures and often viewed shop floor managers as those who had to strike a balance between the demands for speedier production coming from the clients, the pressures placed on them by the higher managers and the difficulties in implementing them as the speed of the line created tensions and problems. The owners were not often mentioned on the shop floor, other than on these exceptional days when they visited. Comments that united the workforce against the ownership, such as ‘we are Hatzopoulos’ slaves’, were very rare. It was as if his visit united workers and managers in jointly preparing for the visit that would include them in a collective ‘we’; in this context, the employees on the shop floor, including the shop floor managers, were situationally pitted against the owners together. Although the owners would take all the final decisions on important issues, such as the expenditure on salaries and production, their names were rarely mentioned by the employees in the shop floor’s daily complaints, the managers in the ‘White House’, such as the country manager and the financial manager, being more evident in daily conversation. However, they also often said it was the ‘White House’ people who made decisions about larger production strategies and salaries. Workers would often mention that it was the financial manager and the HR department that actually ‘control everything’, not the owners, who were far away from Mladost’s daily life, nor the two Greek managers who, although based in Sofia, were thought not to know ‘how things work’ in the country. There was a widespread belief among the workers that the owners in Greece were unaware of their working conditions. Let us then turn our attention to the ‘important’ (vazhnite) ones in the White House. Next in the official hierarchy after the Hatzopoulos brothers was Mladost’s managing director, Mr Ioannidis (aged 52), who was also the country manager responsible for all three factories owned by the Arethousa Group in Bulgaria. He was Greek and, having studied economics, had then worked as a manager in different Greek-­owned companies abroad before landing the director’s position at Mladost in the early 2000. He would be at his office at the White House on a daily basis during the week but would very rarely visit the shop floor or any other premises. He spoke almost no Bulgarian, and at work would only communicate with managers in English. He would leave his office for his lunch break along with the finance

Global Inequalities in Close Proximity  *  79

manager, Mr Ivanov and occasionally with a few other members of the higher management, their lunch being served in the factory’s restaurant, next to the rest of the employees’ canteen but separated by an opaque glass panel. Although Mr Ioannidis seemed to be in constant communication with the Hatzopoulos family, implementing the decisions that arrived from the board of directors, his name was also mentioned only on relatively rare occasions by shop floor employees. There was a widespread opinion among the workers that those who were ‘actually’ the decision-­makers were not the Greeks but the Bulgarian managers in the White House who ‘knew’ how to manage a Bulgarian company and, more importantly, who ‘used’ previous networks to obtain powerful positions after privatization. As such, workers’ conversations were often preoccupied with the Bulgarian managers, as it was commonly held that they would ‘impose’ their own ideas during their daily lunch breaks with the director. The financial manager, Mr Ivanov, was appointed immediately after the factory’s privatization. Workers would often mention that he had strong personal ties with the Hatzopoulos family and that he had been intimately involved in the privatization process. His name was very often mentioned when workers were blaming the managers for the low salaries and small bonuses. Yet, Mr Ivanov’s point of view seemed different. He would proudly mention how the plant’s finances were successful and that the subcontracting was part of this success. Mr Ivanov was certainly viewed as one of the ‘old people’, and although he joined the factory after privatization, he was considered by workers as one of those who had retained power from ‘the past’. HR and legal department employees, also Bulgarians, also featured prominently in workers’ discussions and were viewed as directly relevant to the staff members’ livelihoods. Those employed in sectors not directly affecting the production process, such as materials purchasing, accounting, IT and design units, were rarely, if at all, mentioned on the shop floor. Interestingly, in all such talk, those most often blamed for work conditions were Bulgarians employed on managerial positions and not the Greek managers or owners. Workers would often underline the ‘ignorance’ of the Greek managers and the Bulgarian managers’ ‘manipulation’ of the Greek managers, although higher managers from both countries had regular meetings and cooperation, according to my understanding. Sasho, a 57-­year-­old worker from the mechanics section, expressed a very common view of the division between regular and casual workers: ‘The Greeks care about their own profit ... they don’t know what is going on here. Our people (the Bulgarian managers3) tell them what to do ... and who knows what they gain from all this story ... for sure there is deceit.’4 ‘The Greeks’ were often described as naïve, and ‘the Bulgarians’ as clever;

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therefore, it only made sense that the Bulgarian managers would manipulate the Greek managers and owners for their own profit. Bulgarian managers were not only portrayed as clever but also as traitors, acting against their ­compatriots – t­he workers. Often, workers implied that ‘Bulgarian managers’, in collaboration with the outsourcers, were possibly keeping a percentage of the payment ‘the Greeks’ paid to the outsourcers and that therefore they had a direct interest in dividing the workforce. According to these discourses, ‘the Greeks’ were also pleased because they just saw the production outcome and did not care about the conditions of the ‘Bulgarian workers’. However, conversation with managers gave diverse accounts of the ongoing distinction between regular and casual staff. Mihalis, a 42-­year-­old Greek engineer, complained that this distinction complicated the production process and shop floor relationships. According to him, although subcontracting did reduce costs, this was not significant in relation to the larger costs of running the plant: ‘The daily expenses in energy, material and transportation are such that the money saved from the subcontracting of labour is only a tiny ­percentage … ­Hatzopoulos insists on making this distinction, but I think it is not a good idea for p ­ roduction … i­ t creates confusion at the production’. Similarly, a Bulgarian manager, Valio, 58 years old, from the ‘White House’ said that the owners, as well as company consultants, constantly wanted to see fewer employees and more production, as this ‘looked good in the market’. He also said that company consultants insisted that this practice would bring ‘flexibility’ and ‘profit’. Therefore, the owners requested continuous lay-­offs and greater subcontracting in order to comply with the demands of ‘the market’. Nevertheless, other managerial voices, especially those in the finance department, indeed, were in favour of the conditions of ‘flexibility’ provided by practices of subcontracting. They reasoned that this arrangement did not necessarily result in less spending but it certainly saved time concerning the administrative work related to those job positions. While outsourcing labour constituted an implementation of an economic model of flexibilization that derived from the owners’ decisions as they were shaped by consultants, the lay-­offs and the workers’ distinctions were largely viewed on the shop floor as the results of informal arrangements, especially among Bulgarian managers. Nationalist discourses that viewed Greeks as ‘naive’ and Bulgarians as ‘clever’, and discourses on corruption and mistrust of those in power, contributed to these widespread views. This recalls the example of workers in the Indian Tata factory, who saw in the casualization of labour corruption and informality which, according to Sanchez (2012), constituted a moral critique of the enterprising individual. In Mladost, distrust of the managers and of how they had acquired their

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power were central ways in which criticism of the implementation of neoliberal economic practices in relation to the distinction of the workforce was expressed. Although workers were critical to these practices, they did not blame the owners, who were the prime decision makers, nor the wider economic model: significantly, more often they blamed those power holders who were in their relative proximity. I interpret this not merely as an obfuscation of the relationships of exploitation (Burawoy 1979) between the owners and the workers, but also in terms of the workers critical views that pointed to a new complexity emerging in relationships of exploitation on the shop floor. While subcontracting was expanding, managers, according to workers, stood to become owners or to benefit in informal ways from the smaller firms inside the factory. While the workforce was split up into smaller parts, power was also dispersed and more complex forms of power were taking place, producing multiple conflicts that workers had to confront. Workers’ discussions about various levels of the inequality of power related to the smaller firms included discussions on the ethnic fragmentation between Greeks and Bulgarians, as well as ‘Bulgarian’ ways of gaining power. In this process, the boundaries of ownership were not between Greek owners and Bulgarian employees; they were blurred by the potential of the Bulgarian managers to become the owners of smaller, flexibilized firms operating inside the company. Workers’ blame for this situation adopted the language of corruption, which was often employed by employees in describing privatization reforms in postsocialist work settings (Perrotta 1998; Thiessen 2002; Dunn 2004; Heintz 2006). Nevertheless, this blame also emphasized the complexity of the new mechanisms of power and the multiple relationships of ownership under conditions of flexible capitalism that are capable of transforming managers into capitalists on the shop floor.

Regular and Casual Workers: Visible and Invisible Groups on the Shop Floor In describing the shop floor geography in Mladost, this section mainly focuses on criteria related to the different categories of employment in the form of different contracts and the division of labour (Tables 2.1 and 2.2 below) and their different levels of (in)visibility. It also puts an emphasis on the workers’ relationship with the conveyor belt in understanding the different work tempos and the ways in which different positions are connected through the itinerary of the bottles from manufacture to packing.

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Table 2.1.  General characteristics of regular and casual labour contracts. Data compiled by the author. Type of Employer employment

Gender

Regular

Men and women. Mostly Bulgarians Various age Mostly men groups

Casual

Employed by Mladost

Employed by Mostly women. outsourcers, mostly Few men Litex company

Ethnicity

Bulgarians and a few Roma

Age

Various age groups

Regular and casual workers were two distinct groups among the workers on the shop floor who had different employment contracts with different levels of precariousness. Most of the workers employed by the smaller subcontractors were people whom Mladost had previously laid off. Contrary to the managerial myth of the employee as an ‘entrepreneurial self’ capable of upgrading his or her career in line with work ­performance – a­ myth often uttered by the HR management in M ­ ladost – u ­ nder the company’s regulations temporary workers, could not be employed by Mladost. Litex was ‘another’ company, and ‘it has to maintain its own organization and not to mix with us … this would be confusing for their discipline’, the factory director said. However, Litex would employ regular workers who had been laid off, a convenient method of casualizing work while keeping experienced workers on the production line. As such, the only possible mobility was downward, from regular to casual; upward mobility, from casual to regular contract, was impossible. As workers at the outsourcer Litex would often say, ‘once in Litex, forever Litex’. Unlike other industrial settings where casual workers are motivated by the prospect of a permanent position (Sanchez 2012; Parry 2015; Makram-­Ebeid 2018), the trajectory of working lives in Mladost followed the opposite path of future possibilities. This calls for an analysis of how workers were motivated to work in such precarious positions and how regular workers dealt with their potential downward mobility. Although the contract workers’ labour constituted an integral part of the regular production, they were not visible in the company’s official activity. Moreover, the managers would refer to them less often, if at all; it was as if this group did not exist. Their invisibility was more obvious in moments of conspicuous ignorance, such as the example given at the beginning of this chapter regarding presents being given on International Women’s Day. Furthermore, daily trivial practices on the shop floor reinforced this diversity. Mladost would distribute free coffee

Global Inequalities in Close Proximity  *  83

Table 2.2.  General characteristics of shop floor job positions. Data compiled by the author. Sector

Employment contracts

Shift rotation

Approximate monthly salary analogy5

Gender

Hot End

Mostly regular employees

24/7, 3 shifts

Men

Cold End

The highest salaries on the shop floor. Amount of payment within the group varied with 500 levs range

Both regular and casual employees

24/7, 3 shifts

Mostly women

Mechanical

Half the amount of the Hot End salaries. Amount of payment within the group varied in 350 levs range Mainly monthly salaries (regular) or payment by the item (casual)

Regular

Weekdays. Daytime

Men

Electrical

Same as in the Hot End. Varied with a 500 levs range

Regular

Weekdays. Daytime

Men

Cleaning

Two thirds of the Hot End salary. Amount of payment within the group varied in 350 levs.

Casual

Two thirds of the Cold End salary

Women

Warehouses

Weekdays. Daytime

Both regular and casual

Weekdays. Daytime

Men

External Cold End (located on shop floor in neighbouring dilapidating building)

Casual workers got paid similarly to the cleaning staff. Regular workers got paid similarly to the Cold End staff

Casual

Mainly weekdays. Daytime (shifts varied according to occasional needs)

Payment by the item. The amount could reach up to two thirds of the salary in the Cold End

Women

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Figure 2.3.  Casual workers are often visible as they do not wear a uniform. © Dimitra Kofti

to regular workers on nights, but contract workers would have to pay for theirs. Given the minimal cost, one wonders why Mladost did not offer coffee to all those working night shifts, rather than only to the regular ones. As Mladost managers would often state, the ‘temps’ were employed by ‘another’ company where there was a ‘different’ management; it was the Litex boss’s responsibility to take care of such things. Mladost employed its regular employees under a collective labour agreement, whereas the temporary ones were employed by the outsourcer, Litex, without such an agreement. As already mentioned in Chapter 1, this resulted in a large diversification of salaries for the same job and different access to benefits, pension schemes, vacation and healthcare. Regular workers belonged to unions, although these were almost inactive, meeting only once per year, briefly, to discuss the new labour agreement over which unions did not seem to have much power. The two unions in the factory were basic Bulgarian unions founded soon after the collapse of socialism in 1990. One was center-­left, the other center-­right (KNSB and Podkrepa, respectively). There were almost no discussions about the unions, membership of which workers chose, they said, according to criteria such as Christmas presents, and workers would change membership from one

Global Inequalities in Close Proximity  *  85

union to the other in different periods. My material does not allow me to give a detailed picture of the changing membership because workers would avoid discussing it and did not often give the topic any importance. However, I suggest that this frequent change of union membership was also related to intense electoral mobility in Bulgaria during the first two decades after the collapse of socialism. Moreover, there was a general distrust of the unions, which were largely seen as ineffective or corrupt, as in other workplaces (Kesküla and Sanchez, 2019).6 This distrust was not only directed at the unions, but also to political organizations. Most workers said that it made no sense to participate because union representatives were mostly ‘old communists’, and the unions were institutions in which old power had been reproduced.7 Unions were absent from daily discussions and were never mentioned as a potential means of collective action. However, an important difference between the two groups of workers in Mladost was that the contracts of the regular workers were under a common labour agreement, whereas the casual workers, who were not unionized, were not protected by such an agreement. The distinction between regular and casual staff was also both gendered and ethnic. The great majority of the temporary workers were women, although there were also a very few male temporary workers, all of whom were Roma.8 The groups of regular and casual workers also differed according to age, their life stories suggest there were some characteristics in common to both older and younger workers, especially among those working for Litex. Most women who worked as temporary workers were former Mladost workers who returned after being laid off. Given that they had spent their working lives in the glass industry, they had limited chances of finding work elsewhere at their age. Younger women in their thirties or forties who worked for Litex often had husbands, or less often other relatives such as sisters, brothers or sons, working in Mladost, with whom they would commute to work. Although they might have sought better paid jobs elsewhere, they chose to work alongside their kin. In the next chapter, I discuss relations of kinship on the shop floor and show how family relations at work enabled flexible working relations. The ages of Mladost’s workers varied, as did the variety of staff biographies, making any age-­based categories quite hard to discern. Nevertheless, it is important to mention that salaries often varied in relation to age. Mladost tended to pay less for older workers who were close to pension age and were not considered competitive in the market. Often, they would pay more for younger skilled workers in order, according to HR, to motivate them to stay in the company. In general, although there was inequality based on age, this was not as widespread as the inequality of gender on the shop floor, where women occupied the overwhelming majority of both

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Figure 2.4.  A view from the 24/7 production at the Hot End. © Dimitra Kofti

casual and low-­paid regular, positions. Mladost was not an exception in making this clear distinction, such inequalities of gender also being found in factories elsewhere.9

Hot End versus Cold End An important distinction within the shop floor workforce reflected the circumstances of glass production, which had two important phases of production: ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. This distinction in relation to both space and the quality of labour was essentially that between the ‘Hot End’ and the ‘Cold End’ and two distinct ‘microclimates’ (Mollona 2009b) on the shop floor. In Mladost, this distinction divided workers’ groups into ‘male/skilled/hot’ and ‘female/unskilled/cold’, with concomitant conflicts and distinctions between them. The glass is produced at the Hot End at high temperatures and is shaped in matrixes. The hot bottles are produced on four production lines at the Hot End and are transferred to the Cold End on conveyor belts, with a large wall and a cooling machine dividing the two areas. The red-­hot bottles pass through this machine and are transformed into cold green or brown bottles as they enter the Cold End. The large difference in temperature

Global Inequalities in Close Proximity  *  87

delimits the two areas, but more importantly for this study, there were significant differences in the employment statuses and gender distinctions of the two areas. The Hot End was occupied exclusively by male workers who usually had considerable experience in glass production and most of whom were considered skilled at operating the glass-­producing machinery. Upon arrival at the Cold End, and after being cooled, the bottles initially pass through the quality control unit, whose female workers were considered unskilled. The job of the workers in this unit is to check the bottles both manually and electronically and document each batch while they are on the move. Their work has to be synchronized with the conveyor belt, since they have to grasp and inspect a large number of moving bottles in order to obtain information about all the serial numbers of the bottles that come out of each mold. Their results are sent to the neighboring quality control laboratory, whose workforce consists of glass quality control specialists, who are again mostly women. After quality control, the bottles pass by a camera that also inspects them for any faults, in which case a machine removes them from the conveyor belt. Finally, the product ends up at one of the packaging machines at the end of each of the four conveyor belts. Workers there are also considered ‘unskilled’, and staff turnover is relatively higher than at the Hot End. Another important difference between the hot and cold units was employment status. A vast majority of the Hot End workers were directly employed by Mladost on permanent contracts, compared to the greater proportion of temporary workers, employed by Litex, at the Cold End. This might at least partly be explained by the different needs of production, which were related mainly to quality control at the Cold End. Whenever there were defective products, there was an urgent need for extra hands to carry out urgent, labour-­intensive operations, jobs which were performed for the most part by temporary workers. However, the casual staff were not only present in periods of urgent need: one in every four women at the Cold End was employed by Litex, but occupied a permanent position. These Litex workers were paid monthly wages, not by item, but their wages were significantly lower than those of regular workers doing identical jobs. In addition, the salaries at the Hot End were significantly higher, almost double, than even those of the permanent workers at the Cold End (see Table 2.2). Although many of the jobs carried out at both ends of the line were highly repetitive, their pace being dictated by the speed of the machine, there were differences in payments among workers who occupied the same ­position – ­differences ‘according to their performance’, according to official managerial explanations. This was an important managerial technique to maintain competition and flexibility on the shop floor.

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The management would often warn the workforce that they were strongly discouraged from exchanging information about salaries. However, they were aware that employees talked a lot about their salaries, and it was clear that the inequality of salaries was maintained to increase the competition between the workers.10 The technological distinction between the ‘Hot’ (glass production) and ‘Cold’ (quality control and packing) sectors created distinct groups among  the workforce. Both phases of production are based on capital-­ intensive operations using highly automated machinery. Although the ‘Hot End’ workers were considered skilled and the ‘Cold End’ workers unskilled, one may argue that the various jobs in both sectors require skills and experience in order to operate the machines and to keep up with the speed of production. On the other hand, it could also be argued that the automatic machines at both the Hot and Cold Ends can be operated by unskilled workers. The distinction between Hot End skilled and Cold End unskilled workers seemed quite arbitrary and caused complaints from female workers. It seemed to be based more on an earlier distinction between glass producers at the Hot End, who were considered artisans, and workers at the Cold End in quality control and packing jobs who were considered unskilled. The company’s distinction between skilled and unskilled was not only based on workers’ previous training, it was also an example of a ‘socially constructed skill’ (Thompson 1988: 47), from which women were excluded in a lower position (Phillips and Taylor 1980). In Molona’s ethnography, ‘hot’ (steel-­ making) workers considered themselves skilled workers, whereas ‘cold’ (steel-­finishing) workers considered themselves unskilled labourers (Mollona 2009b: 9–10). Mladost’s ‘Hot workers’ considered themselves skilled because they were the ones who were producing the glass and because they knew how to handle the high-­temperature machines. However, those Cold End workers on quality control also needed experience, and they had to use computers, as well as specific tools for the control tasks; they therefore considered themselves skilled, even though they were defined by the company as unskilled. The other Cold End workers, those on the packing machines, did not need any qualifications; they were the ones with the lowest salaries, although they did the most intense labour on the shop floor. Given the intensity of their labour and the high degree of concentration it required, Cold End workers would often say that it was ‘unfair’ that they were defined as unskilled and therefore were paid lower salaries than those on the Hot End. In terms of health hazards, working at both Hot and Cold Ends was dangerous, albeit for different reasons. A worker at the Hot End had to be careful of the high-­temperature glass, contact with which could cause

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severe skin burns. Equally, a worker at the Cold End had to operate heavy machinery with moving parts that could crush them if they made a mistake with them. Both sectors were also associated with breathing problems caused by high temperatures in the former case and the high density of glass dust in the air in the latter. Moreover, in both microclimates, the noise levels were high, requiring protective ear-­defenders. This was an additional reason why workers at both the Hot and Cold Ends would comment that the differences in salary were not ‘fair’. Both Cold and Hot End workers had a 24/7 shift rotation. Although this was obviously intended to maximize profit, the management would insist that the furnace temperature must be maintained and that the cost of the hot glass becoming cooled and therefore solidifying was large. As a result of this argument, not only did the furnace never stop, which would indeed generate a loss from solidification of the glass, but the production line never slowed. This was significantly different from the practice in the pre-­ privatization era, when the furnace also worked non-­stop, but on vacations and at nights, it would keep the glass as a molten mass at temperatures necessary to avoid damage. Therefore, this decision to maintain a constant output with 24/7 shifts was not an unavoidable one determined by technology, but rather the consequence of a different approach to profit, which in turn resulted in different conditions at work in these two periods. In the end, this argument was based on a fetishism about technology (Pfaffenberger 1988) that projected the dominant ideology of the factory as a space for the mere maximisation of profit. Those working around the conveyor belt had a shift rotation of four days on the morning shifts, four days on the evening shifts and four night shifts, with a day off between each four-­day shift. In practice this meant that one could be working at any day and time of the year, without making allowances for special events such as New Year’s Eve or the Easter holidays. Hot and Cold workers were the only ones who had this kind of shift rotation in the company; the other staff had a Monday to Friday daytime shift. Nevertheless, mechanical and electrical maintenance who worked the day shift had to be available on call 24/7 in case of breakdowns, having to attend the plant regardless of the time of day or night. Although much of the following ethnography highlights conflicts between Hot and Cold workers, the experience of shift rotations and common night-­time work brought them together. Those on shifts would also refer to ‘we in shifts’, in contrast to employees involved in ‘daytime work’. They would often talk about Christmas or other days they spent together ‘away from the family’, proposing a toast or singing next to the machines. In contrast to other industrial sites (Kondo 1990; Dunn 2004; Müller 2007; De Neve 2008), they did not use kinship as a metaphor for their current relationships. However,

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as described in the next chapter, workers from the cold/hot groups had kinship bonds that contributed to loosening the boundaries among the groups and to their consenting to inequalities on the shop floor.

Craftsmen: Mechanical, Electrical and Electronic Maintenance Other subdivisions on the shop floor include the exclusively male units in mechanical and electrical maintenance.11 Their work was not directly dependent on the conveyor and was not bound to the fast, repetitive rhythm of the production line. Acquiring a post in these sectors required education in a mechanical or electrical subject as appropriate, and the jobs were skilled positions. Work time was characterised by periods of intense activity interspersed with periods of idleness; they had to work hard and sometimes to stay on overtime when machines were broken. They also had to work much harder when a production line had to change its product. Products would change according to the size of the clients’ orders and to the sales department’s predictions of those forthcoming orders. However, on average it seems that each production line would change its product approximately every three to four weeks. As a result, the work of the maintenance staff would consist of periodically intense shifts, followed by relatively relaxed shifts. In addition, these units were responsible not only for the maintenance of the production machines, but also for increasing the production space. For example, during my research, Mladost’s engineering unit began to plan and finally build an extension to the Cold End area, where a new packaging machine was set up. In addition to their daily tasks, therefore, the mechanical and electrical staff were also working on this construction project. With respect to salaries, here too large differences between those in the same positions can be found (see Table 2.2), reflecting the company’s policy of paying more to those who, managers claimed, were ‘more productive’. However, it was also well-­known among the employees that the younger ones received higher salaries than the older ones in these sectors. For example, electricians who were close to retirement would receive much smaller salaries than those in their thirties because the older ones, despite being experienced, were considered less competitive in the job market. In addition, Mladost’s management wanted to avoid staff turnover in these positions; rather, they expressed their intention to invest in younger people prepared to remain in these sectors and to specialize in the factory’s machinery. They were the ones who had the power to fix the machines, but this did not mean that they had a sense of job security, since their sector, like every other, also experienced layoffs.12

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Warehouses Another group of low-­paid male workers is responsible for storing the loaded pallets. These were the forklift drivers, who transferred the products to the warehouses, where they were kept until lorries would arrive to take them to the bottling companies. Their salaries were similar to those of the unskilled female workers at the Cold End. Their work tempo also required a certain degree of synchronization with the conveyor’s speed, since periodically they had to be at the end of the production lines to collect the loaded pallets. Some of the drivers were regular workers employed by Mladost, while other drivers, who were mainly located in the warehouses, were temporary workers employed by another outsourcer although on significantly lower wages, similar to those in Litex.

Cleaning Staff The shop floor of a glass factory is in constant need of cleaning staff, since broken glass has to be removed from the machines and the floor of the production line for it to operate safely. Pieces of glass from broken bottles may cause injuries to the staff and, in addition, glass fragments may get into the bottles, resulting in dangerous faults to the products. Thus, the cleaning staff had to clean the shop floor daily and to collect any broken glass resulting from the frequent occurrence of bottles falling from the conveyor. This required them to pay constant attention to the sound coming from the production line during their shifts. Whenever they heard the sound of breaking glass, they had to take note of it and converge on where the problem was. Sometimes a whole pallet of two thousand bottles would fall off the end of the production line requiring very quick action to clear it away before it began to block further the production. Nevertheless, the cleaning staff were only present on weekdays and during day shifts. In practice, this meant that, in the event of pallets falling down during the evening, at weekends or on night shifts, workers from the Cold End would have to fit this extremely difficult task into their usual work. All six cleaners were women, all were employed on temporary contracts with Litex, and their monthly salaries did not exceed half the salary of the Cold End regular workers for full-­time work. They also had to work overtime, coming in earlier in the mornings when ‘important’ people, such as the owner, clients, health and safety officials and politicians, were visiting the factory.

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Production Site Managers Each production unit had a manager who would be present in the plant from Monday to Friday during the daytime. There were Hot End, Cold End, Quality Control, and Electrical and Mechanical managers,13 their offices being located in places with direct views of the part of the production line for which they were responsible. Sector managers, along with the production line’s general manager, would all meet on a daily basis to organize cooperation among the sectors, and each sector manager would organize weekly or monthly meetings with the workers. Most managers on the shop floor were younger than the workers they had to manage. The Cold End, Quality Control and Electro-­mechanical managers were all in their early or mid-­thirties and had been employed since the company’s privatization; with the exception of the Hot End manager, who was in his early fifties and had been a foreman at Mladost since his youth, none of the managers belonged to the ‘old’ workforce. All the managers were men, with the exception of the Quality Control manager, a young woman in her mid-­thirties. The White House people clearly stated that they chose young people on the shop floor who would not have the ‘old mentality’ of work. According to the director, ‘We needed to bring new14 people who were energetic and who could get our new mentality ... the old communists were lazy and only wanted to skip work’. This was a common practice in newly privatized companies in Bulgaria intending to demonstrate their break with ‘the past’. Here, the term ‘old’, used by the Greek director, had different meanings, which were associated with ‘laziness’, a common stereotype employed by foreign managers in Bulgaria (Angelidou and Kofti 2013). The division of the labour force into regular and casual resulted in corresponding managerial arrangements. The cleaners and temporary workers shared the same manager, Latex’s owner. He would also organize regular meetings with his company’s employees at which he would talk about Mladost’s requirements. Litex workers attended his meetings, and they would also attend the regular meetings of the sectors in which they were employed. They would often say that they had ‘two bosses and half salaries’. Up to now I have described the main employees’ groups and their locations in Mladost’s space of production. Each of these groups had different salaries and different work speeds, depending on their different relationships to the conveyor belt and the itinerary of bottle production. The more precarious, unskilled workers were those who were most subject to the machine’s pressures and speeds and had the greater diversities in pay and employment status. The less precarious, skilled workers had a greater degree of autonomy in relation to speed and received relatively

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better payments. Nevertheless, all groups shared a common fear of unemployment, downward mobility and further flexibilization. Having drawn a picture of these groups, I will focus on the pressures experienced at the lowest positions in the hierarchy which often contributed to daily tensions and conflicts among different groups on the shop floor. Although workers were strongly divided and were in daily competition, when they described their powerlessness in relation to the managers, owners and clients in the new regime, or when they talked about the power of the managers and the party members in the old regime, they often repeated the view that ‘We workers have always been workers’. This expression was used with bitterness by both regular and casual Hot and Cold End workers, even when they were blaming other groups of workers on the shop floor, reminding themselves that even in these new divisions they were still parts of a larger group. Again, the phrase ‘We workers have always been workers’ was mainly expressed in private conversations among workers away from the workplace and during our interviews. However, the daily life of the factory was filled with tensions that broke the group into many pieces, like ‘broken glass’. As a result, Mladost’s workers portrayed themselves as belonging to a divided, ‘broken’ working class, yet still connected. In doing so they were stressing the complexities of relations among workers in the context of the changing conditions of work, both postsocialist and post-­Fordist. This suggested the extension of interpretations of class, which, according to Kalb (Kalb 1997), based himself on E.P. Thompson (1963; 1971; 1978), ‘emerges when unequal, divided, sometimes even antagonistic sets of people, with differential access to different sets of resources, try to survive, understand, and reproduce their mutually connected ways of life’ (Kalb 1997: 6). Similarly, Kasmir and Carbonella (2008), also inspired by E.P. Thompson’s (1978) conceptualization of class as a set of relations characterized by fluid movements of people and contexts, underlined the importance of making sense of class relations and understandings and argued that, by drawing on assumptions about the previous stability of classes, attention to class has been neglected in the era of post-­Fordism (ibid.: 6–7). The workers in Mladost led me to view their complex solidarities and conflicts and their views of their relationships as being subject to fragmentation, along with the movement of mutual blame that flowed along with the bottles on the conveyor belt.

Following the Bottle’s Flow and the Flow of Blame It was midday when the women’s changing room hosted the cleaning ladies’ lunch break. Liliana, a 33-­year-­old worker at the packing machine

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who had arrived for her afternoon shift, was curious and anxious to be informed about the day’s production flow: ‘Hi! What’s going on upstairs (on the shop floor)?’ ‘The Fourth (line) is crazy, Sprite ... there were lots of returned defectives. The other ones (lines) are more or less OK,’ Maria, a 28-­year-­old cleaning lady responded. With nervous movements, Liliana began to change for her shift. As she did so, she swore at the Sprite bottle. That day it was her turn to work at the fourth line. The speed of the line and quality of the product were crucial to the experience of working and the relationships that were developed on the shop floor. The itinerary of bottle production bears internal conflicts among workers’ groups and coercive but arcane power of ‘the market’ in setting the speed of production. A mixture of sand, soda and some chemical ingredients go through the batch house into the furnace, where they are transformed at high temperatures into molten glass that is then shaped by the mould. Hot glass is thus transformed into bottles for alcoholic and soft drinks. The production machines at the Hot End, as well as those at the Cold End, produce high levels of noise that make earplugs necessary for employees on the production site, although they would only wear them during official visits and audits. Rather, workers preferred to stay earplug-­free during daily work, indicating that the shop floor was not only a place of work but also a place of socialization, where workers communicated with each other by shouts and bodily signs in a noisy environment. Mladost’s shop floor had its own non-­verbal language for use in an environment where noise is produced by the high-­speed machines at the Hot End and the glass products on the line; while the glass becomes colder towards the end of the Hot End, the bottles produce a loud noise when they touch each other. Some thousands of bottles move together on the four conveyors, contributing to the noise already produced by the machines at the four production lines. Four different types of bottles are produced in Mladost at any one time, with an average output of a million bottles per day in total. Each production line produces an average of 250,000 bottles in 24 hours, which equals an average production of 2.9 bottles per second on each production line. Once the mould machine is set, it regularly produces bottles that are then put onto the conveyor belt; as a result, Hot and Cold End workers have to cope with a flow of bottles that move regularly and steadily on the conveyor belt. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to take average numbers and assume that the speed the workers work at is necessarily a regular one. Although each machine provided the conveyor with bottles at regular intervals, different positions around the conveyor belt would be associated with different speeds. This variation in speed, which was one of the main

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reasons for conflict on the shop floor, had technical causes, or was due to potential defectives or managerial techniques. In particular, when the bottles passed through the quality control zone, a worker first tested their quality before the quality control machine, one stage further down the line, scanned them and automatically removed those it found to be defective. Nevertheless, some defectives could not be identified immediately, neither by the worker nor by the machine, often only being identified after the pallets had been packed. Because of the high speed of production it proved impossible to avoid these oversights. Indeed, they happened quite often, and a whole row of bottles would pass quality control and end up at the packing machine, even though they could not be sold to the client. Although hard to avoid, this regularly produced tensions between workers and managers, as well as between the managers of the different sectors.

‘The Market’ and the Disputes between the Hot and Cold Ends When defective bottles had not been detected on time, the Cold End manager blamed the quality control workers for not working properly and blamed the Hot End for producing the defectives. In their turn, Hot End

Figure 2.5.  One of the quality control tasks. © Dimitra Kofti

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workers often blamed the Cold End, and specifically quality control, saying that they ‘exaggerated’, that the defect was not a serious one and that the particular row of bottles were actually fit for sale. Conflict between the Hot and Cold End groups on the production line was quite common in this regard. Hot end workers often perceived returns as an insult to the quality of their work, the men at the Hot End often saying that women at the Cold End ‘exaggerated’ and that most of the time they identified defectives ‘on purpose’ to make the men lose the bonus they would otherwise earn for maximizing the production outcome.15 They reasoned that Cold End workers did this because they did not get the bonus, making them ‘jealous’ of them. The Cold End workers had a different view of the situation. They had to identify defectives lest they run the risk of letting bad bottles end up in the clients’ bottling factories, something that would risk them losing their jobs. The Cold End manager often reminded them that such mistakes would result in losing clients, who might then choose cheap glass production from factories in neighbouring Turkey. In this way, market pressure was exerted on the shop floor as a means of coercion deriving not from the employer’s demands, but from the fear of the market per se. In such moments, conflict between the workers and the employers was dispersed. Instead a new tension emerged between the shop floor and ‘the market’, the latter being treated as an actor generating coercion on the shop floor, a coercion I describe as latent. The owners were almost never mentioned by the managers: it was as if the managers themselves and the workers collectively only had to deal with ‘the market’. Often, even the phrase ‘the client’ was not used, ‘the market’ almost metonymically replacing ‘the clients’. The fear of losing ‘the client’ and ‘the market’ was distributed at the workplace. In this way, the tensions between the employers and the workforce were partially disguised by another conflict between the shop floor and ‘the market’, and by yet another between the Hot End and the Cold End. In private conversations and in our interviews, workers would blame the owners and the managers for these disciplinary and coercive methods, as well as blaming the new practice of treating ‘the market’ as an agent. Stilian, a 57-­year-­old Hot End worker, said: ‘Market, market ... we have had enough of this bullshit! We know how to do our job, they just want us to work more and quicker for them to earn more ... once we had the (Communist) Party, now we have the market’. I often heard this parallel being drawn between ‘the market’ and the power of the decisions that came down from the Communist Party, with many other parallels emphasizing that they were both distant and nonnegotiable. Stilian, like other workers, pointed to the widespread use of ‘the market’ as a means of coercion on the shop floor.

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‘The market’ was personalized and was becoming a tangible actor on the lines, defining the relationships between Hot End and Cold End quality control workers. Although sometimes ‘the client’ was there, ‘the market’ came to be used almost interchangeably with ‘the client’. Therefore, this power was becoming even more distant and impersonal than that of the distant client who was observing the production line panoptically. As Lee and LiPuma argue (2002), the market as a third-­person agent is a fundamental imaginary of contemporary capitalism. It becomes an actor that investors imagine as risky and uncertain: Thus ‘the market’ can act, indicate, warn, hesitate, climb, and fall, but is usually not able to take second-­order verbs such as reflect, assume, guilt, or take responsibility. (Lee and LiPuma 2002: 196)

Similarly, on Mladost’s production line ‘the market’ appeared as an important actor who could only behave like this because of its very ‘nature’. Managers from all levels often used the non-­negotiable existence of this third-­person agent through phrases such as ‘the market decides’16 to show that a higher authority existed and to avoid their responsibility for the hardships the production line created. Quality control workers used it to tell the Hot End workers that it was not their responsibility but that of the invisible, yet very apparent, non-­negotiable ‘market’. Its existence was even stronger than that of ‘the client’, who actually had substance, be it local beer or a global brand, as well as an address and an existence as a company, and whose representatives would sometimes visit to exert command and control. ‘The market’ was even more distant; it was the power that actually drove ‘the clients’. In these moments, the conflict between the Hot End and Cold End was dictated by an actor with powerful characteristics, who appeared to remove everyone else’s agency, and who appeared to be third-­person, via a computer having no affect. After all this, there was almost nobody who could be held responsible for the pressure on the line. The new conflict with the almost magical actor of ‘the market’ played a key role in the shop floor conflict between the Cold and Hot End workers. Stilian was one of the many Hot End workers who blamed the ‘women’ for ‘exaggerating’ about the defectives: ‘The women give us problems ... at home and at work ... those poor women, they have to do their job, and they get paid so little money ... but sometimes they do it on purpose against us and they say “the market this”, “the market that” ...’. While he blamed the women for the pressure they placed on the Hot End, he also showed a degree of understanding for their position. Valeria, a 45-­year-­old worker in quality control who was married to a man working at the Hot End, expressed a different view:

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Men are egocentric and stupid ... they think that we work against them ... the other day Stilian came and shouted at me: ‘Why do you return my bottles?’ As if the bottles are theirs ... that’s how they talk about them, ‘my bottles’ ... But it’s so unfair. They get paid much better than us, and they also complain constantly about us. What am I supposed to do if the client sees the defectives at the report?

The following sign was hung on Mladost’s production line, close to Valeria’s machine: ‘The next one who will control the product is the client’. This label, along with the electronic system of the control by the clients, could be seen as a disciplinary technology of power (Foucault 1979). The client, an invisible, almighty client, was made dreadfully present through this sign. This suggested a sense of pervasive danger for failing to produce according to the highest standards, and it served as a message of impending judgment, accompanied by the threat of unavoidable punishment. ‘The market’, although impersonal, it often becomes an almost personalised agent through its constant and obvious presence on the shop floor and strongly influences the everyday relations between workers. It was made evident through the electronic system that connected the clients to the production line in real time, as well as through other managerial disciplinary techniques that served to remind workers of the omnipresence of ‘the market’ on the shop floor. The division of casual and regular work was also viewed and presented by the higher management as a market-­driven practice.17 It also appears through the ongoing fear of capital flight, dictated by ‘the market’ that might result into the relocation of the company or the change of ownership. ‘The market’ becomes a menacing power, an important actor on the shop floor, a power which brings efficiency and discipline.

Tensions over Skill and Deskilling: Changing Meanings of Work The tension between Hot End and Cold End at the production line appeared with reference to distinctions of both gender and skill. Hot End workers, by underlining their appropriation of the product, stress their ability to create glass. Nevertheless, the machines were highly automated, and the Hot End workers did not have a direct relationship with the glass, as some of them had in the past. What they actually knew now was how to handle the machines that produced the glass. This was different from the past, especially for those who had been employed in domestic glass production where they would blow glass. Interestingly, the Hot workers’ spoken narratives revealed that the vast majority talked about the glass production of the past in possessive terms: ‘Our production was beautiful ... our glass was sold all over the world ... our shop floor’, whereas in contrast, they would not use possessive terms for the current production process. Nevertheless,

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men would situationally use the possessive to describe ‘their bottles’ when in dispute with the women at the Cold End. During such disputes, they emphasized their skills and their attachment to the product, contrasting it with that of the ‘unskilled’ women. Although they often stressed the skill of their labour at work in contrast to that of the Cold End workers, in their narratives, which were mostly generated away from the workplace, men usually underlined their loss of skill compared to the Hot End in the past. One may view these situational discourses as different aspects of a relationality of skill and its changing meanings according to different temporal and spatial frames. Hot End workers have not necessarily been ‘deskilled’, as the company considered them ‘skilled’, but, rather like shipyard workers in San Francisco (Blum 2000), they experienced their new conditions of labour as a degradation brought about by global pressures that were experienced as oppressive on the shop floor. Historical and anthropological studies of industrial work have emphasized workers’ self-­esteem and the value of their post, which motivates work in exploitative environments (Thompson 1963; Burawoy 1979; Mollona 2005, 2009). Mollona’s analysis of the ways workers view the value of their labour in a steel workshop in Sheffield is of great relevance to Mladost (Mollona 2005, 2009a). Mollona linked workers’ perceptions of the value of their work to the machines and to the differentiation between the hot and cold departments involved in producing steel, which determined the different working conditions and ‘microclimates’ on the shop floor. Workers in Sheffield’s hot department are strongly connected to their machines, which they view as an extension of their bodies. They perceive their work as inalienable and forging as a form of art. Workers in the cold department, by contrast, act through standardized movements, do not personalize the machines and their labour outcomes and perceive their work as alienable. Similarly, workers in Mladost had diverse views about their labour, views that were strongly connected to the Hot/Cold distinction. Furthermore, they not only drew value from their present work positions and the changing taxonomies of skill, but also in relation to their past; their acute experience of downward mobility meant that they defined their positions in relation to what they used to be, not just in relation to their present or to their future. The experience of downward mobility and/or the fear of future downward mobility further influenced workers’ self-­esteem drawn from their personal past, as well as from a past socialist ideology of labour that valued workers as actors producing for society. Nevertheless, these views coexisted with other views of labour as a terrain of individual worth that offers opportunities to those who are more worthy and have ‘made it’, as discussed in the previous chapter.

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I will now continue by following the bottles’ journey and will focus on the next source of tension between casual and regular workers at the Cold ­End – ­tensions that occurred once the bottle has already passed quality control. Along with the flow of bottles, there was also a flow of conflict and blame along the belt and a flow of solidarities.

Tensions over Speed: Piece Rates, Bonuses and Time Pressure If defective bottles ended up packed in pallets along with non-­defective ones, some Litex workers had to unpack the pallets and reposition the non-­defective bottles on the conveyor belt. Nevertheless, this interruption to the process did not necessarily mean that the production speed would slow down at the Hot End. Bottles continued to be produced at their initial tempo, and the additional, repositioned ones went back on to the conveyor heading towards the packing machine. Litex workers were paid piece rates, only getting a few levs for each pallet they would partly reposition on the conveyor, and although they had to be present in the factory during the shift, they were only paid when such pieces were available to them, not for their availability during time otherwise spent waiting. They would have hours of idleness interspersed with unexpected hours of work each day, and as a result, those Litex workers who were available in the factory for this work were strongly motivated to put the bottles back on to the conveyor again very quickly (see Figure 2.3), hoping that more defectives would come along the same day and add to their daily income. Consequently, more bottles arrived more quickly at the packing machine at the end of the conveyor. This was the reason that Liliana, who worked at the end of the production line, got angry that afternoon in the dressing room. She knew that the Litex workers would fill the conveyor with as many bottles as they could. The different payment methods resulted in another conflict among the workers. Litex workers on piece rates worked fast, hoping for more pieces. Those Cold End workers who were directly employed by Mladost and who had to deal with the results of the Litex workers’ speed were paid fixed wages. They were obliged to work fast since the conveyor never stopped, but unlike other assembly lines, where workers collectively slowed down when tired or in resistance to managerial decisions, this seemed impossible in Mladost. An example of such resistance elsewhere was seen in a Chinese subcontracting factory producing electronics (Ngai 2005), where the workers had to rush in anticipation of new orders and the, consequentially, frequent changes of products. Workers had power because the management relied on their cooperation to work at high speed. ‘No matter how despotic and powerful were the Taylorist methods in the workplace, the

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production machine was not omnipotent in controlling working bodies’ (Ngai 2005: 91), and sometimes, in moments of pressure, workers would slow down collectively and silently (Ngai 2005: 92). Similarly, the production process in other types of assembly line, as in garment factories or any other type of production that is not bound to a non-­stop conveyor belt, may allow the work speed to be slowed down as an act of resistance. However, glass production, as practiced in Mladost, did not leave any space for such actions. The non-­stop conveyor belt was a ‘new’ condition introduced after privatization, one that the management presented as an inevitable aspect of this ‘new’ technology. This introduced coercion through the impersonal power of the machine to impose a faster pace on a never-­ending production process. In fact, the Hot End could regulate the work speed. One wonders why, therefore, did production not slow down at such moments, since the pressure on packing was becoming extreme. An important reason is that the Hot End employees would get an extra monthly bonus depending on the speed of production and the overall output. This was not the case for the workers at the Cold End. Therefore, Cold End workers on the packing machines were in constant conflict with the Hot End workers at one end, and with the casual workers who heavily overloaded the production line at the other. Moreover, the management would claim that cutting the speed of the production would anger the clients who were checking their production in real time. The fourth line, which was running quickly the day Liliana was due on it, was connected to the online system and the client company was receiving instant information about the output. This often put additional pressure on the production site. Managers avoided responsibility for the speeding up of production, accusing ‘the client’ and ‘the market’ for it and blaming ‘the technology’. The non-­stop temporality of the line became an unavoidable condition due to ‘the clients’ and ‘the market’, which was also objectified by ‘the technology’. At such moments, Mladost’s status as a subcontractor for another company was evident on the shop floor. Managers emphasized their desire that the work should be done collectively and intensively in order to meet the clients’ demands. However, although it was a mass production factory, Mladost shared many similarities with small subcontractors who intensified work at the demands of the contracting company (Goddard 1996; Smart and Smart 2006). Thus, the bottle produced at the Hot End a few minutes earlier would arrive at the packing machine already carrying a variety of meanings. For those at the packing machine end, the speed of the bottles on the conveyor revealed information about colleagues at the Hot End, in quality control, the client and the management. Liliana knew that her day at work would

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Figure 2.6.  The Cold End: Placing the carton correctly a few seconds before the arrival of the next level of bottles. © Dimitra Kofti

be very hard because the Hot End would not cut the speed of production, and in the event that she complained about the overloaded production line, the manager would most probably say that the client was in a hurry and that there was no time to waste. Moreover, he would probably remind

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her that during this period of ‘crisis’ they could not afford to displease the client. She also knew that the Litex workers would do their best to overload the conveyor belt with more bottles. The production line in Mladost was precisely designed to coerce Liliana into working hard, leaving her with almost no space for resistance, except to quit. Refusing to pack at the speed the bottles arrived would simply result in broken glass around the machine and even more work on her part to somehow clean while packing. Out of desperation in attempting to deal with the overloaded belt, the women Mladost employed at the Cold End experienced moments of extreme anger, which they directed against temporary workers, as well as the Hot End workers and managers. This did not mean that workers at this location did not also have a larger view of diverse conflicts of exploitation and the pressures of the politics of production and ‘the market’. Coercion and consent coexisted interchangeably along with the flow of bottles, the subsequent conflicts and the supervision of the managers and ‘the market’. An important aspect of daily life along the conveyor belt was the way the workers assessed their bodily relationship with the machine.

Dancing with the Machine The intensity of the work brought with it tensions and often anger. Nevertheless, the workers still coped by developing images of the machine as a personalized, anthropomorphic ‘dancing partner’ (tantsuva s mashinata) or as a machine that one has to ‘chase after’ (goni mashinata). Burawoy (1979) described how the game of ‘making out’ was an escape from boredom and a way to show one’s ability to both oneself and one’s colleagues, who also played. At Mladost, the experience of the packing machine, although repetitive, did not necessarily cause boredom to the workers; rather, its rapid work speed mainly caused anger and a human– machine competition over the tempo. Managing to dance with the machine was a sign of workers’ agency, while chasing after the machine was a sign of the machine’s stronger agency over the worker. However, it is important to mention that this anthropomorphic view of the machine was mainly expressed by regular workers in them viewing themselves as ‘dancers’, in contrast to their view of temporary workers, who were the ‘chasers’. While ‘dancing’ described a temporal condition of the production process, it also had implications on the broader temporal distinction of the regular and casual work status. In understanding this distinction of who was a ‘dancer’ and who was a ‘chaser’, which was strongly connected to shop floor hierarchies and the speed of the packing machine, I will continue to describe the experience of the machine.

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At the end of each conveyor belt, there is one worker, the sorter (sortirovachka), responsible for operating the machine that loads the pallets with the bottles that are arriving at the end of the conveyor. This work requires standing and then moving quickly, achieving various tasks in parallel during the whole eight-­hour shift, with a fifteen-­minute or half-­hour break in between. The break depended on whether there was a worker available from another section to replace the worker needing a break. Usually, a worker from the quality control section would replace the worker at the packing machine for a while. In practice this meant that the quality control unit had no worker during this time, but given the shortage of workers at the Cold End because of the number of layoffs, this was the only possible way to organize a break. Exploring the ways that the time pressure felt at the machine was experienced is important in grasping the relationships that developed among casual and regular workers, as well as those at the Hot and Cold Ends. Building a pallet of approximately two thousand bottles takes around fifteen minutes, although depending on the speed of the conveyor, the time can range from thirteen to nineteen minutes. During this time, the operator has to position the heavy wooden pallet on the machine, very close to, and opposite, the end of the conveyor. Then, she has to put a thin plastic film, followed by a harder plastic cover, on the wooden pallet and press a button, which moves an iron shell towards the pallet; the shell at this point comes close to the worker’s head, and she has to take care not to be injured while positioning the whole thing correctly. She has to keep an eye simultaneously on the non-­stop moving conveyor and check whether the machine correctly positions the arriving bottles, which often does not happen as it should, thereby allowing the bottles to fall. Falling bottles makes packing impossible unless the worker manages to reorder them again by hand. Thus, as well as constantly moving around the machine, she also has to keep her eye permanently on the bottles that are arriving. While preparing the new pallet and taking care of the bottles’ stability at the end of the moving conveyor, she has to go to the newly prepared pallet, which is approximately two metres high, and wrap it with a plastic film, a task that requires a smooth and dangerous movement around the pallet and the edges of the machine. This has to be done very quickly because another automatic machine will soon arrive to collect the pallet and transfer it to the last packaging machine, which will cover it with a harder plastic film, beneath which it will travel on the fork-­lift trucks. Meanwhile, the conveyor is getting full of bottles, and the worker has to start building a new pallet. When she is sure that everything is positioned correctly, she has to press a button and then another machine comes towards the bottles

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from above and captures them using inflated elastic tubes. This machine transfers the bottles up and towards the pallet, moves down again and finally positions the bottles on the pallet. Once empty, it moves back, above the end of the conveyor. While the bottle-­carrying machine is moving, the worker has to prepare the next layer of bottles on the pallet. She has to take care of the positions of the bottles at the end of the conveyor and usually (because it is not possible for the machine to order the bottles evenly towards the end), while they are still moving, she has to manually remove four or five bottles from the first line approaching the end. If she fails to act on time, the elastic tubes will capture only a few bottles, and others will start falling. This is an almost constant problem that can only be solved by one more manual movement. When she is sure that the bottles are positioned correctly, she has to press the button to bring the machine with the inflating elastic down again to collect the next layer. Meanwhile, she has to quickly go back to the pallet and position another plastic cover above the first layer of the bottles, pressing another button, which will bring the iron shell up to the height of the next layer. During this process, the worker has to find some time to bring the next heavy wooden pallet close to the machine in order to get it prepared while the current one is still being built. Building the pallet continues until the sixth or seventh layer, depending on the size of the bottle and the client’s requirements regarding the size of pallets. While building a pallet, she also has to find some time to print out four copies of the document that contains the pallet’s barcode, scanning it on a portable gun-­like scanner, which informs the factory’s online system that this pallet has been packed. These scanners were often broken or ran out of batteries, resulting in great stress on the shop floor. In such cases, she has to run to the manager’s office and ask for another scanner or for a battery, since the pallet should not leave the packing machine undocumented. When the documents have been printed out, she has to register the pallet’s serial number on a file and glue the four A4 documents onto each of the pallet’s four sides. The glue used is made of a mixture of powder and water, and although things would have been much easier with an easier material to glue, this was the cheapest material. Once or twice per shift, whenever the worker runs out of glue, she then has to find some additional time during the cycle of the machine’s movement to get some more powder and mix it. She almost runs to fetch the powder, available some metres away from the machine, taking the risk of having an accumulation of bottles at the end of the conveyor. During this frantic activity occasionally the machine is blocked because the bottles fall. She not only then has to reorder the bottles but also sweep the area around the machine

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Figure 2.7.  Synchronizing with the machine. © Dimitra Kofti

and remove the broken glass, the worker on the packaging shift being held responsible for maintaining a clean environment around the machine. The above description was of a typical fifteen-­minute process repeated continuously until the end of the shift; that is, approximately thirty times. The machine has a specific speed, and during the shift, the worker has absolutely no power to change its speed. When the production line becomes faster, as in the example described ­above – ­a speed-­up, which occurred often, – she has to get used to the new speed. There is no other way to deal with it, since the bottles reach the end of the conveyor and must be packed. If they are not packed, they fall off the conveyor, and then the work becomes harder as bottles accumulate and block the conveyor and eventually the entire line. Any such mistake may result in the worker being strongly criticized by the manager and, potentially, end up being fired. The frequency of such moments that things went wrong was not regular. There were shifts that this could happen for a couple of times and other shifts that would run relatively smoothly for several days in a row. Nevertheless, the potentiality of such events produced stress and tension on the lines. When something goes wrong, there is no way for one person to deal with this incident on their own, but often there are no available people around to help. The only ones there who can help are the colleagues from

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the other production lines. If everything is working well on their line, they can leave their own machines for a few seconds to help in between their own multi-­tasking. Otherwise, the shop floor manager may help, if he is around. During the evening and nightshifts, there are even fewer staff around because there are no managers and no other people available to help. Helping a colleague on the line next to you is an essential act when she has to deal with an overloaded production line, or an accumulation of glass due to faulty machinery. Nevertheless, at this position on the production line, not helping your colleague was the only available act of resistance to the pressures of the line.18 Someone working with an already rapidly moving machine could not easily run to help the line next to them. However, not helping a colleague in moments of high stress created an additional conflict among workers at the same location. As discussed above, the process I have described becomes even more rapid when some of the already packed bottles are found to be ­defective – a  usual occurrence, and an almost regular aspect of the process. In such cases, the quality control section was accused of failing to identify a problematic row of bottles that had gone all the way through to the end of the process. Sometimes, the manager also accused the women at the packaging position of not having noticed that the bottles they were packing were defective, as if there was time for them to observe the tiny details that could define a bottle as defective. In these cases, the manager tended to criticize the whole shift, who, he asserted, was not working ‘collectively’ as a ‘team’ and not being careful. What he did not mention was the fact that between the quality control section and the packing machine there used to be an additional position at which a worker in front of a screen used a strong light to check every single bottle passing along the conveyor to the packing machine. The current shortage, caused by lay-­offs, left this position empty, leaving the workers on the line to somehow work ‘collectively’ and fill this gap. Given their already difficult and complicated tasks, this was almost impossible. Ironically, while the production line generated conflicts based on piece-­ rate and wage payments, Hot/Cold divisions and market pressures, the management promoted employee’s cohesion and ‘teamwork’. The gap in the production line as a result of layoffs had to be filled by the workers’ cooperation.19 The Litex workers who added the bottles to the conveyor were paid at piece rates ­and – ­given that they were obliged to be in the factory during the whole shift but only got paid for the pieces they worked on, not for their time spent while being ­available – ­had no motivation to make the lives of the waged workers any easier or to work ‘collectively’. Indeed, the money they earned for each pallet was so small that they often said it was unfair not to have a regular wage like the others. The other Litex

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workers, who were positioned at the end of the production line, did get a monthly wage that was higher than the average monthly payment for those working on piece rates. However, their wages were significantly lower than those of the regular workers at the same position. Although the hierarchy was strong and the workers at the packing machine were aware of the conflict that this distinction, imposed by the management, created on the production line, and that Litex workers had a strong motivation to work speedily, they still got angry with them on many occasions. Although this anger did not lift their anger at the structure of the production process imposed by the company, they still valued their work as more important than that of the temporary workers, a self-­worth which generated a motivation to work, as I discuss in the next section. In this sense, ‘shop floor culture’ was not just a culture of worker’s consent, as in Burawoy’s (1979) case, but rather of a combination of consenting to these hierarchical inequalities and of anger at the pressures of the coercive conditions that were caused by these inequalities.

Dancers and Runners Although the packing process is highly repetitive and the machine’s speed does not easily allow improvisation, workers distinguished their individual techniques from others’ and pointed to the differences in these techniques that gave value to their work. It was very impressive how the women at the Cold End managed all these tasks and finished their shifts; at every single movement they were punctual and efficient. They would remove their bodies one second before the moving machine was about to touch their heads, and they would put their hands into the dangerous path of the approaching part with the inflating elastics and remove them just a fraction of a second before the machine could cause them injury. Workers at this position often said that there was a difference between ‘dancing with the machine’ and ‘running after the machine’ or ‘chasing after the conveyor belt’. Experience led them to develop a relatively more controlled and rhythmical bodily movement, as well as increase their confidence. Sometimes, one could tell whether a worker was very stressed while operating the fast machine or whether she would operate it with swift movements, but still in a relatively relaxed style. In the end, the high speed of production easily transformed the most experienced ‘dancer’ into a ‘runner’. The machine was humanized by being turned into a dancing partner, which placed it in a much more equal position with the worker than being the chased object. ‘Dancing with the machine’ required synchronization and control over the machine’s power and speed; ‘chasing after the

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machine’ underlined the machine’s power over the worker and the worker’s weakness in having to cooperate with its speed. These different perceptions of human interaction with the machine were held about identical machines, and the same machines and the same working conditions were subject to different views and bodily experiences. Moreover, these experiences and moods of interaction with the machine were, at the same time, subjective, despite following collective patterns. Individual performance at the machine was assessed by workers as ‘clever’ (dancer) or ‘stupid’ (chaser), but this subjectivity was related to the larger divisions between regular and casual work, divisions related to the type of contract and one’s age and position at the conveyor belt. I observed comments about ‘dancing’ and ‘running’ being mentioned in describing those who worked at identical machines and apparently, to my eyes, with identical movements. I now move to explore what were the wider implications of these comments for relationships on the shop floor. Putting the plastic cover on one layer of bottles before or after pressing the machine’s button; putting glue on two or four corners of the paper; scanning it when it is already glued or beforehand: these are the variations that may mark a worker as ‘clever’ and/or ‘capable’ (umna and/or opravna) or ‘stupid’ (glupava). Indications of an individual’s level of ‘cleverness’ would reflect some of the details of how they ran the machine. Women made sporadic comments about these distinctions. One basic argument would be that pressing the button before or after a certain act would save time and that the worker would spend less energy. This was, to my eyes, only partially true because, while differences might exist between workers, in the end, all of them would pack as many bottles as the machine would place in front of them and they could all make almost exactly the same moves. Indeed, as I also gradually learned, having acquired more experience on the machine, one learns how to spend less energy. While, at first glance, the differences were quite small and insignificant, they were used as evidence of competition among workers. One day Svetlana, aged 42, told me: ‘Don’t glue the paper before you scan it, of course you learned it from Dessi, who worked with you yesterday. She does not know well. She’s not clever.’ I followed Svetlana’s advice that day and compared the two practices. Both needed exactly the same time. In fact, it was more convenient for me to glue the paper first, then position it on the pallet, and then scan it without holding it. I also noticed that the order in which different workers glued and scanned was almost 50-­50. The choice seemed random to me and did not seem to make any difference to the process or pace of work. Svetlana, a regular worker, would often tell me that she was one of the few educated people among her colleagues, since she had got an accountant’s specialization in high

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school. She would often mention her previous job as a secretary in another company from which she was laid off; after losing her job in the mid-­1990s, she had worked at Mladost ever since. She would also tell me that, given her previous work, she actually deserved to get a better position than the one she currently had. She would stress that she could think in practical and clever ways that helped her even in her current position. It was mainly her past position that valued her work in the present. Svetlana’s description of Dessi as a ‘stupid’ worker was not exceptional among regular workers, who defined themselves as ‘dancers’ and described casual staff as ‘runners’. Casual workers did not use such characterizations, but they did comment to me privately that it was inappropriate to call them ‘stupid’. It was quite usual for the regular workers to comment negatively about casual workers, especially in moments of time pressure. They would usually describe them as ‘stupid’ during moments of time pressure on the line but, when away from the workplace, they would mostly underline the structural divisions between the groups and mention that it was ‘a pity’ or ‘unfair’ they had to do this badly paid job. Dessi, 58 years old, who scanned ‘the wrong way’ according to Svetlana, was one of the workers employed by Litex. She started work at Mladost in the late 1970s but was laid off at the end of the 1990s, later coming back through Litex and working at the packaging station. In one of our meetings outside the factory, while speaking about Litex and casual workers’ difficulties regarding the production line, she said: ‘Our colleagues [the regular ones] and the manager believe that we are stupid; they say that it is stupid to stay at this work and get paid so little money ... but what can we do ... where can we go? But you know something, once we made it, we built the NDK, we are not stupid, they should not treat us like that!’ NDK is the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, a strong symbol of modernity built in the late 1970s and opened in 1981. Dessi, who was proud of ‘building it’, was not physically involved in the construction, though as she later explained she had contributed to it through her extra work on Saturdays, a usual socialist practice of compulsory ‘voluntary’, work. She included her colleagues from Litex in a community of people who contributed not only to the company, but also to society in general, stressing the previous model of socialist work as helping the wider society. Dessi, like many of her colleagues, often mentioned their previous positions in order to show that their current one was not the one they should have. Both Svetlana and Dessi drew on their past experiences, which was what mainly instilled value into their current work. They both described their downward mobility and both valued their work through their previous posts, this value being drawn from different qualities of the image of the ‘ideal’ worker. On the one hand, Svetlana gained value through her individual

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achievements and education, which helped her maintain a job and her at least relatively better status in relation to temporary work, although it was significantly worse than her previous one. On the other hand, Dessi underlined her personal value as a worker who contributed to her society through compulsory unpaid work. While in Bulgaria this kind of compulsory ‘voluntary’ work under socialism is generally considered evidence of the oppressive character of the regime, unpaid work on the construction of highly symbolic buildings and on important socialist projects still retained its value and was a source of individual pride for many older workers in Mladost who had experienced status degradation like Dessi. Dessi, like many of her older colleagues, would stress the value of their collective work during the socialist period, saying ‘We have worked for Bulgaria/we have worked for the society’. However, this did not necessarily mean that they were uncritical of the previous regime. While Dessi underlined the values of collectivity and Svetlana underlined individual achievement, they both emphasized their pasts to increase their self-­esteem. Moreover, they both shared a common experience of downward mobility and a common potential future trajectory, that of further downward mobility and lay-­offs. Workers in both regular and casual employment draw lines between the two groups. The regular workers often said that, although their job was very difficult, tiring and the wages not sufficient, they had stable incomes and health insurance, unlike workers from Litex. Litex’s existence nonetheless made their difficulties more bearable. They distinguished themselves from the casual workers and asserted that they deserved their regular employment while making frequent accusations against their colleagues from Litex during meetings with their managers. Regular workers would also imply or say that they had not been laid off because they were better than those who had left. Litex workers in their turn felt privileged that they had ‘made it’ back to the factory, in contrast to those laid-­off workers who were still unemployed. Workers from both groups strongly defined themselves and the value of their work positions in relation to those who were considered to be in a worse position in this hierarchy and on the ladder of ongoing loss. As already noted, despite shop floor fragmentation, everyone viewed themselves as members of the same group and often said ‘We workers have always been workers’. Used in various circumstances, the phrase often established continuity with the socialist past. As I discuss in the final chapter, this phrase was used to show that workers demonstrated awareness of their working-­class position, which they defined in opposition to enduring structures of power. While they defined themselves as members of the same large social group, with common needs, experiences of work and lifestyles, and while they were also related through kinship, as I shall

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discuss in the next chapter, they also drew distinctions among themselves. These distinctions were related to the different meanings people attributed to their work. One set of these meanings derives from the types of employment in Mladost that give meaning to the personal identity through judgmental remarks. These remarks spring from assessments of the work around and with the machine. Moreover, workers mention the human value that derives from their past. Dessi spoke of the worth of the previous regime. She drew on a sphere of ethical values where past and present, personal identity and trajectory, posts occupied earlier and currently, intermingle in workers’ views of worthiness. What determines the worth of people and their work is wider notions of the effects of past and present, of the kind of technical skills exercised, of those exercised in the past, the positions they held at the Hot or Cold End, their gender and the type of contract they are on. Views of value on the shop floor diverge; they are about features of human worth, taken in the context of the tangible and intangible webs of global forces.

Motivation on the Shop Floor: Consent, Discipline, Value and the Meaning of Work Mladost’s shop floor relations, where various regimes of value converge, call for a complex understanding of the notions of consent, coercion, as well as power and resistance, as various types of employment, different external global and local forces, technologies of production and discipline, ideologies of work and diverse employment schemes and types influenced its production lines. The articulations of consent with coercion, discipline and value allow insights into the wider conditions of postsocialist flexible capitalism, the promotion of a new culture of competitiveness, the effects of new disciplinary methods and relationships of power and exploitation. These notions are interrelated and tend to become indistinguishable in Mladost’s post-­Fordist context. The notion of consent, which has been at the centre of older (Burawoy 1979) and newer studies of work (De Neve 2006; Mollona 2009), may include not only complex and ambivalent stances to discipline and coercion but also people’s choices, motivations and constraints and, as in the case of Mladost, awareness of the dynamic relations of power and class. Although as a notion it might shift attention from direct practices or resistance, it may as well reveal complex ways that people respond and critically think of the organization of work, all of which might open up views to people’s motivation at work as well as to potential practices of resistance.

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Burawoy (1979) defined consent to mean the ways in which relationships of exploitation become invisible on the shop floor, a place where one might find other relationships of great importance for workers. In his argument, the confrontational relationships between employers and workers are obfuscated by horizontal conflicts on the shop floor, a process that he describes as a manufactured consent (ibid.). Burawoy’s influential ethnography of a Chicago factory demonstrated the ways in which workers on the shop floor consented to their own exploitation by making work a competitive game among themselves. He argued that a shop floor culture of ‘making out’ motivated workers to gain bonuses and compete with each other and that lateral antagonism, which is found in many work settings, often shifts the attention of workers from other forms of antagonism with managers (Burawoy 1979: 67). Burawoy drew attention to workers’ active participation and criticized previous views that analysed the shop floor simply as a place of opposition between the workforce and the capitalists. Mladost workers were also competing with each other, even in jobs that seemed identical, such as those in the packing unit who were arguing about who was better ‘dancing with the machines’. Moreover, coercion and discipline was further complicated by ‘the market’, an agent with the power to determine the speed of the machine. Whenever managers issued orders to speed up production, they put the blame on ‘the market’ or on the firm’s clients, especially those receiving real-­time information about the speed and quality of the production. This time pressure caused tensions among the workers, especially between male Hot End and female Cold End workers, and to a certain extent consent to workplace inequalities, since workers focused a lot on their conflicts with others. However, workers in Mladost also remarked on the firm’s coercive managerial methods, which relied on ‘the market’, which managers treated as the unavoidable power that drove every managerial decision. Therefore, unlike the workers in Burawoy’s case, Mladost’s expressed awareness of the complex wider powers that were responsible for the pressures on their working on the machines. Burawoy (1985, 1979) further introduced a rather rigid distinction between the first period of ‘despotic capitalism’ and the second period of ‘hegemonic capitalism’, whereby the former imposes coercion on the shop floor and the latter achieved productivity through workers’ consent. A third period of capitalism has been described by Burawoy (1985) as ‘hegemonic despotism’, and his observations, made during the mid-­1980s concerning the new forms of production that were being influenced by the relocation of capital, are still timely. This new despotism is based on diverse fears at the level of the shop floor, especially the fear of disinvestment, plant closures or the transfer of parts of the production elsewhere

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as a result of global market competition (Burawoy 1985: 150), all of which seemed prominent in Mladost’s daily life three decades later. The global economic transformations of recent decades have also brought new kinds of fear in Mladost’s workplace. The constant possibility of the capital flight ‘elsewhere’, driven also by ‘the market’, that was central to daily discussion on Mladost’s shop floor, grew to become an additional source of discipline. ‘The client’ and ‘the market’ were important forces of fear and discipline as the management described all difficult working conditions as being imposed by the will of ‘the clients’, ‘the shareholders’, or ‘the market’s’ will. Mollona (2005: 184) has suggested that different individuals comply with different rules of their exploitation because they have different ideas of value and profitability at work. His ethnography from Sheffield, where outsourcing and wage labour, and small workshops and larger industrial units are strongly connected, points to a new capitalist trend, ‘a new despotic regime’ where, similarly to Mladost, coercion and consent are not easily distinguishable (Mollona 2009b: 177). Similarly, De Neve (2006) also employs Burawoy’s concept of consent and discusses horizontal conflicts on the shop floor that are seen as largely obscuring and disguising vertical conflicts between employers and workers (ibid.: 85). He argues that ethnographies of the shop floor may reveal how interactions there can shape both conflicts and solidarities. His research on relations in respect of production on the shop floor of a small-­scale dyeing company demonstrates that hierarchies and power are not merely defined by structural positions of power, nor is authority merely generated by the employer’s power over workers. Rather, this is also done in relation to supervision, production tasks and labour organization (ibid.: 135). His ethnography of workers and supervisors reveals the complex hierarchies of power that emerge when the supervisors are in between the two groups. De Neve’s ethnography provides a more subtle analysis of consent than Burawoy’s and reveals workers’ consent without losing sight of their critical views of the relationships of exploitation that influence their lives (ibid.: 13). Similarly, in Mladost, daily conflict between workers only partially obfuscates other tensions between the workforce and the management, the owners and the clients. On an everyday basis, workers are mostly preoccupied with conflicts among workers, which are largely influenced by the division of labour between regular and casual and with the intertwined relations of gender, age, ethnicity and skill. Such conflict takes place on the shop floor during their daily experience of work and the pressures caused by the organization of the production process. However, Mladost workers in discussions in their homes emphasized that behind their internal tensions were powerful players whose decisions largely influenced the conditions under which their lives on the shop floor were spent.

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Based on Marxist ideas on coercion as the basic power exercised upon the proletariat (Marx and Engels 1848) Braverman (1974) analysed how Taylorism, through ‘scientific management’, brought discipline to the shop floor, and demonstrated how new technologies led to workers’ de-­skilling, a process that rendered workers easily replaceable and therefore weaker in practices of resistance. In Mladost, the conditions of post-­Fordist capitalism and the introduction of the new technologies seem to have similarities in relation to worker’s deskilling and gradual loss of agency over the production process, especially for those who used to blow glass and now operate machines of mass production. Workers’ motivations draw also, as I have shown in this chapter, from their relationship with the machine and its tempo, from their ability to ‘dance’ with it, from their past work positions and from previous prestigious meanings of industrial labour. Anthropological accounts of work have emphasized the need for a broad understanding of the meaning of work, one based on an equally broad understanding of value (Graeber 2001; Harris 2007). Harris (2007), through her analysis ranging from Aristotelian philosophy to Christian ideas about work, has argued that the association of work with coercion is deeply rooted in Western thought, but that this is not universal. She argues that the Western dichotomy between freedom and coercion did not exist in her example of an Andean ‘joy in work’. A closer look at Mladost’s daily life suggests that despite the coercive and disciplinary techniques, work is also situationally experienced as a source of pleasure and pride. Moreover, a close look at the larger processes of the political economy suggest that the complex forces that meet at the production site bear diverse relations of power and regimes of value. As Narotzky noted, the blurring of value regimes seems not to be paradoxical but inherent to conditions of current capitalism that provides the space for the ‘compression of value regimes’ (2015: 269). In this entanglement of value regimes in Mladost, the changing meanings of postsocialist work played an additional crucial role, as the statue of the worker who ‘made it’ reminded to those entering the plant for their shift.

Conclusion The multiple levels of outsourcing and the forces that meet on the production line contribute to workforce division, which has been described as a ‘broken glass’ fragmentation. Mladost outsources for clients that may inspect the production lines through an electronic system connecting them to the production process in real time. These inspections and demands exert post-­Fordist pressures on a Fordist-­type conveyor belt.

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Global pressures become tangible on the production line where flexible work is practiced in relation to two conditions that are experienced as inflexible: the technology and the market. The managers discharge themselves from responsibility for the difficult working conditions, pointing to a technology and a machinery that cannot be slowed down, even though it actually can be, and to clients who are distant and need only justify their decisions to ‘the market’. Although distant, the clients are also present through the coercive electronic system. I described this as a kind of insidious, latent coercion which is also experienced as an omnipresent, personalized actor. The decisions of the management and the owners have now been taken by external forces over whom the former seem to have no power. By underlining the role of the factory as an outsourcer, the management stresses the relationships of dependence on a range of different actors. These actors are presented as dependent on the impersonal market (Lee and LiPuma 2002), with its strong and non-­negotiable power on the shop floor. Although socialist decision-­making is often described by workers as having been distant because of socialist centralization, Mladost employees experience the current decision-­making on the production line as impersonal, distant and more dispersed. Invisible, anonymous shareholders and distant client-­inspectors, present through technology, impose their power on the shop floor and enhance fragmentation among employees. This process of imposing power is further complicated by the market’s almost magical power. The market is a metonym of non-­negotiable power, a power that from being impersonal is becoming an almost personal and tangible actor on the conveyor belt itself. A second level of outsourcing occurs within the factory. The outsourcer, Litex, provides Mladost with workers for its production lines. In fact, these are often laid-­off workers formerly employed by Mladost. Their experience and skill are still being used, but they are now ‘away’ and invisible. They are locally dislocated. Contrary to the neoliberal myth of management, often quoted by the HR management in Mladost, of the employee as an ‘entrepreneurial self’ who may upgrade his or her career according to performance at work, workers of Litex could never be employed by Mladost under the company’s regulations. Therefore, the most likely mobility was downward. Hence, workers would often say, ‘once in Litex, forever Litex’ to describe the claustrophobic environment of their casual employment. Intense tensions are reproduced through the distinctions of employment types, skills and positions, the coercive presence of ‘the market’ and the constant possibility of further lay-­offs. Consent and coercion seem to have porous boundaries in this context and resonate with Mollona’s description of a ‘new despotic regime’ (2009b: 177) of capitalism where a

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variety of types of labour and forces and regimes of value (Narotzky 2015) blur the lines between the two. Furthermore, Mladost’s shop floor shows workers making sense of their conditions through conflicts among themselves, while being aware that the divisions which bring them into conflict are in favour of the process of production. Antagonistic relationships on the shop floor generated by the relations of production do not necessarily result in an obfuscation of relations of exploitation. This was highly visible in workers’ private conversations, held mostly away from the shop floor. The conflicts in question are indeed often in favour of the production process because the daily experience of the tough working conditions keeps workers’ attention fixed on their own disputes. Burawoy’s (1979) analysis that vertical conflicts between capitalists and workers are transformed into horizontal disputes between workers through a process of consent which fragments and distributes the conflict does not apply to Mladost, where workers have to deal with a variety of global forces. Given the complex relationships that have been developed through the parallel levels of the outsourcing, the potential transformation of managers into the owners of the small companies and the continual presence of clients and the company’s owners, not only are horizontal relationships dispersed, but so too are the vertical ones. However, the forces of power are not obfuscated by the workers’ conflicts; they may seem impersonal and difficult to grasp, but workers show awareness of this complexity. These forces dictate the real conditions of the conveyor belt’s operation and speed, which in turn define the daily experience of work. An experience that, according to many workers, is filtered by the coercive power of the market in similar ways to the once coercive power of the Party. The workers who deal with these complex forces in front of the machine are simultaneously in mutual conflict, although they also emphasized that they ultimately belong to the same ­group – ­a powerless workforce sharing common fears of downward mobility. Their relationships and their sense of common belonging, despite strong antagonisms, resonates to a great extent with Kalb’s (1997) relational approach to class, which relies on E.P. Thompson’s (1978) approach, which opens up a view in a wide range of forces and values related to workers’ lives and experience of labour. An important motivation to work comes from how workers value their positions. At the lowest shop floor positions, it is often their past, rather than a promising future, that gives them the motivation to work. There were two different pasts that generated value. One was defined by previous experiences, drawing on past socialist discourses of collective work that offer benefits to the wider society. The other drew on individual previous education and employment histories and emphasized individual rather

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than collective worth. Furthermore, workers often made sense of their fragmentation and inequalities by comparing individual performances at machines of identical speed and operation. There is a difference between being able to ‘dance with the machine’ and having to ‘run after the machine’. This difference is related to the qualitative experience of working with the non-­stop machine. Its product outcome was irrelevant to the quality of the operator as a dancer or a chaser. This vision of machine work has important implications for the sense of time and the human-­machine relationships. Moreover, workers with regular positions were the ones who defined themselves as ‘dancers’ and who described temporary staff as ‘runners’, thus reproducing the newly formed divisions. In this context of asymmetrical structural inequalities, including of pay, on the shop floor, workers’ relationships were further complicated by kinship and gender relationships, the theme of the next chapter.

Notes   1. Here I mean equal payment in terms of wages up until the period of privatization. In Chapter 1, I discussed other forms of inequality related to access to resources that occurred during socialism.   2. Women’s comments about the attractiveness and unattractiveness of men who were in higher positions were very common, as with the women in Pun Ngai’s Chinese example (Ngai 2005). De Neve analyzes women’s teasing, jokes and flirting as ways of criticizing and ridiculing patriarchal values, gender identities and inequalities (De Neve 2006: 119). In Mladost, besides women’s ironic comments about the sex appeal, or lack of it, of the managers and owners, flirting and intimate relationships among workers, as well as gossip and rumours about sexual relationships, were important, as I will describe in the next chapter.  3. In Bulgarian, ‘our people’ (nashte hora) very often refers to co-­ nationals. In this case this expression does not mean that Sasho is placing the managers in a common group with the workers, but rather that it accentuates the conflict.   4. He used the word ‘dalavera’, a very common word in Bulgarian slang to describe deceit and practices of corruption.   5. One can find here an indication of the analogy of the salaries within the different shop floor groups. This information derives from workers’ responses, managers and pay slips I had the chance to see. The salaries of the Hot End workers in Mladost were higher than the relatively low paid public sector jobs in Bulgaria. For example, during the period of my research, a schoolteacher would earn a salary similar to a regular Cold End worker, which is half the salary of a Hot End worker.  6. Similarly, according to Eeva Kesküla, workers in Karaganda considered unions to be ineffective. While one may find similarities in postsocialist settings, such responses to unionism seem to share similarities in various settings across the world. Yet, in postsocialist regions they are also related to disappointment with the communist period.

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  7. In the last chapter, I focus on the importance of ‘old communists’ in the factory’s everyday politics of labour and on their association with their unclear acquisition of power.  8. Most ethnographies of Roma portray them as resistant to regular paid work, which they consider to be specific to non-­Roma workers (Horváth 2005: 32). In the very few accounts that discuss Roma as wage-­earners, it is inevitably for manual unskilled work. For example, the Hungarian Roma studied by Michael Stewart were employed as unskilled workers in the communist factory (Stewart 1997: 97–112). In postsocialist Hungary, permanent jobs for Roma range from ‘garbage-­men, sewer-­cleaner’ to ‘mason assistants’ (Horváth 2005: 41). There are many similarities between Bulgaria and Hungary in this respect. Nevertheless, Roma workers were a tiny minority in Mladost. In this book, I am not focusing specifically on ethnic distinctions on the shop floor, although Roma women and men mostly worked at the lower end of the hierarchy of jobs, along with ethnic Bulgarian women.   9. See, for example: (Westwood 1985; Ong 1987; Yelvington 1995; Dunn 2004; Ngai 2005; De Neve 2006). 10. Managerial meanings of flexibility and the implications of this diversity on salaries is the main theme in Chapter 4. 11. These sectors employed approximately fifteen people each. 12. The ethnography in Chapter 5 looks at how maintenance staff developed practices of resistance to their lower payments. 13. There were five in total, plus one more who was the general production manager. 14. He actually meant both young in age and new to the company. In Greek, the same word is used for both. 15. The outcome was determined by the number of pallets that ended up in the warehouses, ready to sell, not the actual production number. 16. ‘Пазарът решава’ (Pazarat reshava). 17. I discuss this in more detail in Chapter 4. 18. In Chapter 4, I discuss how not helping was intended as an act of criticism on the stressful working conditions. 19. In Chapter 4, I discuss how workers denied ‘cooperating’ in opposition to the differences in salaries among regular workers at the same position, which were widely viewed as unfair, and how this resulted in inefficiencies at the production site.

3

° Home-Work Gender, Household and Intimate Relationships across and beyond the Production Line

The flexibilization of labour has affected gender, household and intimate relationships on Mladost’s shop floor, and vice versa. Although Mladost is a mass production factory, its role as a subcontractor and its internal divisions over subcontracting within the plant generate characteristics most commonly found in the anthropological literature focusing on small firms. Conversely, the distinctions between regular and casual work, which are important in Mladost, are mostly found in the anthropological literature relating to large-­scale industries. Mladost shares similarities with both global large-­ scale assembly lines and small-­ scale petty-­ capitalist firms, which is enabled by Mladost’s localized dislocation. In this chapter, I discuss these trends by focusing on familial and intimate relations among workers. Kinship and gender relations among workers, both on the shop floor and outside the factory, which were often enforced and reproduced by the regime of flexible production on Mladosts’s shop floor, further divided women at the Cold End. The distinctions between casual and regular staff and between Hot End and Cold End workers were widely experienced on the shop floor. This was due to the distinctions of employment status and types of labour among these groups and the diversity of payments and work speeds, which was the focus of the previous chapter. These distinctions were intertwined with gendered ones between the male Hot End and the female Cold End workers. In researching workers’ motivations to work once at the production site (Parry 2005), I have focused on how hierarchies on the shop floor, and a variety of coercive and consenting forces, contribute to the production process. Previously, I began by considering the production line in order to understand relations of power and inequality around the machines; in this chapter, the ethnography transcends the factory’s doors. As a variety of anthropological and historical studies of work and labour suggest, one needs to study the interconnections between different aspects of social life, such as gender relations, friendships, family life and household practices,

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in seeking to make sense of the dynamics developed at the production site (Meillasoux 1981; Hareven 1982; Ong 1987; Kotkin 1997; Jahoda, Lazarsfeld and Zeisel 2002; Yanagisako 2002; De Neve 2008). Here, the ethnography explores ways in which these shop floor distinctions are coupled with gender divisions and are also strongly connected to workers’ relations of kinship and intimacy, both inside the factory and in workers’ households. Family relations across the production line and beyond affect those among the different groups on the production site and bring relative stability, yet instilled with tensions to the process of production. Household relations, although often in tension (Creed 2000), play a key role in generating solidarities among workers from different sectors. Despite their conflicts at home, common household interests played a key role at work. I have concentrated on the stories of the less privileged groups on the shop floor, which I will discuss by focusing on the stories of two female workers, Gergana and Katia, and their daily and family lives, both within and outside the factory. In doing so, I seek to determine what motivates them to stay at work. Before getting into Gergana’s and Katia’s stories, the first part of the chapter engages in a discussion on aspects of family and household relations in work settings and of houses as work settings.

Family and Household Relationships at Work The flexibilization and deregulation of labour and the dispersal of production in small companies through subcontracting have resulted in increased involvement in the production process by a growing number of extended family members of existing staff and in new forms of production based on networks of kinship and neighbourhood, as indicated by a variety of sources on industrial sites in different places (Nash 1989; Stacey 1998; Smith 1999; Smart and Smart 2006; Mollona 2009b). The shift from Fordism to flexible accumulation has shifted class, as well as family relations through subcontracting, to the extent that although it gives opportunities to small scale companies it also introduces domestic and patriarchal relations into the production and brings familial conflicts and tensions within class relations (Harvey 1989: 152–53) A variety of anthropological studies of small-­scale production workshops have shown how the flexibilization of labour may result in relations of exploitation inside the family and that women’s labour remains invisible in the family context. Female labour is often culturally and socially expected as the work of a good wife and daughter, and hence it often remains invisible and not economically valued. Narotzky and Smith (2006) have demonstrated how family labour in small firms in Spain generates relations of

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exploitation within the family, where the women work longer hours, as well as also being responsible for household maintenance. Similarly, Goddard’s (1996) research on family enterprises in Naples showed that although small companies have a degree of autonomy, this is accompanied by increasing dependence on their clients and strong relationships of dependence among family members. A collection of ethnographies of petty capitalists (Smart and Smart 2006) also suggests that work in small enterprises often results in great pressures being exerted by the subcontractor on those who are both workers and dependent kin. Rothstein (2005) further argued that, besides the exploitation of dependent workers, subcontracted work involves the self-­exploitation of the managing owners through long working hours with the domestic space, the house often becoming a space of production. As Smart and Smart (2005: 3–4) argue, these new forms of capitalism, where the owners actively participate in the production process, force us to question the assumed boundaries between capital and labour in a context of globalization. The intense work of both owners and workers binds them together with the same purpose and a sense of commonality, yet workers are constantly under surveillance (Narotzky 1997). In Mladost’s case, the boundaries between capital and labour are more distinct than in the above ethnographies of small firms. Yet, there is a significant similarity in that workers from the same households had a sense of commonality about their work due to their kinship ties and household solidarities, even when they belonged to conflicting groups inside the factory, as the ethnography in this chapter demonstrates. Kinship and gender, as well as ethnic ties, are important in shaping relationships within production and enforcing discipline. Discipline is sometimes achieved within the factory through managerial techniques that erase the distinction between work and life, techniques that take advantage, for example, of gender dynamics and kinship networks (Parry, De Neve and Mollona 2009: 191). In Pun Ngai’s (2005) ethnography, many young women who are employed in a Chinese electronics factory have migrated from their home villages in rural areas to work for a short period of a few years before returning to their villages to get married. The temporary nature of the employment of these young women and their relations with their patriarchal families play an important role in how they are disciplined on the shop floor by male managers, who are mostly from urban areas. Pun Ngai (2005: 15) emphasizes that gender and sexual difference is important for the accumulation of capital in global capitalism, as various other ethnographies demonstrate (Westwood 1985; Ong 1987; Yelvington 1995; Ching Kwan 1997; Dunn 2004; Ching Kwan 2009). In Mladost, gender played an important role in the production process, since the low-­paid shop floor jobs were mostly undertaken by women. Although

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the division of labour between men and women was not as absolute here, as in Pun Ngai’s (2005) case, ideas of gender roles and household practices that attributed different roles to women and men played an important role in reproducing gender hierarchies on the shop floor. The division between casual and regular work has also been discussed in relation to kinship ties, a feature of life and work in Mladost that resonates with similar characteristics documented elsewhere in the world. Holmström (1984) has argued that kinship ties among the two groups formed by casual and regular employees in Bangalore, India, do not allow the formation of class divisions, while a different approach is suggested by Parry’s (2013, 2020) work in an Indian steel plant, where this division is reproduced in workers’ lives, forming two distinct classes with conflicting interests: the regular workers assume the characteristics of the ‘aristocracy of labour’ and consider themselves ‘middle class’, whereas the casual workers share different lifestyles and values. Parry demonstrates that kinship and neighbourhood ties do not necessarily unite the two groups. In Mladost, kinship ties between regular and casual, as well as Hot End and Cold End workers, often motivated them to work and muted their complaints about shop floor inequalities. Despite the inequalities between the different groups at the workplace, their common belonging as parts of the same households, and their common lifestyles and consumption practices, blurred the boundaries around these distinctions, meaning that they cannot easily be viewed as being in different classes. Moreover, there is another significant difference between the division Parry describes in an Indian state factory and in the Bulgarian private factory. While the former provided job security to the regular workers and a precarious status to the casual ones, the latter provided only relative job stability to the regular workers, who thus lived in constant fear of downward mobility. As discussed previously, regular employment in Mladost could easily turn into casual employment. Therefore, although the regular/casual distinction in Mladost significantly shaped relationships on the shop floor and in workers’ lives, both groups shared different degrees of employment uncertainty. This new division of labour between stable and secure employment and precarious forms of non-­unionized labour that lack security is discussed by Guy Standing (2011). He points to the emergence and gradual growth of a new class, the precariat, which shares the same characteristics based on a lack of security, a lack of unionization and employment instability. While Standing describes a global trend that largely applies to Mladost, I hesitate to describe Mladost’s fragmented workforce in terms of different classes due to the complexity of the gender and kinship relations on the shop floor and their common households. Furthermore, given the uncertainty of

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employment positions in the Bulgarian private sector, the division between regular and casual work defined different degrees of insecurity. Workers who shared a household with other workers from different groups on the shop floor often viewed their employment as contributing to their shared household and accepted relationships of inequality between those different groups, which, they would say, they might otherwise have confronted. Female Cold End workers married to male Hot End workers were more likely to accept the rapid speed of the packing machine, knowing that the bonus paid to her Hot End husband would end up in their household. Nevertheless, I am not assuming here that family relations are merely characterized by cohesion, which necessarily produces solidarity among kin that ‘naturally’ transcends solidarities among colleagues. Rather, the ethnography attempts to explore their ambivalences. Moreover, one might say that a focus on relatedness (Carsten 1995) rather than on shared household relations might bring other shop floor relationships to the fore that may be equally or more important here. However, the prominence of relationships that were mainly connected to shared households and/or extended family economic networks was very important among Mladost workers and, as I will show, they played a key role in adding to the complex conflicts and solidarities within the shop floor groups, further blurring the regimes of value at the workplace (Narotzky 2015, Kofti 2016a, Yalçın-­ Heckmann 2022). Kinship, as well as common household ties, existed among workers on the shop floor, but not between workers and managers. Although there were many workers who were the siblings, partners or members of extended families and there were some relatives among managers, I did not find a single case of a relation of kinship between a manager and a worker. Moreover, no use was made of metaphorical kinship ties among current employees, such as father-­son relations or between siblings, and there were no metaphors of the factory as a family promoted by the management, unlike in other ethnographies (Kondo 1990; De Neve 2008). The only metaphorical view of the factory as a family appeared in some interviews and daily conversations in which workers described what ‘has changed’ since privatization and/or after socialism. In such cases, the image of the lacking of family was used as a metaphor for the current state of fragmentation: ‘We used to be like a family, edno vreme’. In variance with other ethnographies, where managers or owners emphasized kinship ties (e.g. De Neve 2008), the management in Mladost clearly stated that they tended to avoid relations of kinship among the workforce because this was against the ‘principles of the HR’, as the HR manager, Rossi, put it: ‘We employ people because of their a­ bilities … ­we do not want to employ people because of their connections to ­others

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… ­we make sure we keep the best workers which, sometimes means that coincidentally they are members of the same f­amily … ­also life continues here, people fall in love, get married and have families.’ Rossi’s statement had two interconnected implications. She stated the importance of the workers’ capacities and skills that were assessed by her department or by the shop floor manager as principal criteria for getting the job. In this sense, she was describing a managerial discourse that clearly aimed at separating work and life. This was connected to another implication, namely that the new management wanted to claim that there was meritocracy and that one would get a job due to one’s abilities rather than through one’s connections, which were discursively condemned (Ragaru 2003) as practices of the socialist past. Interestingly, while the owners in De Neve’s (2008) case were quite unsuccessful in maintaining workers’ motivation by emphasizing kin ties, the management in Mladost successfully made use of the relationships on the shop floor while emphasizing the opposite. Management’s new moral values in this respect seemed to be in contradiction with the actual practice. Moreover, it was true that some kin ties were developed over time and that people entered into relationships that started on the shop floor. Having people from the same household on the shop floor was not the direct intention of the management, but as I shall argue, these relationships contributed to workers consent on the shop floor and influenced relations among workers in general, not only those among kin. Workers often viewed the work of their relatives as part of the household’s reproduction, and I think the management was aware of this fact. The emphasis the HR manager placed on showing that kin ties in the factory were not intentionally promoted was also an argument denying the possibility that the company might use these relationships in an exploitative way. I do not imply that employing workers’ relatives was necessarily planned by the management, but my understanding is that the management was aware of the benefits of these relationships to the coherence of the workforce and production outcomes. Therefore, although in theory, they avoided them, in practice at least half of the women at the Cold End and on Litex contracts lived in the same household as men working at the Hot End or in other shop floor positions. Most of them were married couples, but there were also some mother-­son relations and sibling pairs who either shared households or occasionally shared meals and care duties. At variance with other ethnographies that analyse extended kinship networks as forms of resistance to deindustrialization (Stack 1975; Stacey 1998), Mollona argues that extended families reproduce the regime of flexible production (Mollona 2009b: 71). My observations in Mladost suggest similar responses. However, not all kinships ties were strong in this respect,

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but rather mainly those based on shared households and shared economic practices with extended family members. In placing an emphasis on the household, I am not assuming that it is a homogeneous space, but rather see it as a dynamic one that includes conflicts and renegotiations of relationships between diverse subjects, as well as strategies based on common interests (Stenning et al. 2011). Tocheva’s (2015) study of household production in rural Bulgaria underlines the importance of the relations of the household economy and the market. She analyzes complex relations between global market forces and household activity without losing sight of the complexities of relations within families. Similarly, in the urban setting of Sofia, industrial workers’ households are places that respond to, and interact with, larger economic spheres. Literature from different contexts suggests that the flexibilization of labour generates extended familial networks of support (Stacey 1998; Pine 2001; Narotzky and Smith 2006; Mollona 2009b), and this was also the case among workers in Mladost. In almost all workers’ families, there was an extended network of daily support, one that was relatively greater among low-­ paid workers than among managers, suggesting that familial and extended household practices were also informed by class relations. Smith (A. Smith 2002) criticized approaches that focus on ‘household survival strategies’, arguing that they tend to view household practices as mere responses to hegemonic capitalism. This, for him, may mute the agency of individual choices while positioning these choices in peripheral spaces. Mladost workers’ practices and discourses show that their economic practices and their focus on the household themselves comprise a choice based on the interaction of the difficult economic conditions they face with a variety of ideas and practices about production, reproduction and social relationships. Rather than being without agency, workers are often critical of both the larger economic forces that they have to deal with and the relationships of dependence inside their households. In recognizing the strong forces of capitalism, we do not necessarily force ourselves and our interlocutors into peripheral spaces where action is not possible. Rather, we might see how people are ‘… neither passive victims of outside forces nor themselves totally in control of their own fates. They look at the displacement and dispossession caused by ­change – p ­ articularly   privatization – b ­ ut also at the creative responses people develop from their repertoire of resources to deal with the new situations’ (Pine and Bridger 1998a: 11). Smith reads this approach as one that ‘positions individuals and households as excluded and “othered” by a hegemonic capitalism’ (A. Smith 2002: 235). I would rather view it as an approach that acknowledges the agency of the subjects involved without losing sight of the complex forces of global capitalism and of relations of

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dependence that kinship often entails in daily life. Nevertheless, in accordance with Smith’s (A. Smith 2002) suggestion, I take into account the historical continuities upon which workers form their economic practices.

Postsocialist Transformations of Gender and Household Strategies Research in postsocialist countries has shown that women’s ‘emancipation’ was one of the ideological projects of socialist parties across eastern Europe (Daskalova 2000; Brunnbauer and Taylor 2004). In socialist Bulgaria, although women were employed, their roles as wives and mothers were also valued (Kaneff 2004: 44). Although patriarchal relationships, which were seen as presocialist, persisted during socialism (ibid.), gender inequality worsened significantly after the collapse of socialism and the feminization of poverty of the new era. As Pine (2001) emphasizes, women’s rights, guaranteed employment and the state’s provision of care for children and the elderly was common in the socialist states; this significantly changed during the period of postsocialism, generating senses of loss and uncertainty. Similarly, during socialism there were ideological projects of the transformation of family practices. The new socialist way of life in Bulgaria promoted the nuclear form of family as the basic unit of society, and new housing was constructed in such a way as to accommodate these specific units (Brunnbauer and Taylor 2004: 296–98). Yet, living as a nuclear family unit was not always made possible due to the lack of adequate housing, which prevented the young generations from living apart from their parents (ibid.). Nevertheless, most Mladost workers’ families lived in nuclear family housing during the period of socialism. As their stories suggest, including Katia’s and Gergana’s in this chapter, those apartments or houses offered accommodation to extended families during the postsocialist period, for larger or shorter periods of time. Research on the history of family in Bulgaria has demonstrated that despite the changes in housing arrangements, the importance of family ties and extended networks did not cease during socialism and continued to exist in the postsocialist period (Brunnbauer and Taylor 2004). In the course of the last three decades, a variety of family strategies can be found. Recent research in Bulgaria shows that parenting is strongly connected to new economic conditions and new inequalities, and that migration plays an important role in kinship networks. Guentcheva (2010) shows how children in southern Bulgaria grow up without parental care while their parents are migrants abroad. Deneva (2012) describes the shift

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from ‘welfare to kinfare’ through research on migratory strategies among Bulgarian Muslims in Spain. Older members of extended families move between places in Bulgaria, or between the two countries, to take care of their grandchildren while their children work abroad. Angelidou (2010) discusses how Bulgarian migrant women abroad work at child-­care and elder-­care and become breadwinners for their homes in Bulgaria, thus leaving their husbands to fulfil parenting duties for their families and challenging usual patterns of parenting and motherhood. Different parenting practices are found in Sofia’s wealthy district of Lozenets (Dimova 2010). Most of Dimova’s upper middle-­class informants live in nuclear families, and childcare is actively taken care of by both parents, although child-­ carers and grandparents are also sometimes employed. All these examples from Bulgaria suggest the existence of a variety of parenting patterns and family practices, which, to a great extent, depend on the families’ economic backgrounds and class positions. This variety of parenting was apparent in Mladost; workers largely relied on extended families, whereas managers had patterns of parenting similar to those of Sofia’s upper middle class (Dimova 2010). Although I focus here on workers’ families, a comparison with my material on the family lives of those employed in higher positions in Mladost suggests that the degree of interdependence between extended family members is strongly connected to income. This was mainly apparent in respect of parenting. While managers had the ability to pay for childcare, workers relied on their parents, a subject that was a topic of daily discussion among workers, especially when they had troubled relationships with their parents. Although both men and women talked about childcare, women focused on the issue significantly more. The flexibilization of labour, the demise of the welfare state and the lack of state-­supported childcare created new relations of dependence among workers’ family members. Workers in Mladost in the mid-­2010s shared many similarities with rural Polish working families in the 1990s studied by Pine (1998, 2001). Pine argues that the postsocialist years brought about an emphasis on the economy of the domestic domain as a response to the changing public domain. This new emphasis was practiced through extended networks of support, an emphasis on production for self-­subsidence to which all family members contributed, and informal trading networks. Workers in Mladost employed similar practices as a response to their precarious positions and to the continuing sense of loss created by the postsocialist experience and the uncertainty of deindustrialization. I will now discuss these practices and trajectories through Gergana’s and Katia’s stories.

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Gergana’s Dream of a Sweet Life Gergana grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in a village near Svoge, a small town close to Sofia where a large factory produced chocolate for the whole country and employed a large number of workers in the area. As a school student in the late 1980s, she received a specialized education in sugar product-­making, with the aim of working in state chocolate production after graduation. At that time, the great majority of the students who acquired this specialization found employment in the local factory. However, her graduation coincided with the turbulent years of the early 1990s, and her plan to work there soon changed, as the factory ceased to employ new workers. After a couple of years of unemployment in her early twenties she married Kolio, a man from the area with whom she had had a relationship since being a teenager. Given that she was unemployed and that finding a job was hard during these times, they decided that she would stay at home and have children, while Kolio would work in a private factory near Sofia as an electrical-­technician. Kolio, who was ten years older than Gergana, spent most of his time commuting to Sofia and working long hours. Gergana said she soon found herself trapped in the home, raising her two young sons. Although she enjoyed raising her children, and here she emphasized the importance of motherhood, she also complained that her lack of employment contributed to both the family’s poverty and to the restrictions on her social life. Her husband’s low income did not allow them to move to a new house as they both desired. In fact they were sharing the same home with her in-­laws ‘temporarily’ until they could move to a new place after the children had grown a bit older, after she had hopefully found a job and, as she explained, ‘after things with democracy would provide a better economic environment’. However, the years passed and Gergana was still living with her in-­laws, taking care of domestic food production in the plot of land they had at the foot of the mountain in the area. ‘When I went to school and got the sugar specialization, I was dreaming of a sweet life … but then they would not hire us there … I did not know I would spend my youth at home with an unpleasant mother-­in-­law. I love Kolio, but he was not around much … I told him I should do something about it when the children grew a bit older’. Nevertheless, Gergana also emphasized that her contribution to domestic work was important, given the much better quality of food she could produce for their children, particularly in relation to the food ‘in the market that nobody knows what it is made from’. Her words echoed the words of Polish and Czech women in the 1990s (Haukanes 2001; Pine 2001), who also emphasized the importance of domestic food production as a response to

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Figure 3.1.  Gergana’s old bookcase. © Dimitra Kofti

an unknown and dangerous market. Gergana and Kolio, like many workers in Mladost, spent a significant amount of their time making things for their household that ‘were of much better quality’. These included, apart from food, clothes, furniture and the common refurbishment (remont) of rooms that they did themselves. Almost all workers used their vacation at a certain point to fix their dilapidated kitchens and bathrooms, and they knew in detail where they could find the cheapest materials. Although they aimed to make things similar to what they had seen in magazines and the media, I have never heard it said that this remont was in a ‘European’ or ‘Western’ style. At variance with other postsocialist ethnographies that argue that western-­style products have become metonyms of a ‘normal’ way of life (Fehérváry 2002; Rausing 2002), workers in Mladost produced home-­made products, which they would mostly call ‘modern’. They were ‘modern’ because they were like those ‘in the market’, but they were better because they were ‘ours’ and thus of ‘better quality’. For example, Gergana and Kolio made together a new bookcase out of their old one, which they had had from ‘edno vreme’. As he said, he saw the design in a magazine and used one of the two old bookcases he had because the wood he used, ‘edno vreme’, was much better than that ‘on the market today’. Although this has many implications for a material culture approach and for significations of

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Figure 3.2.  Gergana’s new bookcase made out of the materials of the old one, together with Kolio. © Dimitra Kofti

the ‘modern’ that come from both fashionable images and past materials, my point here is to show the working families’ emphasis on domestic production as a response to the faults of ‘the market’ and to prices they could not afford. This emphasis shaped workers’ practices during the time they did not work in the factory, a significant amount of their non-­wage work being dedicated to domestic work.1 In the mid-­1990s, Gergana found a job in a new garment factory locally where women from the nearby villages worked, a factory she described as the worst place she had ever been in her life. There was pressure to produce more in less time, and low piece rates. She saw this job as temporary, as she still hoped to get a skilled position at the local chocolate factory ‘once things get better’. But things did not get better. The chocolate factory was bought by a multinational company and embarked on a policy of layoffs similar to that in Mladost. Gergana lost all hope of getting a position there and continued to work at the sweatshop from time to time, according to its production needs, on a flexible contract. She also spent some months working as a shop assistant in a local shop where she had the bad experience of being left unpaid for a long time before finally she left,2 never managing to get the wages owing to her. After this period of unemployment,

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underemployment and domestic labour, her sister, who was employed in Mladost, told her about a new position at the Cold End. It was in the late 1990s, during the period of Mladost’s restructuring of labour involving layoffs, but also of some rare job openings, such as this one on the packing machine. Her interview went well: ‘They understood that I am hard-­working and committed to work, and they knew my sister was a good worker’. Gergana had a discussion with her husband and family because they were very concerned about the long working hours at night, the shifts and the daily commute into Sofia. An important consideration was that she would commute along with her sister, who lived in a village nearby, and that they would meet every day on the train. This was a common commuting practice in the factory, where many friends and relatives described their shared journeys as a strong motivation to work in Mladost, particularly given the difficult shifts. The area was indeed quite dangerous and remote, and travelling from and to Mladost was hard when it was dark. One had to arrive at the train station and then to pass over the lines, down a dark subway and through areas with massive abandoned industrial buildings standing between active ones. Moreover, a couple of streets over and parallel to the factory there was a street sex market, and many cars with clients in search of sex would randomly pass by the streets around Mladost and often stopped to talk to female workers. Travelling together ensured some sense of security to low-­paid workers who could not afford to maintain a car and had to travel by train. As these were mainly women, this difference constituted another gender inequality that was visible at work; while the majority of men arrived in cars, women travelled by public transport, which often had poor service and required walking long distances through difficult parts of town. The HR management was aware of this fact, and it contributed to their hiring practices, as employing new staff with existing workers’ networks would also ensure that they could travel together. As workers often said, ‘edno vreme’, the bus line that connected the factory with the railway station and other parts of Sofia had been frequent. Adding to the difficulties brought about by privatization and the introduction of new shifts, however, this bus service had stopped and, for this reason, relatedness became important for travelling together and helped fill the gap caused by the withdrawal of the bus service. Gergana got the job and could still remember the happiness she felt the first day in Mladost because of the income she would make and because of her new life away from the village. Although both Kolio and she now had jobs, their incomes combined could hardly cover their daily expenses, and their plans to leave Kolio’s parents’ house still seemed unrealistic. Her sons were older, and their daily expenses would not permit a different

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family life from this extended model, so often seen in the area. At variance with Dimova’s (2010) ethnographic examples from a wealthy area in Sofia, where models of parenting are based on higher incomes and mostly nuclear family households, the area of Svoge, from which many workers in Mladost came from had many families like Gergana’s. Gergana’s happiness in her new job was soon replaced by stress caused by the hard work conditions and the fear of being laid off. Nevertheless, she described how she was still happy because she felt ‘free’. Away from the village and from her mother-­in-­law’s gaze, Gergana had the chance to live a ‘freer’ life at the factory. Parry (2009) describes how industrial workers in a steel plant in India were happier with their factory’s discipline and labour than with the patriarchal relationships of their work experience in agriculture. Like the workers who enjoyed their independence from repressive kinship ties in India, many female workers in Mladost shared Gergana’s experience. However, unlike workers in the Indian public sector, female workers in the Bulgarian private sector had more stressful working conditions and were in constant fear of layoffs. Therefore, although they sometimes expressed pleasure about being away from home, at other times they imagined a life at home based on ideal images of domesticity, similar to other workplaces (Westwood 1985; Dunn 2004). During the course of Gergana’s employment in Mladost, Kolio was often paid poorly and changed jobs between factories in Sofia, thus, apart from the low pensions of her in-­laws, Gergana’s income was sometimes the only cash coming into their family. While her job in Mladost was considered badly paid and exploitative, her employment was well respected at home, where she was the breadwinner, and her mother-­in-­law, who was the main carer of her children, could no longer put pressure on her. Her lack of power in the factory was reversed back home. Dunn’s study of a Polish baby food factory suggests that women valued their work by bringing ideologies of motherhood across to the production lines, thereby blurring the boundaries between home and work (Dunn 2004: 143). Gergana valued her work by overstating her role as not only a mother, but also, and mainly, as a successful breadwinner and major family supporter. She strongly connected her new position at home to her work. This new positionality was so important to her that the fear of being laid off was not only a fear of a loss of wages, it was also a threat to her new and ‘freer’ lifestyle. Nevertheless, during the redundancies that were a response to ‘the crisis’ in the summer of 2009, she was among those who were laid off. A few months later she returned as a Litex worker, now on almost half her previous wage. She could not stand the hard working conditions and soon quit because of a health problem brought about by the hard working conditions, her doctor suggesting she should leave the job in the plant as potentially endangering

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her health. She thought it would not make sense to work in this environment, having to spend all of her money on medicines while her health declined. Women like Gergana often occupied the less attractive positions in Mladost, and one of their main motivations for remaining in their jobs was the reversal of their power back home. Nevertheless, many women who worked away from their partners or who were single also gave other reasons related to their social life inside the factory. The factory gave them the opportunity to socialize beyond the village, to create friendships with other women and to flirt. ‘It’s beautiful to flirt and to have flings, it makes you feel alive’, was a phrase women in the factory would repeat in various circumstances. Flirting was a strong motivation on the shop floor. Flirting and sexual jokes in the factory have been analysed as ways of renegotiating and reproducing gender hierarchies at work, as well as relieving boredom at work (Ngai 2005). But flirting and sexual banter may also reinforce existing hierarchies by imposing power and violence upon women (Yelvington 1995, 1996). Flirting on Mladost’s production lines was a widespread daily practice, but it did not necessarily lead to the violence described by Yelvington. An important difference between Mladost and the above ethnographies was that such flirting mainly took place between workers; managers were not part of this. It seemed more like a pleasurable game between colleagues that alleviated the boredom of the repetitive production. Workers would also say in a humorous tone that ‘the moments that you are some kilometres away from your husband/wife, you are nearly not married’. Although work at the factory was largely seen as a means of household reproduction, and thus often based on marriage, the daily practices of flirting and sex games that might be a challenge to marriage coexisted on the production lines. Flirting and the frequent sexual relationships among the workers stimulated the interest of both men and women on the shop floor. Besides people stating that flirting made them feel ‘alive’, gossip about flirting and extra-­ marital relationships was also a central aspect of Mladost’s daily l­ife – ­all reasons, besides the economic benefits of their wages, for workers being socially involved at work and motivated to be on the shop floor. Women often emphasized that working in the factory, although exploitative and very tiring, gave them the opportunity to escape from their dependent relationships in extended families. Although they often complained that they missed their children, they also underlined the importance of their own social lives. Their comments did not merely reproduce the image of woman’s central role as mothers, they also emphasized their need to have more independent lives. However, they often stated that the reason they worked was to provide for their children and if they had more money, they ‘would get out of here’.

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I met Gergana again in her village after she quit. She was both sad, she said, and relieved. She was afraid that she would not be able to provide for her children and parents, although she found a new job as a cleaner, which was extremely low paid, and she was sad to come back to the village life. However, she was happy she would not have to deal with the loud noise in Mladost, and she was also relieved that she had left the exploitative shop floor, where she did not dare complain because of the fear of losing a job and having to return back home. Moreover, she expressed her anger at her colleagues, who would not agree to complain collectively about the extremely rapid pace of the work. In her view, those who were most ‘guilty’ (vinovni) of this lack of involvement in a collective expression of complaint were those women who were married to workers on the shop floor, like Katia, married to Stefan, a couple I will focus in the next section. Gergana was tired of being constantly disappointed and of not having had a more stable life since becoming an adult, as she said. ‘Once I thought that this democracy would make things better … but nothing … things will not change … this is it’. While she hoped for a better life during the 1990s, she was now getting used to the idea that things wouldn’t change. Gergana’s disappointment at losing her job and returning to her village has some similarities with Polish women in the 1990s: Their stories were couched in terms of loss: loss of self-­esteem, an incredible sense of loss of the sociality and close relations of the workplace … all perceived their houses and families to be threatened; they were terrified that they would be unable to provide for their children or to care for their aged parents. (Pine 2001: 96)

At first glance, Gergana’s story seemed to me almost identical to this experience. However, it was different, or maybe it represented a continuation of these conditions but occurred a decade and a half later. Gergana, unlike the women Pine describes, did not lose a stable job and welfare benefits, but lost a highly exploitative and precarious job with no security. Moreover, she had already got used to being in a state of uncertainty. In her early twenties she had hoped that things would change ‘with this democracy’. In her forties, she was practically certain that things would not change ‘with this democracy’. Although one might argue that this disappointment is also related to Gergana growing older, her story echoed many similar experiences on the shop floor reported by people of various ages. Workers were disappointed with, and tired of, their economic situation being dictated by successive ‘crises’ and of their inability to make things ‘better’ while time passed. Gergana, like most of the workers, avoided talking about future plans. They took care of their material futures by refurbishing their residences and making new furniture to fit it. This refurbishment of kitchens and

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bathrooms took place in accommodation that were initially seen as ‘temporary’ until they could move to another one as a nuclear family. This was a very common narrative pattern: plans made during the 1990s had not materialized, and the future in the mid-­2010’s was discursively silenced. The basic way in which the future was referred to was in terms of fear of uncertainty for themselves and especially for their children. Gergana and Kolio thought about migrating in the 1990s but never did so. She regretted this in the late 2000s, but thought that it was already too late. In a way, many of these stories seemed to be stories of those who did not migrate. It was as if migration had imposed itself retrospectively as the more viable alternative to staying. Gergana’s story of a sweet life, the one she desired but never had, was very common among workers in Mladost. I will now return to the question of how family and gender relationships influenced production relations. Gergana described her position as a Cold End worker as highly ‘unfair’. Nevertheless, she switched power roles back home and was part of the factory’s social life. Her distance from village life and the relations of dependence she had with members of her household were factors that motivated her to work, where her sister was her constant companion. In

Figure 3.3.  Commuting: from Mladost towards the railway station. © Dimitra Kofti

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this context of disappointment and of an accumulated sense of loss and powerlessness, workers often did not complain about the relationships of exploitation on the shop floor. In suggesting this, I am not underestimating their agency; this was expressed in various ways in their daily lives, as I have attempted to show. However, as they often said in private, they felt they had no strength to react. Moreover, given the pressures of the job market, the constant threat of job losses and the inflation during the new ‘crisis’ in 2008, Gergana and other workers clearly stated that they did not want to think or to talk about the future; they mainly lived in the present and planned only the very near future.

Katia and Stefan: ‘Our Family History Is Mladost’ Katia’s mother and grandmother, as well as her father, were workers in Mladost. Now in her mid-­thirties, she was the mother of two children and had been at Mladost for ten years. She had obtained a higher education degree in accountancy, and her first job after graduation was at the Cold End, where she began working ‘temporarily’ until she could find a job that was relevant to her specialization. Her husband Stefan, whom she met at Mladost, was a worker at the Hot End. Katia grew up in Zaharova, the area close to Mladost where many workers had been allocated apartments during the 1980s. However, her family had lived there previously, in a small house. She grew up in this house with her extended family, where, during my fieldwork, her parents, grandparents and cousins still lived. She had since moved out and was living with Stefan in his family house in a village near Svoge, close to Gergana. Like Gergana and Kolio, Katia and Stefan had also initially planned to move to another house but never managed to do so. Katia’s family history was strongly connected to Mladost’s history. Her grandparents moved to Sofia from the south of Bulgaria to become industrial workers during the late 1950s, and since then all the family had worked in Mladost. Katia’s grandparents were already pensioners in the early 1990s, but her mother, who was a worker there during the first period of layoffs, had lost her job. Since then her mother has changed jobs many times, working as a shop assistant, a worker in a meat factory and a cleaner. Nevertheless, Katia managed to acquire a job during the restructuring after privatization, one of several young people whom the new management preferred to employ rather than older ones. Sometimes after her shift she would visit her house in Zaharova and spend time there with her family. Like Gergana, she was not happy living with her in-­laws, who took care of her children while she and her husband were away at work. There, in her ‘own’ house in Zaharova, she often met

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her grandmother and mother. She invited me sometimes, given me the opportunity to talk to three generations of women from the factory. Her grandmother often talked about the hard work conditions on the old machinery and did not present idealized images of the past like those some of the current workers drew. However, her grandmother and mother both emphasized that their work experience was significantly different from Katia’s: ‘This is awful, she gets much less than Stefan, although she works much harder … OK, he is in the hot temperature but he does not have to run like Katia’, her mother said. Katia added: At least his money and my money end up at the same place, at home, otherwise it would be very unfair … men drive us crazy at work, they believe they are always right … sometimes Stefan acts the idiot like all of them … when he thinks I am becoming strict with the returned bottles, he comes and shouts at me like any other idiot … well, after all, he is a man, everything is designed to help men in the factory.

The ‘unfairness’ of this inequality was transformed into ‘fairness’ since Katia and Stefan pooled both their wages to meet their joint household expenses. This did not mean that Katia and Stefan did not have any conflicts. While on the shop floor Katia worked hard and perceived Stefan’s and her payments as one common purse, but at home they often fought because of their tensions at work. However, Katia’s experience at work differed in relation to other women who not only thought that these unequal payments were unfair, but also that their groups would have been stronger if wives with husbands on the shop floor did not have this sense of the ultimate ‘fairness’ of their joint household income. Usually, women found that the unequal payments between the Cold and Hot ­Ends – ­that is, between female and male labour unfair. They considered that the workers at the Cold End were unable to struggle against this situation and held those among them who were married to men from the Hot End responsible for this communal failure. The women married to men at the Hot End would support the interest of their husbands and would undermine any potential protest by the Cold End workers. While this assumption was not entirely true in Katia’s case, it is true that household partners blurred the lines between home and work, while the other workers wanted to maintain a more clear-­cut boundary. For the latter, kinship solidarity among kin from the same household was detrimental to solidarity within the work group. There were further differences between people like Katia and Gergana. The inconvenient shift hours made it easier for couples to work together and to organize their lives and family activities together. Couples also took vacations together, which they often spent at home refurbishing their old bathrooms and kitchens and taking care of their vegetables. Also, because

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they were allocated a room in the company-­sponsored hotel on the Black Sea more often, since each employee could get a room for their family approximately every two to three years, Katia and Stefan and those couples who worked in the plant would go twice as often as workers without partners in the plant. These couples would meet with other couples from Mladost there during vacation, would create stronger bonds than the single workers, and would maintain those social relationships during the year. Since the rooms were only for Mladost’s regular workers, casual employees never got the chance to participate in this added socialization. Flirting also marked the difference between married couples who worked together in Mladost and others. Married people working together would say, when alone, that they were happy because they could ‘control’ their partners and stop them having extra-­marital affairs, which were common in Mladost. However, although they would often talk extensively about other peoples’ affairs, they would also complain that they themselves were not able to flirt like those whose partners did not work at Mladost. On the one hand, they valued the stability of their positions, which gave them the opportunity to plan their family lives together with their partners. On the other, they also desired the relative freedom that other people enjoyed on the shop floor.

Intimacies on the Shop Floor Gergana’s and Katia’s stories both suggest that their lives outside Mladost motivated them to work and instilled meaning into their relationships with their colleagues. Kinship ties played a central role, but not all in the same way or with the same efficacy. Not all ties of kinship were equally prominent in shop floor solidarities but mostly those between kins that were members of the same household economy. Gergana was employed in Mladost along with her sister. However, she did not view this fact as influencing her relationships with other colleagues, while she viewed Katia’s relationship with Stefan as one that affected their group cohesion. In their regular meetings with their supervisor, Gergana and other colleagues sometimes complained about the pace of production and the ‘unfairness’ of not getting bonuses for it, unlike ‘the men’. However, their manager’s response would be that this was an order from ‘above’ and that they could potentially formulate a collective response to it as a brigade (brigada). Those who worked with other members of their household were usually not willing to participate in such complaints or discuss possible collective action, as people like Gergana often told me. But as Katia and others said, they did not want to risk their jobs, since they gave them some sort of

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stability. As Katia’s view of ‘fairness’ suggests, as a member of the same household economy with a Hot End worker, they had found ways to turn this ‘unfairness’ into a kind of ‘fairness’. Nevertheless, this did not mean that Katia was unaware of the ‘unfairness’ caused to her colleagues; it was, in fact, something she stated her awareness of quite clearly. Moreover, Katia’s fear of being laid off seemed to be different, and perhaps stronger, than Gergana’s. Katia’s life was strongly connected to Mladost, where ‘she grew up’, as she would say. Her ‘family history is Mladost’, as she and her elder relatives said. She could not easily risk leaving. Moreover, she did not want to lose the opportunity to work along with Stefan, although he often acted like an ‘idiot’ at work, and they fought at home as well. Katia was young, but ‘old’ in Mladost. The ‘oldness’ in her case was not associated with her acquisition of a position of power, but it gave to her a stronger sense of belonging, something she was afraid to lose. This contributed to her muted responses to inequalities. Different moral ideas about ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’ that drew from family and household values contributed to workers’ consent to unequal relations in Mladost. Gergana also had a more complex relationship on the shop floor because her sister had worked there since the late 1980s. However, Gergana did not admit to a sense of ‘belonging’ as Katia did. An important difference was that Katia formed an economic unit with her husband, while Gergana and her sister, though very close, did not pool their incomes, did not share any kind of economic practices and did not live together. More importantly, they both viewed themselves as belonging to those who were negatively affected by couples living in common households and working together, such as Katia and Stefan. A common economy rather than a relationship of intimacy made the difference. Take, by contrast, unmarried couples on the shop floor such as those who had ‘secret’ affairs. They were never criticized by others for having common strategies in relation to the production line. These ‘muted’ sexual relationships did not restrain these workers’ responses towards the managers. It was the economic household and not the sexual relationship or other types of intimacy that defined this distinction in many of the workers’ views, including the views of those who were half of a married couple at the workplace. More importantly, it was a difference important enough that almost everyone on the shop floor recognized it as such.

Conclusion In this chapter I have continued questioning what keeps workers motivated at work, despite inequalities and pressures at Mladost’s shop floor,

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and discussed aspects of how workers in the lowest positions on the shop floor stay in these positions and how this is connected to their lives outside work. In doing so, I have focused on the family and household relationships that are important to these processes. An emphasis on the cohesion of the economy of the household was connected to continuities with the past, the experience of loss and uncertainty in the context of postsocialism and successive experiences of ‘crisis’. The reproduction of workers’ households played an important role both when women were employed along with partners and when their partners were not part of the workforce. In the first case, working alongside a spouse, they valued their work through the stability of their relationships and what they have in common in relation to labour tasks that might otherwise have conflicted. In the second case, women working on their own valued their work, as they became more powerful when back home and they often enjoyed adopting various roles such as that of a lover or a woman who could flirt away from home. However, I do not suggest that these different attitudes to work resulted in the formation of distinct groups of workers who otherwise socialized and were friends; rather, they were understood to be important on the shop floor and significantly shaped renegotiations of sexual relationships, household reproduction and workers’ groups that cut across the categories of Hot/Cold, casual/regular. Although kinship and other intimate forms of relationship were important for workers’ social life on the production line and outside work, these did not necessarily define groups on the shop floor in any significant way. Rather, an important division that cut across the Hot/Cold divide was between those who lived in a common household and those who did not. This has two implications. First, ideas of household reproduction are central and affected the relationships between the workers. Solidarities among members of the same household clash with solidarities among different groups of shop floor workers. Second, kinship ties, friendships and relationships of intimacy, although very important for workers’ social lives on the shop floor and beyond, and a source of value in themselves, did not influence the ways workers viewed their position as wage labourers. Those without household members on the shop floor described their relationship with the shop floor as one that was closer to commoditized labour, while those with such relatives were viewed as having more complex relationships of dependence with their relatives and with the company. Although the management stated that kinship did not play a role on the shop floor, kinship and other social ties among workers played an important role on the production line and in relations among workers’ groups. The examples of Mladost resonates with other ethnographies that underline the importance of external relationships to relationships of production

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(Hareven 1982; Ong 1987; Kotkin 1997; Jahoda, Lazarsfeld and Zeisel 2002; Yanagisako 2002; De Neve 2008; Mollona 2009b). It also resonates with ethnographies of postsocialism, which show the importance of household practices as a response to the loss and uncertainty caused by the collapse of socialism and the demise of the welfare state (Pine and Bridger 1998a; Haukanes 2001; Pine 2001). In Mladost, the economic unity of household units infringes on the solidarity of workers’ shop floor groups. These are competing solidarities, or at least they are in tension with one another. However, the ‘harmony’ of the household as an economic unit drawing an income from the factory is by no means evident. On the contrary, there are plenty of tensions induced by the different jobs husbands and wives do. Like the examples of small family production units (Goddard 1996; Smart and Smart 2005; Narotzky and Smith 2006), these couples have a common task in factory production. Women in this case, as in the small production units, have less privileged positions. Through these case studies, I have also argued that not all of the kin ties of the workers are equally important on the shop floor. The unity of the economic household is more important to the relations of production at Mladost than other kinship and sexual relations among workers that are not constitutive of economic units.

Notes Some of the data and arguments in this chapter appeared previously in a paper entitled ‘Moral Economy of Flexible Production: Fabricating Precarity between the Conveyor Belt and the Household’ in Anthropological Theory (2016 16 [4]: 433–453). 1. Domestic production was not merely a response to the difficulties faced by the market but also a practice that has continuities with the period of socialism (Smollett 1989; Kaneff 1998; Yuson 2009; Kofti 2018b). Yet, domestic work among family and friends grew stronger during the period of postsocialism in Bulgaria and in other postsocialist countries (e.g. Gudeman and Hann 2015, Tocheva 2015, Monova 2015) 2. Being left unpaid or getting less payment than the initial agreement at the retail sector in small shops was a repeated experience, according to the life story interviews with workers. The relative stability of the payment at the factory was, thus, an added reason they would prefer this job to the retail sector.

4

Rigidities and Elasticities of ° The Flexibility

The production methods and managerial practices of flexible capitalism that have been applied to privatized companies across the ex-­socialist countries included, inter alia, employment and production flexibility, contracting out, and geographical dispersal of some parts of the production. Along with the above, new managerial techniques and discourses aim at the creation of new models of employment and the ethos of labour. One of the new trends that is still being discussed by privatized companies’ Human Resources, in cooperation with consulting companies, is the transformation from a ‘rigid’ to a ‘flexible’ workforce (Dunn 2004: 59) that emphasizes individual competitiveness and increased productivity at the least cost (Müller 2004: 150). This process is also accompanied by managerial discourses emphasizing workers’ ‘individual responsibility’ as opposed to the ‘collective responsibility’ of the socialist past (Vodopivec 2012). This chapter looks at managerial discourses, which were presented as ‘new’ by Mladost’s management, and focuses on how they were viewed and practiced by employees in various positions. It asks how managerial discourses of the ‘flexible worker’ were applied by the management and ­whether – ­and if so, ­how – ­these managerial ideas were put in practice. Through these questions, I aim to discuss the various meanings flexibility assumes for the production process, the workers and the administration in Mladost, as well as the elasticity of a term which, in a recursive turn, is itself ‘flexible’, being employed by various actors on the Mladost site and in the anthropological literature in various ways. Here, the ethnography not only looks at the elasticity of the term but also at ways in which distinctions based on ideas of flexibility, despite it being a euphemism, bring rigidities on the shop floor. Moreover, by looking at different understandings of dominant managerial ideas, it explores relations between morality and economic practice (Hann, 2018) and explores how workers’ practices are informed by values about what they consider ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’.

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At variance with anthropological studies in other postsocialist work settings (Dunn 2004; Vodopivec 2010; Müller 2004), hegemonic post-­Fordist managerial discourses on flexibility did not reach Mladost’s shop floor and were often ignored by the management because of managers’ and workers’ cynical attitudes to both socialist and capitalist hegemonic discourses. Furthermore, as I shall argue, the nature of the assembly-­line production of glass did not always resonate with those managerial discourses and techniques coming down from above which could not ensure a smooth production process. Here, the ethnography does not merely aim to discuss discrepancies between dominant managerial theories of flexible capitalism and their actual practices. Rather, I argue that such discrepancies are inherent in ‘flexibility’, which, in the end, becomes a floating signifier into which many interpretations and practices may fit in the context of flexible capitalism. Via its discursive elasticity, flexibility allows a wide range of practices on behalf of the management in a combination of Fordist and post-­Fordist practices. Workers, despite their fragmentation, which shares many of the characteristics of post-­ Fordist techniques, are obliged to perform collectively on a non-­stop production line that shares many of the characteristics of Fordist production. Unable to move upwards, they work together, divided into different teams and employment companies with rigid boundaries. Flexibility, in this context, becomes a managerial top-­ down idea and an experience of the workplace, not an individual option. Furthermore, flexibility may provide an experience of increased coercion and rigidity at work, as well as precarity and lack of forward planning for the workers. Through a close attention to hegemonic notions and practices at the workplace, such as flexibility, we may study not only workers’ responses and lives or the creation of flexible subjectivities but we may also challenge dominant ideas and their ‘rationalities’ and ‘efficacies’ for the production.

‘Flexibility’ at Work Since the 1980s, production, the economy and labour have been transformed through new practices of subcontracting, downsizing and the focus on core production, along with specialization and outsourcing. This process has been described as the ‘second industrial divide’ and as ‘flexible specialization’ (Piore and Sabel 1984). These new economic phenomena of global capitalism have also been described as ‘disorganized capitalism’ (Offe 1985; Lash and Urry 1987), globalization, post-­Fordism, flexible capitalism, neoliberalism or simply ‘free-­market capitalism’ (Friedman 2005). Harvey’s (1989) influential approach to ‘the conditions of postmodernity’ described these phenomena as a significant transformation from Fordism

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to ‘flexible accumulation’, which was also a shift from the previous period’s ‘rigidities’ in relation to production, technology and organization of work, consumption and labour markets (1989: 147) All these wide-­ranging theoretical approaches, including those who take a critical approach to the new conditions, such as Harvey (2005), or those who celebrate the new economy, such as Friedman (2005), agreed that there had been a shift inside capitalism and that among most important ingredients of this shift were the new forms of flexibility and the challenge to the assumed rigidity of Fordism (Dunn 2004: 19). Some analyses emphasized that production had significantly changed and that Fordist production belonged to the past: ‘Gone is the linear work sequence of the moving assembly line, its machinery dedicated to mass production and mass marketing. Instead, the organization is a fleeting, fluid network of alliances, a highly decoupled and dynamic form with great organizational flexibility’ (Martin 1995: 215). Although the production process, including at Mladost, did change significantly, becoming more fragmented and taking on post-­Fordist characteristics, Fordist-­type assembly lines continued to exist under the new circumstances. The movement of production towards diverse countries blurred the lines between the ‘industrialized’ North and the ‘underdeveloped’ South and challenged the dichotomies between ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ (Mollona 2009a, xix). Nevertheless, as ethnographies of work settings suggest (Fernandez-­Kelly 1983; Ong 1987; Tiano 1994; Dunn 2004; Ngai 2005), production with Fordist-­type characteristics of the assembly line did not cease to exist. However, Martin’s (1995) analysis of managerial discourses points to significant shifts which indeed required the dismantling of Fordist principles (Dunn 2004: 19). Martin’s research on new managerial books and manuals and on training in the US, scrutinizes the ways in which new discourses on the distinctions between ‘rigidity’, associated with Fordism, and flexibility, associated with ‘post-­Fordism’, are at play. Such discourses were prominent among managers at Mladost and contributed to the implementation of new principles at work, although they did not always fit the complicated production relations and practices. The new conditions of production across the globe led to the relocalization of factories and displacements of workers, along with the increased mobility of businesses, people, ideas and money. This fragmentation of production also resulted in new forms of petty-capitalist businesses and of informal economic practices (Smart and Smart 2006). While the ‘core’ work of permanent full-­time employment was declining, temporary, part-­ time and insecure employment was increasing in a variety of sectors (Hann and Parry 2018; Lazar and Sanchez 2019). Furthermore, the term ‘flexibility’ has been associated with larger political processes of the downsizing of the welfare state (Mingione 1991).

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Anthropological and historical research since the 1990s has focused on various aspects of neoliberal flexibility in diverse spheres of life, not only those related to economic practices and production (Vargas-­Cetina 1999; Freeman 2007). For example, relatedness and households, citizenship, transnationality and new perceptions of the body have been analysed through notions such as the ‘flexible family’ (Stacey 1998), ‘flexible households’ (Wood 2000), ‘flexible citizenship’ (Ong 1999) and the ‘flexible body’ (Martin 1995). Flexibility for companies, workers, families and bodies describes the permeability and dispersal of boundaries and adaptability to rapidly changing circumstances. The elasticity and permeability of the nature of the term itself render it open to various interpretations in a wide range of analyses and contexts. Thus, in understanding the complexities of flexibility, it is important to locate the subjects involved and the particular conditions it describes. In the context of labour production, as Rothstein points out, ‘Flexibility is by definition unstable; consequently, what is flexible in one phase may be restriction at another stage’ (Rothstein 2005: 67). In researching dispersed petty-­capitalist garment workshops in Mexico, Rothstein poses Green’s question: ‘flexibility for whom?’ (Green 1997). Rothstein (2005) argues that, while flexibility provides a variety of advantages to retailers and large manufacturers, it only gives the illusion of opportunities for gain to workers and the ‘worker-­owners’ of workshops. The fear that retailers will seek cheaply produced apparel from elsewhere leads to successively greater pressure to work for less payment, bringing constant downward mobility rather than opportunities for better conditions and payments. This kind of lack of actual choice does not agree with other hegemonic managerial discourses on flexibility, according to which employees are active and able to choose their paths and careers (Martin 1995; Dunn 2004). There is a body of ethnographies of petty capitalism and globalization (Smart and Smart 2006), suggesting a discrepancy between employees’ ability to choose their career paths based on their efforts, and managerial discourses on flexibility, which artificially inflate the importance of individual choice. Often, market pressures do not allow much space for individual choice at production sites. Rather, disciplinary regimes within the factories continue to define each worker’s practice during the shift in every single detail (Ching Kwan 1997). In Chapter 2, I discussed how market pressures meet at the conveyor belt and bring discipline and coercion to the shop floor. The daily work experience does not allow a wide choice, but instead forces workers to follow the stressful rhythms of the production line. Yet, managerial discourses on flexibility legitimize the implementation of politics of fragmentation and hence deepen the conditions of fragmentation and precarity for workers.

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Here, I focus on ways in which managerial discourses on flexibility were voiced and discussed in Mladost by managers, and how these became entangled with relationships among shop floor workers and managerial staff. These were mainly communicated on the shop floor by managers on the production line who were not only mediators but had the power to decide on redundancies and to determine variations in the wages of workers doing the same jobs in the same positions. I pay particular attention to Dunn’s (2004) ethnography of a postsocialist context which is an important contribution to the discussion on flexibility and the creation of the ‘flexible subject’ in the anthropology of work. It is based in a factory that has many similarities with Mladost, both having been subject to postsocialist privatization. Dunn argues that managerial practices aimed at achieving the ‘flexible subject’ often ignore the needs of the individual but achieve cheap and effective production. Here, I will further question whether they actually always manage to bring the outcome of effective production on to the shop floor. Although Fordist production techniques have shaped industrial organization in both socialist and capitalist countries throughout the twentieth century, there were not only similarities but also important differences between these two systems of production that generated different characteristics. As a consequence, these different parts of the world do not share a common transformation to a ‘flexible’ production process. While in a capitalist, Fordist factory decision-­making was in the hands of the management, in a socialist factory, decisions were centralized, made by planners in ministries (Brown 2001). The plan, and the shortages that resulted from it, generated a socialist industrial organization that differed to the Fordist model in capitalism, resulting in different modernities that aimed at the construction of employees as different types of persons (Dunn 2004: 18). Nevertheless, as ethnographies across the world indicate, managerial discourses on flexibility and the production of new workers in workspaces across ex-­socialist eastern European companies seem to be in agreement with those in other parts of the world. This is because managerial techniques are often based on the assumption of parallel transformations from ‘rigidity’ to ‘flexibility’, which seem to point to common desired qualities of the employees and not to care so much about the socio-­historical background of the workplaces. Czeglédy pointed out that local histories in eastern Europe are often neglected and that western advocates of economic reforms tend to view the new privatized companies as entirely new economic institutions (Czeglédy 1999: 143). Managerial discourses across various countries are informed by manuals based on the assumption of ‘rationality’, which are therefore considered to be universally applicable.1

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Managerial Discourses on Flexibility in Post-Socialist Work Settings Production in the socialist era is often represented by managers in privatized ex-­socialist companies in Bulgaria as ‘rigid’ compared to post-­socialist ‘flexible’ production, although such dichotomies seem to be blurred in the actual practices of production. This recurring stereotype about work under socialism describes workers who cannot get used to changing conditions. As has been argued for different socialist workplaces, shortages of raw materials resulted in a kind of socialist flexibility. Ethnographic accounts from ex-­socialist labour settings have documented that in many cases under socialism, during periods of scarcity, production would necessarily change, and workers often had to switch quickly to another product. When materials arrived, the work would be intense (Burawoy and Lukács 1992; Verdery 1996; Dunn 2004; Müller 2004). Besides irregularities caused by periods of material changes and scarcity, working with plans and for piece rates under socialism also required quick adaptation to stressful conditions. Haraszti’s (1978) example suggested that working for piece-­rates also required workers’ ability to get used to changing conditions owing to the extreme time pressures and changing rhythms of work. Oral histories from Mladost do not include similar narratives of shortages during the socialist past. This was mainly due to the nature of the glass and its raw material. Sand was always supplied, and therefore production did not meet such unexpected delays, unlike in other industrial sectors in Bulgaria. Nevertheless, a variety of products were made, ranging from mass-­ produced bottles to handmade ornaments, and some older workers would proudly mention that they had the skills and knowledge to produce them all. Mladost workers would highlight the previous variety of specialization that had now gone with the focus on the mass production of glass and their consequent deskilling. Since Mladost followed the path of mass production, its workers have abandoned their previous, often multi-­tasking posts to focus on a single, highly automated production line. Such statements about the products of the past mainly pointed to the workers’ deskilling and the transformation from craftsmen to workers (e.g. Braverman 1974) that the new production brought. In this case, in responding to Green’s (Green 1997) question, ‘flexibility for whom?’, one might claim that Mladost’s new flexible and mass production, which had to constantly adapt to the demands of the market, restricted the workers’ range of activities and often bound them to the rather inflexible position of the deskilled. I never heard ‘flexibility’ in Bulgarian or in English used emically on the shop floor. Nevertheless, it was used, mostly in English, by higher managers in the administration, who often drew a distinction between the ‘rigidity’

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of the past and the ‘flexibility’ of the present. In the following section, I take a close look at the qualities of employment that ‘flexibility’ described in Mladost’s context. By following the use of the word, I will look at ways in which these managerial terms reached, or did not reach, the shop floor. The ethnography that follows focuses on the various forms and interpretations of ‘flexibility’ and on the new managerial discourses carried out by employees from different levels of the hierarchy concerning the desired qualities of the employees found in Mladost. By means of this discussion, I attempt to open up a view on relations between managerial staff and people at non-­decision-­making posts in the production process. Therefore, the ethnographic discussion takes two parallel directions. On the one hand, it aims to show the relevance of the new managerial doctrines in a privatized factory in Bulgaria. On the other hand, it aims to analyse the connections between two diverse groups of managers and workers, also taking into account the production managers who walk among both groups.

‘Flexible’ Employees during Redundancy Mladost managers often referred to ‘flexibility’ as an important and desirable criterion during redundancy operations. The recent and ongoing history of the redundancy process was often approached with silence. Employees, including both workers and managers, avoided speaking about it because they had gone through unpleasant experiences during intense periods of lay-­ offs. Consequently, this kind of information was often only available to me through indirect references. For example, Andrey, a 55-­year-­old engineer employed at the technical sector, would often talk with his colleagues during his lunch breaks about his favourite habit to visit a lake near Sofia for fishing. During our interview, when he narrated about fishing, he mentioned that he goes to the lake in order to keep away from daily life routine and that this has helped him also cope with stressful periods, including the one of intense staff reductions. It was the only time he introduced the topic of lay-­offs in our discussion, similar to other interviews and daily discussion with employees. It was a topic both very important to mention and to also keep silent about. ‘It was very stressful, and it happened gradually … we did not know who would be next … When I visit the lake, I leave everything away from my mind!’. He was one of the two who remained at Mladost from among a team of eight employees. According to his own explanation for this, it was his hard work that kept him at the plant. In such narrations, I attempted to understand the criteria, as understood by the workers and the managers, by which some employees retained their jobs. While it was difficult for non-­decision-­makers to

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respond to such questions, it was also hard to collect this information from decision-­makers. Most of the people avoided discussions about their decisive role in lay-­offs which significantly affected the life of the workforce. Employees had gone through long periods of fearing unemployment, and most of them were still afraid of the prospect, especially after the new period of ‘crisis’ in 2008–2009. Those in key managerial positions would also avoid talking about redundancy because they had participated in the process of choosing the next ones to be fired. Others would avoid this discussion because they felt uncomfortable being those who had remained in the company, their former colleagues having left. This avoidance of speaking about the subject of redundancy indicated that people from both sides felt uncomfortable with this process and did not seem convinced by the managerial discourses that accompanied it. This is contrary to other ethnographies of postsocialist work settings (Czeglédy 1999; Dunn 2004; Müller 2004), in which managers seem more convinced advocates of the new discourses. It was in this context of mutual doubt that conversations about new managerial discourses often occurred. However, avoiding talking about redundancy was not a universal response. Some employees, mainly those away from decision-­making positions, were proud to be the ones to be chosen to continue working at the company. They often reasoned that this was due to their hard work, their ability to cooperate effectively with members of their ‘brigade’ (brigada), their ‘cleverness’ (as described in Chapter 2) and their personal connections. None of my respondents ever mentioned that their ability to get used to the new technologies or to adapt to changes was considered to be to their advantage, a response one might expect given the content of the discourses of the management. Nevertheless, those involved in the decision-­ making stressed the different qualities of the employees that had been deemed important in choosing who should remain. The new owners employed new people in certain key managerial positions in 2000, not only in order to make the staff redundancy program more effective, but also to apply new managerial and production policies. Since some people had been working there for decades, it was hard for the Human Resources (HR)2 personnel and shop floor managers to decide who would be staying and who would leave. In some cases, as older employees would narrate, some members of the old managerial staff, unable to handle such pressure, resigned, while others were fired. Some of the old managerial staff, though, while keeping their positions, did not take on the role of deciding who would be laid off. This role was mainly performed by new managerial staff who did not have any previous personal relationships with the workforce. The new HR manager, Ms Nikolova (42 years old), who had previous work experience in HR in an American company in Sofia and had attended some short HR courses

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in London, explained: ‘I was more rational than the old ones, and I could more clearly view who would fit in the new working environment … this process was not easy … we needed flexible people who could handle new challenges and could get used to new positions.’ What did ‘flexibility’, a term used almost exclusively at the higher levels of the administration in English, include? ‘Flexibility’ regarding the production process was quite clear since their responses would focus on the structural changes to the factory, such as the closing down of various sectors and the decision to subcontract some functions. However, it was not equally clear how it would be used as a term to describe workers’ attitude to work. In accordance with Dunn’s (2004) and Müller’s (2007, 2004) ethnographies of privatized work places in Poland and Germany, respectively, managers in Mladost would often compare ‘flexibility’ with representations of a previous era. I queried how, in the long process of staff reductions, they assessed workers in order to choose the more ‘flexible’ ones. Whenever I asked what the criteria were, the responses would be quite repetitive. People from the management would mention that those who were not ‘flexible’ and could not get used to the new technologies and practices were those who would be leaving the factory. However, in unfolding the story of the adoption of, and adaptation to, the new technology, it turned out that specific training was provided for a few workers on the use of the new machines. Those who had already been chosen to receive this training were those who secured new job positions in the new context. The others had already been chosen for redundancy. Therefore, it seemed like a kind of retrospective assumption on the part of the management that those who remained were those who were more likely to get used to the new technology, although those who were made redundant were never given the chance to work on the new machines. The management’s expectations of the qualities possessed by a ‘flexible’ employee were mainly that they were able to get used to new conditions. This actually included their willingness to show dedication to the company’s interests and to show that one would work overtime, if necessary. Although I would then ask what a ‘flexible worker’ meant, the examples would come not from workers but from shop floor managers, people with whom managers from the administration were actually in daily contact: ‘… look at Petar, he knows how to handle difficult situations and how to work hard when it is needed without complaining … he is able to view the general task, to please the client, and he does that by working with all of his energy … that’s why he has the potential … he is a good manager, and he got promoted’, the HR manager said. She would often also mention that this was the reason for having different salaries for the same job. Everybody should get paid according to his or her abilities: ‘… we have to ensure that

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salaries correspond to people’s work … those who work harder will get paid more’. This idea of the employee who works individually while being dedicated to the company’s tasks was often repeated. Although this could apply to various positions, it was hard for me to understand how such a distinction could be made among those workers on the conveyor belt, who would do exactly the same repetitive job on shifts, which would leave neither space nor time for different approaches to their work.3 Similar responses by the higher management showed that being ‘flexible’ meant identifying oneself with the company’s tasks and working overtime for it; employees’ time and bodies were at the disposal of the management and the demands of production. The following statement was made by a member of HR about a quality control manager: ‘Yanka has a flexible approach … she can learn all new technologies, and she can even stay during the whole weekend if there is an urgent need … she never refuses to do it.’ It was as if ‘flexibility’ was used in a consistently ambiguous way, leaving space for various meanings, since the meaning of the word itself is open to various interpretations. Moreover, the word could not easily express qualities related to job positions which were not bounded by the strict time pressure of the non-­stop conveyor belt. Yet, in a general manner managers would mention that this was an important quality for all workers. Nevertheless, Human Resources and other higher managerial staff did not actually give specific examples from the production site and did not seem to have a very clear idea about shop floor management. That was the shop floor managers’ duty; it was their responsibility to assess the workers and to inform the HR department of their assessment. Actually, both Petar and Yanka, who were described as ‘flexible’, worked in managerial positions on the shop floor. They were both young, educated and in their mid-­thirties, and they were viewed as the ‘new’ staff, as discussed in Chapter 1. They were both hard-­working and indeed spent long hours beyond their actual schedule on the shop floor. When I asked the HR manager how a ‘flexible’ worker should operate, she responded: ‘Do you think I really care about flexibility or about the audits or all these things we have to do for the environment? We have to keep the production going and basically to say that we are doing all these fashionable things nowadays …’. Ms Nikolova revealed her conscious reproduction of discourses which were ‘fashionable’ and not necessarily those she would actually take seriously. To a great extent, similar responses were received from other members of the management team when I asked them about their managerial practices in transforming the plant. For example, the financial manager said: ‘Today, in 2010, we produce a million bottles a day with one furnace and four production lines. When we got the factory in 1997, there were three furnaces and seven production lines, but we produced four

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times fewer tonnes of glass a month. Our production has increased … the workers are very experienced anyway since the past … this success is due to the new machines we bought’. Although I attempted to open a discussion about new managerial practices, he never drew a connection between the increased production and any kind of new mentality at work or new managerial practices. Rather, such discourses accentuated broader ideas about technological progress and modernity which seemed to represent continuity with socialist discourses of industrial modernity rather than with the new discourses. Managers in Müller’s (Müller 2004) study of three enterprises belonging to a multinational elevator company operating in Germany, the Czech Republic and Russia aimed at meeting economic and commercial goals, as well as at changing the culture at work. Managers ‘… had to accomplish not only economic and commercial goals but a civilizing and cultural mission. Against what they saw as the irrationalities and the arbitrariness of the planned economy, the managers offered an image of economic man based on rationality, optimism, and individualism’ (ibid.: 156). Managers in Mladost drew situationally on a similar image of the contrast between the past and the present. Nevertheless, in Mladost, these binaries coexisted with others, stressing continuity with past work practices and ethics. Interestingly, the few Greek managers in the plant were the only ones who tended to use a kind of ‘missionary’ language when talking about managerial practices. ‘Bulgarians did not know how to work … communism destroyed everything … we had to organize everything from the beginning … they need deep training to understand business’, the vice-­general manager said. Nevertheless, during my fieldwork, none of the Greek managers seemed to be involved with direct decisions about the organization of the shop floor or changes to the workforce. Their role was to come into contact with clients, to communicate daily with other factories in the group and with the owner, and to take financial decisions. Although their decisions were seriously affecting the production process, their images of their employees were mostly bound up in stereotypical images about ‘the Bulgarian employee’. When I would ask for specific examples about what they meant by stating that ‘these people did not know how to work’, responses included general characterizations such as, ‘they are slow’, ‘they don’t understand the market’ and ‘they fight with each other instead of doing their job’. Furthermore, their responses mostly referred to those who were employed in the administration and with whom they had contact. Their comments about the production site were rather more general. Greek managers in Mladost talked about employees, especially about manual workers, in similar ways to other Greek managers in Sofia in a wide range of services and production settings. Their responses, which were similar to

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the dominant ideas of consulting companies, seemed more of a repetition of comments heard among the Greek community of managers (Angelidou and Kofti 2013), rather than echoing their experience from the production site. With their minimal or almost absent skills in the Bulgarian language and only a moderate knowledge of English, their involvement in the daily lives of most Bulgarian employees was limited. Greek managers would often repeat that being ‘flexible’, ‘hard-­working’ and ‘career-­orientated’ were the basic criteria the new workforce should aspire to. Furthermore, they often repeated that they had introduced performance-­related pay for people doing identical jobs: ‘They (employees) had to learn to work in competition, not to be lazy and to feel secure with their equal salaries, like during communism … it is natural to work better when you know that you will get better money than your lazy colleague’, Mr Papadis, the Greek vice-­general manager, said, expressing a common argument about the ‘natural’ character of competitiveness. In the event, their discourses were not heard in the plant, where the HR manager, Ms Nikolova, and the financial manager, Mr Ivanov, were the most prominent figures of power in Mladost’s daily life. However, both Ms Nikolova and Mr Ivanov referred to differences in salaries as being a way to create motivation on the production line. Before discussing aspects of how diverse salaries shaped shop floor relations and conflicts and affected the production process, I will continue to attend to the use of managerial discourses on the shop floor.

From Management to the Shop Floor: From an Emphasis on ‘Individual’ Responsibility to an Emphasis on ‘Collective’ Responsibility While HR was the department responsible for employing the staff, those who finally decided on the redundancies and salaries of the workforce involved in producing glass were shop floor managers like Petar. When he talked about criteria for the ‘good worker’, he never used the term ‘flexibility’. This was also the case when he talked to the workers, in spite of his being the main link between HR and the shop floor’s Cold End. Being hard-­ working, not complaining about production problems and being cooperative with colleagues were the most important criteria for the ‘good worker’. As the manager of the Cold End, where production heavily depends on the workers’ cooperation at all stages of the production chain, ‘collectivity’ and ‘collective people’ (kolektivnost and kolektivni, respectively) were the key concepts and those he would often emphasize during his monthly meetings (sabraniya) with the workers. Part of the quality he sought in the

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‘good worker’ was that the worker should also be ready to help a colleague facing difficulties. The meetings between workers at the Cold End and their manager were important for the ‘team’s cohesion’ (splotiavane na kolektiva), as Petar said. He would meet a different shift every Wednesday before the start of the afternoon shift, a practice which resulted in a monthly meeting for each rotating team of workers. The meetings were usually brief, approximately fifteen to twenty minutes, and the topics were usually repetitive. This was when the management gave feedback to the workers and vice versa. After an introduction by the manager on the process of the production line and the output, the workers spoke in turn. These discussions mainly focused on the number of unidentified defects which ended up being packed. This was often presented by Petar as the ‘brigade’s’ fault. The manager would complain that both the quality controllers and the re-­sorting workers had failed to prevent a row of bottles being packed, which then had to be selected and returned for recycling or repacking. Furthermore, the ‘brigade’ would be responsible if the production lines became overloaded. When the conveyor was overloaded and bottles fell on the floor, it was a sign that the team was not cooperating properly. However, such problems were often caused by machinery malfunctions in combination with the production’s high speed. Only in extremely rare cases would Petar hold a particular worker responsible for an event like an overloaded conveyor belt. Rather, he was careful to stress that there was ‘collective responsibility’ (obshta otgovornost) for what had happened. The manager on the production line was well aware that most of the time the line was overloaded for reasons that were beyond the individual worker’s control. Moreover, he was also aware that if there were more members of staff, such incidents would not turn into uncontrollable problems. By underlining the notion of ‘collectivity’, Petar attempted to solve a problem that had in fact been caused by the shortage of workers due to redundancy. Petar described the desirable worker as one who can manage several tasks: ‘Workers have to look at the larger view of the production and help others in trouble’. This describes a worker who can perform his or her task at the machine, as well as other’s tasks if necessary. In practice, this meant more than working collaboratively. Given the shortage of workers’ owing to the redundancies, this was actually the only possible way for the production line to operate. Workers not only had to help their colleagues, they also had to perform tasks in order to fill gaps caused by the shortage of workers. For example, each packing machine used to employ two people who would both perform tasks that were now one person’s duty as discussed in Chapter 2. Petar’s suggestion that workers work collaboratively as a team around the conveyor belt was aimed at ensuring an effective

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outcome on the production line. He had to motivate workers to help each other in critical moments. In this sense, one might argue that workers are ‘flexible’ when they are able to complete their own duties while helping others during frequent irregularities of the production line. Thus, ‘flexibility’ included one’s own ability but also one’s willingness to work beyond one’s job description, even if this was a near physical impossibility. Petar was also aware that this was almost impossible and was therefore careful not to suggest that workers had responsibilities as individuals for faults of production. None of the language used from above about individual responsibility and the efficiency that competition brings reached the shop floor. Instead, collective responsibility was highlighted in many ways during meetings between workers and managers. Furthermore, Petar would emphasize that it was only through ‘collective work’ that the brigade would be able to meet the ‘clients’ demands’; it was not the management’s demands or the owners’ that were prominent in such discussions, but the market’s will and the market’s inevitability. ‘We have many orders waiting, we have no time to lose during this period of crisis’, he would mention during meetings. Petar had to give a report to HR about the workers’ performance, along with his suggestions concerning lay-­offs, when necessary. Furthermore, he had to decide for his own sector the range of salaries and the range of pay increases each worker would get every year. In line with his statement during his meetings with workers, he said that he gave better salaries to those who were prepared to cooperate with others at difficult moments. ‘Look at Maria, she is always ready to help her colleagues and she is not competitive at all … she should get a better salary than Olga, for example, who never cares about other people in her shift’. Maria, a 38-­year-­old worker, was indeed one of the few workers who was always willing to help and to alleviate stress on the line and among the workers. Furthermore, she never complained about the conditions at work and very rarely gave negative feedback about the management during the monthly meetings with her colleagues. Petar implemented the managerial decision to pay different salaries in order to reward certain workers’ individual performances while having to keep production continuing smoothly. Nevertheless, he mentioned that such decisions were hard for him to take and he wished he did not have to. Moreover, he mentioned, like other production sector managers, that he would rather work with regular workers only because the division was ‘unpleasant’ for the employees and not helpful for managing the production smoothly. Nevertheless, he mentioned that although he would see several practical difficulties arising from this condition, this type of organization is the ‘market’s will’ and therefore, it should be implemented for ‘financial reasons’.

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Figure 4.1.  Disagreement over the speed. © Dimitra Kofti

I will continue with an exploration of how the workers responded to these two approaches, that is, promoting individualism while relying on collective labour, how they shaped relationships among the workers, and ultimately, how they affected the production process. Most of my examples and my focus derive from the Cold End, where I participated extensively in daily operations and where one may observe relationships between casual and permanent workers, as well as relationships with other sectors. The combination of the notion of workers’ collective responsibility for the outcome of the production and the differences in individual pay generated various discussions at the plant, both during the meetings with the manager and in daily conversations. Many employees working at the Cold End would say that, given the speed of the conveyor belt, it was ‘not right’ or ‘unfair’4 to be held responsible for not identifying the defects and for the variety of other extra tasks. Furthermore, they would complain that the extra tasks that were required of them were intended to cover positions that were now abolished because of the redundancies. They would also blame the Hot End employees and manager for producing at high speed and with regular defects in the product. Although they viewed their problems as being caused by their colleagues at the Hot End, they would also blame the management for being unfair. ‘We are slaves once more … I am

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here to pack bottles, but I have to deal with so many other things at the same time … this is simply impossible but the bosses (i.e. the managers) act as if it is possible’, said Magda, a 50-­year-­old worker, while packing. Workers in private talk would also complain about the large differences in pay between the sectors. Women working at the Cold End complained about the men’s significantly higher salaries, even for unskilled positions at the Hot End. Furthermore, they complained about the different salaries paid to themselves and their colleagues in identical posts. Although talking about salaries was discouraged by the management, workers discussed their differences in pay extensively, pointing to the low salaries in general and their differences in particular. While there were a few regular, relatively well-­paid workers who thought the differences in pay were ‘right’, most workers complained about them and described them as ‘unfair’, thus revealing the importance of moral values related to ideas of equality and cooperation rather than individual reward and competition. I now turn to the final part of this chapter and ask: how did diverse payments based on the higher management’s ideas about ‘flexibility’ and the ‘natural’ character of competition and individual responsibility intertwine with production relations in Mladost? Given the motivation that the possibility of receiving better pay generated, did it encourage workers’ participation in the production process? Furthermore, what is the relationship between, first, the distinction between permanent and temporary staff and significant differences in their respective salaries, and secondly, the distinctions within the body of permanent workers brought about by different rates of pay within this group and by notions of ‘flexibility’?

Diversification of Pay, Cooperation and the ‘Rationality’ of Competition Every year, every sector manager in Mladost, in cooperation with the ‘White House’, had to suggest the amount of pay rise for each of the employees in their sector. Like Petar, other production managers in the mechanical and electrical sector would stress collectivity at work in meetings with workers. One of the mechanical sector’s shift managers, Valio, often complained that his employees did not cooperate, and in fact that many of them fought each other. He reasoned, in private talk, that the diversification of pay and the division between casual and regular workers was not helpful in that matter as it brought ‘fights’ rather than ‘productivity’.5 Here, I explore ideas and practices about cooperation within a system that pays workers different rates in a stressful environment characterized by competition and labour shortages. In Mladost, differences in pay do not

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necessarily motivate people to work harder, nor does it necessarily increase productivity. Rather, in this case, competition negatively affects both the workers’ own relationships and, at times, the production outcome. In line with criticism that ‘flexibility’ is detrimental to workers’ relationships, I further suggest that in Mladost it may also be detrimental to the outcome of the production line. Through this ethnographic example, I argue that the ‘rationality’ of competition generated by differences in salaries might not have the ‘rational’ result that managerial discourses promise. While this adds to the fragmentation of the workforce and to the disciplining of workers, it causes tensions and problems in the production setting, as several shop floor managers and engineers also implied or suggested. I will focus on an incident of a machine breakdown that involved two sectors of the shop floor, each of which organized its work differently. The first sector was the Cold End, an area which is directly related to the assembly line and in which the workforce is divided between those with casual employment status and those with regular employment status. The second sector was that of the electricians; they perform artisanal work at different work speeds. In both cases, the workers complained about differences in pay, a practice which generated conflicts in employee relationships and, according to shop floor managers, affected the production outcome negatively. I now examine a particular moment of difficulty on the production line, an example of the sort of situation Petar referred to during his meetings with workers. The packing machine on the third production line started to malfunction around three in the afternoon on a Wednesday, two hours before the daily shift was due to end for the electricians. As such, not only the electrician who was to stay in the plant for security reasons but the whole team of electricians was still in the plant when the incident occurred. The elastic floating pipes that grasp the bottles to transfer them on to the pallet partly failed to inflate with the appropriate amount of air, and as a consequence the machine failed to grasp about four of the waiting bottles every single time it transferred a layer of bottles to fit on the pallet. This caused two irregularities. First, it meant that these four bottles would stay tipped over on the belt and become mixed with the next batch of bottles to arrive. The second consequence, which was even worse, was that sometimes the machine would grasp the bottles to begin with but a few seconds later let them slip so that they would fall, and sometimes break, on the arriving bottles, or even worse sometimes fall down while passing above the worker’s head. The problem increased as the machine gradually failed to grasp more and more bottles each time. The worker on the packing machine, Maria, had immediately informed her shift manager, asking him to call the mechanical and electrical section to solve the problem.

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However, production did not stop, so she had to continue working under these conditions and to attempt to pack the bottles while avoiding, with difficulty, adding pieces of broken glass to the packed pallet. While she was doing all this, she also had to avoid a potential accident since bottles were falling from the air. While the minutes passed her work gradually became more difficult as more and more bottles were added to the conveyor belt and started to fall on the floor on the side of the line. The workers on the other three lines should have found a way to save a few seconds between their own actions to run to Maria’s machine to assist. Zheni, the worker on line two, had a difficult bottle that day. It was a small ‘Sprite’ bottle that required more attention than a large wine bottle, and she did not leave her line to assist her colleague, not even for a second. The worker on line four, Jana, did not assist either, even though she had larger bottles that afforded her a tiny amount of time for some spare actions. The worker on line one, employed by Litex, was the only one who attempted to leave her work for some seconds every once in a while, to assist Maria. While the problem accelerated, Maria was getting more and more stressed and started whistling loudly for help to arrive either from the shift manager, the quality-­control sector or anyone available. Responding to this, the worker at quality control left her work and went to help Maria, running the risk of leaving defective bottles on the line. None of the electricians had yet arrived. Finally, an electrician arrived after a wait of some fifteen minutes, which was an extremely long time given the short distance between the machine and the electrician’s room and the severe impact of this sort of malfunction on the flow of production. One might wonder why the worker from line four did not assist her colleague and why the electrician appeared so late. This incident was one that Petar later brought up for discussion during the meeting with workers. He blamed the brigade for not cooperating as a team. He was very ‘disappointed’ by the workers from the other lines who did not assist, and he pointed out the importance of collectivity. Maria did not blame her colleagues on the shift for not assisting, but complained that it was the electricians’ fault, as they ‘never do their work on time’. Jana, who did not help Maria, complained that she already had a hard task on her machine and that workers should not be responsible for the malfunctioning of the machines. Petar agreed with both of them, but still insisted that the ‘brigade as a whole’ was responsible for the smoothness of production and that they should find ways to overcome such difficulties ‘collectively’ until the problem was solved. Latinka, the woman from line one who helped Maria and who was also considered to belong to the ‘brigade’, although she was employed by Litex, did not comment on the event. Petar also said that he was aware of the electricians’ failing and that he already talked

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to their manager. After the meeting, the workers talked in the corridors about the stressful working environment. A widespread opinion was that they should not be responsible for more tasks than they could actually achieve. Private conversations with those employees who were involved in this incident suggest an additional perspective on why the team did not work as a ‘collectivity’ on this occasion. Jana did not help Maria because she thought it ‘not right’ to do more work when she was already stressed with her overloaded production line. Indeed, while it would have been possible for her to help a bit, it would not have been at all easy. When she made this statement during the meeting with Petar, her intention seemed to be to push the management into improving the working conditions and to bring in more staff, rather than giving more tasks to the workers. This complaint of overwork was usually made by the workers during these meetings. Nevertheless, Jana had an additional reason for not assisting that she did not voice during this meeting, and never did: Maria was paid a better salary than she was, and Jana thought that that was not ‘right’. As a result, she did not feel motivated to help Maria: ‘Why bother for Maria? She gets much better money than me … this is simply not fair, we are a team, we work at the same job, we should get the same money’. Jana’s remarks, shared in private talks, gave voice to a different view about what a team should be from that which Mladost’s management insisted on. According to her, the members of a team who were working at the same post should get the same pay and contracts and should share the same conditions of work. She thought that if workers were treated as ‘identical’ (ednakvi)6, there would be no conflict among the staff. Here Jana used a word very common with workers: ‘The problem is that we are not identical’ (Nie ne sme ednakvi). She also mentioned both the different salaries and the distinction between casual and permanent workers in this context. Latinka, the casual worker who helped Maria, mentioned that she always helps her colleagues and that she also appreciates it when they help her. As I noticed during my stay in Mladost, workers employed by Litex would often offer help to the regular workers and would receive help from them. The conflicting interests I am describing here were mainly among the regular workers. They would often help the casual workers in such a way as to suggest that they could do the job better than them, thus proving their familiarity with the machines and the process.7 The boundary of inequality between Litex employees and the regular workers thus permits some congenial work–time relationships. For the regular workers, helping the casual workers is occasionally a safe way to show that they are working ‘for the brigade’, whereas the internal inequalities within the regular staff seem to inhibit the cooperation the managers aim at.

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Interestingly, the delay in the electrician turning up was also related to the different salaries in this sector. The problem arose at the machine a while before the shift ended. However, the electrician who dealt with the problem might have to stay beyond the end of his shift to fix it. When information arrived about the fault on the packing machine, most members of the electrician team were occupied with constructing an extension to the production line. Pavel, an electrician in his early sixties who avoided undertaking this task, said, ‘I disappeared during the breakdown … I am not paid much; let the well paid take the responsibility’. Most of the less well-­paid electricians, some earning up to 50% less than others in that section, usually avoided working extra because they thought that it was ‘unfair’ to work more and get less salary. In this case, differences in pay do not necessarily stimulate the motivation to work harder; in fact, it may reduce productivity when employees rely on moral ideas about equality that evaluate these differences as ‘unfair’. In the case of the electricians, the differences in salaries for the same job seemed to be mostly connected to age. Older men who were closer to pension age would get as little as half the salary of a young electrician. Therefore, this difference was not necessarily connected to better performance at work; rather, as discussed in Chapter 1, higher salaries for young skilled workers were offered to persuade them to stay with Mladost, whereas the older ones had limited chances to quit because the job market was harder for them. However, the difference itself resulted in those who felt underpaid having less motivation. The ‘old’/‘new’ divisions which pointed to the importance of temporality as a site of struggle, discussed in Chapter 1, were expressed in this bias towards age. Experience and links to the past were not always valued on the production line, but their value varied according to the position and the importance of the post and the specialization. The ever-­present risk of downward mobility, the strong distinction between regular and casual work and the differences in pay for different workers seem to lock each of these categories of workers (regular/casual/ technicians) into their respective situations. The well-­paid regular workers were often coerced into showing ‘flexibility’. Maria, the regular well-­paid worker, often bent and took whatever was given to her, rarely complained and often helped others when and if needed. Jana, the low-­paid regular worker, protested against the system of flexibilized salaries, which put her at odds with her colleague, yet the constant danger of her being fired or downsized further required her to shift the blame and excuse her own inability to rise to the occasion of collective cooperation. Her lower salary did not motivate her to work harder in order to get a pay rise and thus attain Maria’s income because she saw the managerial practice of paying

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Figure 4.2.  Glass recycling material lying in the plant’s back yard. © Dimitra Kofti

different salaries for the same job as ‘arbitrary’ and ‘unfair’. Latinka, the casual worker trapped at the bottom, was, like Maria, stuck in the most precarious position, as she has almost no voice and must do her work with no chance of reward. With the electricians, likewise, it seems that the highest paid worker performed the extra work; that is, is ‘flexible’. The others declined to do the extra work, although this put them at risk of being laid off. However, through this action they demonstrated their resistance to a system of pay they considered unequal. As for the young, more highly paid electricians, they were trapped between the management and their co-­workers, as they needed to demonstrate that they were ‘worth’ the extra income they had acquired, almost accidently due to their age. A reward for every position is the hope that one might not lose one’s job; to achieve this reward, one must comply with these inflexible flexibilities.

Conclusion The ethnography in this chapter has traced the diverse meanings and ideas related to flexibility and the complexities of its implementation in Mladost. On the one hand, it is an etic term that has been used by diverse theories to analyse diverse spheres of social life within global capitalism. On the other, it is an emic ­term – ­though for only a certain stratum of the hierarchy, in Mladost’s ­case – ­which is used in contemporary workplaces to describe both the organization of production and new managerial techniques that

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aim at the creation of the subject-­worker. Consultancy companies and managers often adopt a dichotomized view of a process from a ‘rigid’ to a ‘flexible’ form of capitalism, or, in the case of postsocialist countries, from socialist ‘rigidity’ to capitalist ‘flexibility’. Anthropological studies of postsocialist work settings have challenged this dichotomy and situated their ethnographies in a more complex socio-­ historical context. They narrate more nuanced histories with both continuities and discontinuities with the socialist past (Dunn 2004; Müller 2004; Vodopivec 2010; Czegledy 1999). Nevertheless, in these studies, the relationships between managers and workers are, to a great extent, characterized by a dichotomy. The managers are advocates of new managerial discourses on flexibility, while the workers often challenge these new discourses, although they find their own ways of adapting to them, ways that are often based on the experience of socialism. The ethnographic material from Mladost has some similarities with the discourses of the managers in the studies of postsocialism mentioned above. However, managers in Mladost do not seem to be persuaded by these new ideas, and they often repeat them in a rather consciously performative way. Yet, although the rhetoric does not reach the shop floor, many of these ideas contribute to divisions of labour and fragmentations of the workforce. The new managerial discourses in Mladost agree with those found in other work settings in postsocialist countries, as well as in other parts of the world. Individual responsibility, self-­ regulation and a flexible approach to work dominate discussions about the qualities of the desirable employee at higher management levels. These are in line with the general context of the importance of individual choice in neoliberal capitalism. Nevertheless, in following the flow of these discourses from the higher management to the shop floor, it is apparent that collectivity is more important and individuality less important to the latter. The nature of glass production on an assembly line, which requires the interdependence of workers at different positions, along with the shortage of workers due to ongoing redundancy programs, needed a stronger stress on a collective approach to work. More importantly, the values of cooperation, rather than of competition, seem to be continually addressed to Mladost’s workers. In this context, shop floor managers needed to underline the value of ‘collective responsibility’ rather than the ‘individual responsibility’ as cultivated by managers in the administration, who have limited experience of production. However, they did not manage to achieve the collective ways of working in the ways they would have liked as they would clash with the existing divisions within workers’ groups, which were the results of the implementation of production policies based on the ideas of flexibility.

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‘Flexibility’ assumes diverse meanings for diverse actors. It is a ‘fashionable’ word that needs to be mentioned, as the HR manager in Mladost pointed out. Although managerial discourse associates with the rise of the values of individual responsibility and reward, as well as with the possibilities of choice and opportunities, in Mladost, many workers with ‘flexible’ but precarious employment statuses and insecure contracts who were paid on an individual basis had to perform collective tasks. In this context, I would hesitate to describe Mladost as an example of a clear transformation from a ‘Fordist’ to a ‘post-­Fordist’ mode of production. Rather, while the production line has many of the characteristics of Fordist production, managerial policies follow post-­Fordist techniques. Nevertheless, managerial discourses fail to understand the complexities of this combination and fail to convince workers about their organizational choices. In this sense the flexibility rhetoric becomes almost a floating signifier, a concept that includes managerial practices and discourses that are not necessarily those that are defended by dominant ideas of ‘flexible’ capitalism, though they are, in any case, situationally convenient for the management. In other words, the flexibility rhetoric becomes a ‘black box’ into which any content can be put, thereby providing the management with some ideological justification for doing whatever fits. Moreover, this is a rhetoric that is largely introduced on the factory by the owners and, even more so, by their consultants and large multinational corporate clients. As discussed in Chapter 3, the distinction between casual and permanent staff was significant in generating conflict on the shop floor. While discourses about flexibility as expressed from ‘above’ did not reach the shop floor, the practice of paying different salaries to motivate competition and provide the motivation to work, in line with the broader ideas of employment flexibility, was implemented in Mladost, thus creating further divisions among members of the permanent staff. Although the basic idea was to increase the workers’ productivity, a close look at Mladost suggests that this is not always the case. Workers were not convinced of the ‘fairness’ of such distinctions and were therefore not motivated to increase their performance. In the case of the assembly line, employees did not see the point, or fairness, in receiving different pay for identical tasks. In the case of jobs away from the conveyor belt, the differences in pay were often generational rather than based on performance. In both cases, the implementation of ‘flexible’ managerial practices did not necessarily bring out the desirable results as far as the production line was concerned. This was a concern expressed by both shop floor managers and engineers, often expressed at the crisis moments in production that occurred often.

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While it can be argued that managerial practices in favour of the ‘flexible subject’ (Dunn 2004) often ignore the needs of the individual in order to achieve cheap and effective production, whether they actually always manage to bring this result to the production line may be questioned. This leads to another thought regarding criticisms often made of neoliberal production. Neoliberal production and its focus on the creation of the flexible individual subject has often been criticized for generating inequalities among employees, both locally and globally, and for sacrificing human relationships for the benefit of smooth production achieved by competition between workers. Anthropological studies of work settings often criticize these conditions, which, as they are based on flexible production, are in favour of the production outcome rather than relationships among employees (see, for example, Dunn 2004; Ngai 2005; Rothstein 2005). While the ethnographic account of Mladost is in agreement with this criticism, it further suggests that, if managerial discourses and practices are not orchestrated to favour relationships among the workforce, they might likewise not benefit production as workers, engineers and shop floor managers seem to think. Rather than take for granted claims that these managerial practices result in better production, we should question their validity. In questioning whether the process of production benefits from dominant managerial practices of ‘competition’, we should challenge the very ‘rationality’ of the dominant managerial ideas and practices of flexible neoliberal capitalism.

Notes 1. There is a wide range of managerial handbooks, read across many countries, with diverse political-­economic backgrounds, translated into various languages, which are based on this assumption. See, for example (Peters 1988; Blanchard, Carlos, and Randolph 2001). 2. In Bulgarian, the term ‘human resources’ is literally ‘човешки ресурси’ (choveshki resursi). During socialism, this department used to be called ‘личен състав’ (lichen sastav), i.e. ‘composition of the personnel’. 3. In Chapter 2, I discussed how workers often showed that they did have different approaches to the machine. Nevertheless, these did not actually produce differences in the final outcome and therefore could not be measured by the management. 4. They would mostly use the expression ‘това е неправилно’ (tova e nepravilno) (this is unfair/not right). 5. He further said that he would rather work with a stable team of regular workers because casual workers would only arrive on demand for certain periods of time, and although it was not clear whether these people would actually return to his workshop, Valio had to invest time training them each time in specific needs.

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6. ‘Ednakvi’ (еднакви) means identical. In a broader sense, it means equal. However, the Bulgarian term for equal is ‘ravni’ (равни). The word choice here is more political. ‘Ednakvi’ is more encompassing and larger, in the sense that it covers all the conditions, not only equality of salaries. 7. A familiarity that was often described in terms of ‘dancing with the machines’, discussed in Chapter 2.

5

and Idle Chimneys ° Smoking (In)Visible Labour and Workers’

Identifications in Dilapidating Industrial Spaces

Transformations in a wide range of social domains and ongoing renegotiations of production and labour practices have been vividly inscribed onto postsocialist landscapes in both urban and rural areas (Alexander and Buchli 2006; Dzenovska 2018, 2020; Morris 2016). In Sofia’s industrial zone, there are a number of industrial buildings from the socialist and postsocialist eras, with marked visual differences between dilapidating and newly constructed industrial buildings. Some belong to active companies, others survive from companies that have closed, and in a few cases, their construction has been left unfinished. Dilapidating old and new buildings also coexist on Mladost’s premises. This architectural mixture constitutes the materiality of multiple coexisting temporalities, which not only carries but also enables intense historical transformations to take place. In her ethnography of a Chinese production site, Rofel suggests that, ‘rather than accepting as transparent the identities of workers, one must ask how they are culturally produced, embraced, performed, challenged and denied’ (Rofel 2009: 342). Here, I focus on the ways in which old and new worker identities are performed and interacted in relation to the use of space and the choices of workers to follow paths that are often invisible and left unregulated by the management inside the seemingly empty and abandoned buildings. Furthermore, in accordance with Rowlands’ (2005) argument for taking a materialist approach to materiality, access to materiality and the ability to make choices regarding it provides a means to achieve ‘self-­realization’. As Nadia’s story of the reuse of her old sewing machine and room suggests, focusing on the discourses and uses of older and newer spaces in Mladost may reveal ways in which workers’ changing identifications are performed. Furthermore, research into the plant’s use of space reveals ways in which regulated and less regulated economic practices were closely connected. In this chapter, I place the use of invisible spaces and architecture at the centre of attention. I look at the performances of the multiple worker identities and multiple economic practices that take

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place alongside Mladost’s more visible spaces. These invisible places not only hosted workers’ informal practices outside the work schedule, which were away from the panoptical gaze of the main production building, but they also hosted a large number of production operations undertaken by the outsourcers. As such, they are also a focal point in studying both the relationship between regular and casual work and daily practices of resistance. Moreover, inside these buildings, multiple and contested temporalities met as ‘old’ and ‘new’ practices of production took place along with informal practices of commemoration of the ‘old’ Mladost. In underlying the processual character of their dilapidation, which was central to these temporal multiplicities and contestations, I have chosen to mainly describe them as dilapidating in a continuous present, rather than as dilapidated or abandoned.

Researching the (Re)Use of Industrial Buildings Underlining the importance of researching people’s attitudes to architecture, Victor Buchli points out that ‘… our understanding of societies is almost invariably concentrated through an architectural ocular’ (Buchli 1999: 1). Indeed, workers’ understandings of ongoing production and managerial changes in Mladost were strongly related to changes to the plant’s materiality in general (machinery and technological changes), and to the architecture’s central role in particular. While production techniques changed after privatization and new spaces were built in order to accommodate new techniques, many of the older buildings in the plant were classified as ‘not in use’, according to official descriptions voiced by the company’s management. Nonetheless, some of these older, ‘not in use’ buildings and spaces were used informally, such as Nadia’s sewing room. Certain other dilapidating spaces hosted parts of the outsourced production process, as I shall show. What was left of older buildings from the period prior to privatization were incorporated into the life of the newer production buildings. Although the management regularly described them as ‘not in use’, they were integral to the production process and daily life of the plant. Postsocialist architectural constructions have often been built in relation to and/or in contrast with the past in order to create new futures. Humphrey’s (2002) study of ‘New Russian’ villas offers an insightful way to view the process of how the new cultural category of ‘New Russians’ is being formed. In this case, as Humphrey (2002) argues, the new buildings’ construction reveals aspects of their owner’s identity formation in relation

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Figure 5.1.  One of the abandoned rooms that workers used to socialize and to rest before or after the shift. They would often describe it as ‘my office’. © Dimitra Kofti

to new consumption practices and shifting meanings of wealth in Russia. Pelkmans (2003) focuses on discourses around newly constructed kindergartens that remain empty and unused, as well as plans for other future constructions in Ajaria in Georgia. He argues that constructing as an act sometimes seems more important than the use of the buildings that result (ibid., 2003: 124). Although in Ajaria, the operational plans for these buildings failed and they remained empty, they offer future images of prosperity associated with images of ‘Europe’ (ibid., 2003: 131). Additional representations of ever-­forthcoming luxurious housing constructions are viewed by Pelkmans as ‘the embodiment of the myth of transition, of the dreams about a ‘modern’ life’ (ibid.: 131) in relation to the past. In contrast to these transitional mythic images, Pelkmans suggests looking at processes of change that take place in relation to such reconfigurations of images. Here, I explore transformations through the practice of using old industrial buildings as stable but perishable images that stand next to newly constructed buildings, viewing the latter from inside the older ones and vice versa. I shall discuss how the use of space in an industrial plant that consists of older and officially abandoned buildings and newer, officially active

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buildings used for production provides a means for employees in diverse positions to cope with, and give meanings to, changing power relations and hierarchies between regular and casual work statuses in the production process. Most of Mladost’s old buildings were gradually evacuated and abandoned by the new management after their takeover. This was part of the move to flexible capitalism, as described in Chapters 1 and 4. There were no official statements or discussions by the company’s management in relation to the remaining buildings. Rather, there was a tendency to avoid any relevant discussion, a silence consistent with other silences about the past in Mladost, as described in Chapter 1. Once, while I was about to enter one of the abandoned buildings, I met Yannis, a 62-­year-­old Greek manager who was responsible for the maintenance of the plant’s buildings. He asked me why I was going there and said quite angrily that I should not enter because there was nothing to see that could potentially be related to my interests. ‘These are the old communist buildings … There is nothing to see here. They are not in use. Don’t you see what bad condition they’re in? We had to build better, new ones.’ His words echoed the ‘embodiment of the myth of transition’ (Pelkmans 2003: 131) performed through discourses on new building construction. This only fed my curiosity further, and I started going to the old buildings when the management’s gaze was turned. Interestingly, the main production building was built during the socialist period in the 1 ­ 970s – n ­ one of the buildings were built by the current owners. However, those used for production were well-­maintained, and some extensions had been added to the main production building. One may wonder why these old buildings had not been demolished. However, this would cost the company a significant amount of money. Further, one may wonder why the company has not attempted to sell them or make some other profitable use of the land they stood on. However, since these buildings were inside the plant, this would have required complicated rearrangements. Moreover, this area of Sofia has always been exclusively industrial, its land of little value, and there were no obvious plans to build housing there or to host any other activities. As a consequence, these buildings remained inside the plant. Although evacuated and ‘not in use’, the majority of their spaces were left unlocked and were accessible by the employees, who were the only ones allowed to cross Mladost’s entrance. Inside these buildings, there were various activities that the management, by leaving them unlocked, seemed to silently host or ‘ignore’. The use of these spaces and their ownership make this case particularly interesting. Because these buildings were owned by the company but not officially in use for the main production, they provided an opportunity for alternative activities to take place within the site. Unlike ‘gentrification’, wherein

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the upper and middle classes purchase and renovate industrial space as a capital investment in housing (Smith 1996; Herzfeld 2009), Mladost’s dilapidating buildings were still owned by the company and, being left open, were being repurposed by employees during or outside their shifts. It might have been this peculiar status of the abandoned buildings that made Yannis say I should not go there. His statement seemed to mean more than the obvious conclusion that the management was constructing a new capitalist modernity in opposition to the previous socialist version of modernity. He wanted to prevent me from entering a space over which the management had a different sort of control than that which prevailed in the ‘in use’ building. While the main production space was based on the visibility of labour and followed disciplinary techniques of power aimed at regulating the production line and the workers’ bodies, the dilapidating buildings were invisible, informal and did not share the same disciplinary methods. Anthropological studies of workplaces have focused on the power of the managerial gaze upon workers and the disciplinary techniques imposed by the shop floor design. Rofel (1992) and Ngai (2005) each analysed the ways in which panopticism brings consent to the shop floor in two different Chinese factories. In discussing Foucault (1979) on the disciplinary methods of modernity that define strong hierarchies of power in the process of production, they also demonstrate workers’ daily escapes from the panoptical gaze. Rofel (1992) suggests that analysis of the connections between memory, space and resistance in workplaces may bring to the fore the complexities of managers’ and workers’ diverse interpretations, implementations and subversions of transglobal production and managerial practices. In Rofel’s (1992) study of a Chinese silk factory, workers’ memories of previous spatial relationships cause daily spatial subversions to the shop floor. Spatial practices in Mladost resonate with these arguments. I explore the ways in which memories of previous periods and practices of commemorating become daily practices of resistance within Mladost’s seemingly abandoned and empty spaces, suggesting that, in practice, the transformation from a socialist modernity to a capitalist modernity of production is not at all unilinear, and that the temporal and spatial paths taken at Mladost are multidirectional. Moreover, I explore the work that the outsourcers carry out there, as well as memories of past conditions of labour, when these buildings were fully operational. I describe the ‘not in use’ buildings as seemingly abandoned because both the factory’s management and other employees were involved in their use. These old buildings are not ‘undesired architecture’ in Van der Hoorn’s (2004, 2009) sense, nor do they fall neatly into Ederson’s (2005a, 2005b) description of industrial ruins. According to Van der Hoorn, undesired

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architecture are ‘buildings or projects whose existence is publicly questioned and sometimes physically altered by people who have, or took, the power to do so’ (2004: 93). Some of Mladost’s old buildings were demolished after privatization, while others were gradually evacuated and have remained abandoned ever since. Although some were physically altered, the company’s management made no official statements or discussions in relation to the remaining buildings. Rather, there was a tendency to avoid any relevant discussions. Unlike Van den Hoorns’ ‘undesired architecture’, there was a lack of open criticism about the existence of these buildings. Through the ethnography, I explore the reasons for the management taking this position. On the one hand, there was an obvious economic reason, since they were not willing to spend money demolishing them. On the other, and more importantly, some parts of the outsourced production were hosted there. The ‘not in use’ buildings were actually fully in use and hosted invisible activities of flexible capitalism, along with practices of resistance to it. Industrial ruins, according to Ederson, are buildings in which production is no longer taking place and that have ‘negative connotations with which they are associated in official and common sense thought’ (2005a: 17). In his research, the author suggests that ruins be viewed as spaces that are used ‘alternatively’; for example, for home-­making, plundering, gardening or adventurous play or art. He argues that these alternative uses offer a critique of the notion that ruins are necessarily useless and empty places. Rather, once-­ordered industrial spaces offer a stage for alternative human action. In agreement with this, I explore what kinds of uses are taking place inside Mladost’s seemingly abandoned spaces and what kind of ruins these ‘not in use’ buildings are. Factories, Edensor suggests, ‘are exemplary spaces in which things are subject to order: machines are laid out in accordance with the imperatives of production, shelves accommodate tools, and a host of receptacles [and] notices, [but] as soon as a factory is abandoned to its fate, the previous obvious meaning and utility of objects evaporates with the disappearance of the stabilizing network which secured an epistemological and practical security’ (Edensor 2005b: 313). In the case of Mladost, although its abandoned buildings were presented in a negative light by the management, it was not in their interest to transform them further or demolish them. Rather, some of the activities that take place there, although not carried out in accordance with the industrial discipline described by Edensor, were in favour of the operation of the production line as they hosted some of the invisible labour practices. Their additional informal use by the workers for their own private purposes challenged the order found in the ‘in use’ buildings.

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Multiple Temporalities of the ‘Old’ Buildings The ‘old’ buildings in the plant were often at the centre of employees’ attention when they drew situational comparisons between ‘before’ and ‘after’ socialism and/or privatization, as well as in giving meaning to the reordering of the geography of power relationships. These buildings seemed to bear renegotiations of various overlapping temporalizations. Workers, especially, but not exclusively the older ones, would often point to these buildings while resting in the yard, talking about edno vreme (‘old times’ or ‘in the past’; see Chapter 1). During the cold days of January 2009, a few months after the ‘financial crises’ and the redundancies that followed, the ‘gas crises’ between Russia and Ukraine also affected Mladost. On the main production line, which heavily relied on gas, two out of the four lines had to stop temporarily, resulting in workers worrying about an uncertain future once more, and reminding them of previous periods of insecurity at work. During these days of high levels of stress, Vlado, a 55-­year-­old engineer who had changed various jobs and employment statuses throughout his working life, pointed to a chimney: ‘Do you see the smoke? Do you think it will manage to reek for another decade until I get my pension? I wouldn’t like to have another dead chimney in my life …’ he said, pointing to another old idle chimney in the plant. The dead chimneys in Mladost’s yard, like the dilapidating buildings, were metonyms of economic decline, downsizing and insecurity. Vlado worked at a factory for a decade before it closed down after the collapse of socialism. After two years of unemployment, he found a job at another factory in the early 1990s, only to be made redundant a few years later, during the Bulgarian financial crisis of 1997. After talking to me about the idle chimney, he started narrating his family’s difficulties in coping during the period of his unemployment and his ways of finding basic nutritional goods. During this period, his family’s income consisted of his wife’s low salary from her public-­sector position as a teacher. He was employed in Mladost in 2000, hoping, given the constant demand for glass in the market, that this would be a stable job. After pointing to the chimney, he said that given the global economic crisis, he was afraid of a new period of scarcity, but he also expressed his hope that this would not happen again. Vlado did remain in Mladost for another decade and finally got his pension without changing to another job. Nevertheless, during that period, he saw several of his colleagues made redundant, while his own salary remained stagnant, and he continued to worry about his future throughout the whole period. While comments like Vlado’s referred to a difficult past and an uncertain future, these buildings were also a chance to talk about the ‘good old

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times’: ‘Do you know how many people used to work inside this building you see there? It used to be the domestic glass production … beautiful production, not like the bottles … now everyone is gone … they fired us all … back then (during the period of intense job reduction), we did not know who would be the next to leave’, Lydia, a 59-­year-­old worker, said during a break. Lydia had worked in this building since the early 1970s until she was laid off after privatization, when domestic glass production ceased and the building in which it was produced was formally closed, with most of the redundant workforce never going back to work at the plant. Lydia was one of the few workers to re-­enter the factory doors and work again in the same building, this time as a worker for Litex. In employees’ narratives, the abandoned buildings were often nostalgic reminders of past times, which were also better times compared to their views of their working conditions today. However, they were also constant reminders of the abrupt changes to production and the economy: the fall of the regime, the difficult years of the early 1990s, the Bulgarian economic crisis of 1997 and the subsequent privatization, with its reordering of the production line. Although reminders of the insecure past, they were also warnings of potentially insecure futures, like the idle chimney that reminded Vlado that the other one that was currently still working might have a future of idleness too. In such comments, the old buildings would become a metonym of the ‘good old times’. At the same time, the abandoned buildings were reminders of the practices of exclusion that followed privatization. Downsizing the staff was necessarily a matter of choosing who would stay and who would leave; the empty spaces were constant reminders of those who were missing, like the Latvian countryside described by Dzenovska, where emptiness is an ongoing reminder of those who have migrated (Dzenozska 2020). Ironically, while these old buildings represented the ‘good old times’, they were also reminders of the process of their abandonment. This in turn brought to mind the insecurity of the present and the ambiguity of the future, which cannot be described using idioms of temporal coherence (Guyer 2007), a future that is neither lost nor predicted (Ringel 2018: 7). The existence of these buildings in the yard of the plant manifested memories and multiple temporalities in Mladost’s daily life, where the processes of deindustrialization and reindustrialization met. In relation to the past of these buildings, staff with different work experiences and positions of power in Mladost offered two different but repeated narrative patterns. The first was expressed by employees like Lydia, who had worked in Mladost before privatization and who often talked about life in the past of these buildings and remembered both past production practices and their old colleagues. The second narrative was that of the higher

Map 5.1.  Mladost drawn by a Mladost engineer. © Dimitra Kofti

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managers, who would refer to these buildings as a foil for proclaiming the achievements of the new management, contrasting them with the images of ruination of the old buildings: ‘These ruins belong to the communist past … when we came, we threw away old machines, furniture, books … we could not have our production run in these ruins’, the factory director, Mr Ioannidis, told me. Interestingly, this was a retrospective view of buildings that had, in fact, fallen into ruin since privatization, not before. As narratives in Mladost indicated, these buildings had been kept in a relatively good state until their official abandonment and the resulting lack of maintenance. Buildings abandoned to entropy quickly become ruins, allowing the director’s comment, just over a decade later, to increase retrospectively the difference in the company’s ‘newness’ after privatization. I will now go inside these buildings to describe the activities that took place there and the further discourses and silences related to these activities.

Producing Products and Inequalities inside Dilapidating Buildings The building formerly used for domestic glass production is visibly decaying. Nonetheless, although often described by the management as ‘not in use’, it hosted some of the production undertaken by Litex workers. This enabled Mladost to avoid the risk and responsibility for what happened there since it accommodated workers working ‘outside’ of the company. In having actual production embedded there, this building became a constant symbol and reminder of the inequalities in the factory in discussions among workers. Furthermore, it provided a means for Mladost to outsource part of the work literally next door, with lower salaries, no costs of transportation, constant control of their work, and the absence of any responsibility for health and safety regulations or any of the other responsibilities the management would otherwise have. This appeared to be the primary reason the management avoided discussing these buildings and their current use. Instead, the management would refer to them as if they belonged only to the past of the factory. Their present use by the company remained unspoken, and the workers employed there were almost invisible. Lydia, the 59-­ year-­ old Litex worker formerly employed directly by Mladost in the three-­storey building for domestic glass production, now worked at its entrance, indicated on the map (Map 5.1) as a ‘re-­sorting line’. According to the director and the higher managers, ‘nothing happens there’. According to the head engineer who drew the map and explained the production process that took place in this space to me, it was labelled

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Figure 5.2.  Casual work in the old buildings. © Dimitra Kofti

a ‘storage space’: ‘In fact, this building is not used by us (Mladost); it is Litex that works on the ground floor of the old building. The other floors are not in use’. Their tasks were related to sorting defective products that could not be repositioned on the production line in the main production building. Workers on the ground floor loaded pallets with bottles, identical to those at the Cold End, but everything would be done by hand, without the automated machinery used in the main ‘in-­use’ building. Litex workers in the ‘storage’ space, were paid piece rates and earned much lower monthly wages than the workers located inside the newer buildings. Their workflow was irregular, unlike the flow on the production line described in Chapter 2. They had to be present in the factory for their shift, but when defectives did not arrive at their line, they would often have to spend waiting time unpaid. When the defectives did arrive, they worked fast and, like the Litex workers who added more bottles at the production line in the ‘in-­use’ building (discussed in Chapter 2), hoped for more to come so that they could make at least some money during the shift. These two groups of Litex workers were not, in fact, always kept distinct. Workers employed in the ‘not in use’ building would also, if needed, take on a number of tasks on Mladost’s main production lines. This need arose daily, though they were still employed on a casual basis to fulfill regular

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tasks. They often worked on a variety of jobs throughout the whole shift, but nevertheless, their salaries could never reach more than some 60% of those earned by the regular workers. Although Litex workers had originally been laid off by Mladost because they had been considered ‘inefficient’ and ‘inflexible’, they now performed various different tasks in different positions, trapped in flexible contracts, their work tasks regularly changing. Their ‘punishment’ for not being ‘flexible’ was the increased employment flexibility that was expected of them. The production that took place on Mladost’s new shop floor was the main and visible production with automated machinery, workers wearing identical uniforms and using identical safety equipment, and both machines and workers being inspected during audits. However, parts of the production process were extended from the Cold End to the old shop floor, an area where work was done by hand and workers, whose pay was significantly different, were not provided with clothes or equipment by the main company. This place was where the invisible extension of the production process was hidden away. Nevertheless, such invisibilities were legal, enabled by the outsourcing regulations. Working inside the nearly collapsing building became indicative of the new hierarchies and divisions in the plant that had occurred after privatization. Most of the workforce would often point to these hierarchies while talking about the workers employed in the ‘old’ buildings. Workers at the end of the production line in the ‘new’ building, who received the lowest pay among the permanent staff, would often position themselves as more privileged employees in comparison with those working in the ‘not in use’ building. ‘I feel lucky I work at this position; working for Litex is bad … we get better salaries and a vacation; they don’t’, Maria, a quality control worker, often repeated, echoing the general view of her colleagues. Nevena, another colleague, once told me while pointing to the ex-­domestic production building: ‘I am somehow in a good position here (on the ‘new’ building’s production line); I do not want to end up there.’ However, workers like Lydia, who did ‘end up’ there in the old building, would often say that they were happy working there, although the pay was extremely low. ‘At least I have somewhere to work. Other people lost their jobs and were searching [for one] for a long time with no results. I am 59 years old; I only know working here. Nobody would hire me elsewhere.’ For Milena and Maria, work taking place in these dilapidating buildings made their situations and their low status in the factory bearable when compared to the even lower status people like Lydia had in the ‘old’ building. This building and the productive activity taking place in there were constant reminders of their relatively better off situations, having been among those who were not fired during the staff redundancies. Although

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Figure 5.3.  Casual work in the old buildings. © Dimitra Kofti

they were happy not to be working in the ‘old’ building nowadays, they would often speak about what was happening inside this building ‘before’ (predi), in the ‘old times’ (edno vreme), when ‘all women were working together … [and] there was no fear of being fired’, as workers would often say. Furthermore, since many of the workers in the dilapidating building

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had actually been laid off by Mladost and then re-­employed there by Litex, these buildings were a permanent reminder of potential downward mobility for the regular and visible workers on the new shop floor. The threat of more precarious working conditions and of a less formal employment status could be seen just in the building next door.

Workers’ Alternative Uses for the ‘Not in Use’ Buildings Several other parts of the dilapidating buildings were informally occupied by workers and were used as personal spaces for taking a rest and socializing and for alternative economic activities. Rooms that had apparently been abandoned and where the management did not go to, hid spaces that workers had reappropriated. The second floor of the former domestic ware production building was mostly empty. The machines had been removed in the late 1990s, and the windows were already broken or missing. In a corner behind a wall was a hut made out of a variety of materials, and outside it, a few glass ornaments and a few tools. Georgi, a 65-­year-­old craftsman who, according to other workers, had been one of the most talented of the former domestic glass production workers, was still working there, albeit independently. He was not employed in Mladost and was a squatter from previous times who was left alone by the current management. He occupied a small part of the building, in which he had constructed a hut, which seemed lonely and paradoxical inside the vast empty floor. In it, he kept some of the old equipment and, according to rumour, had launched his own business there. He continued to produce small glass ornaments, but under what status he occupied the place, nobody could actually tell. He would avoid talking to anyone and, consequently, I failed to get into conversation with him. There were many rumours about Giorgi; many said that he actually lived on the second floor, and that it was both his home and the place where he still made glass by hand, just like the ‘old times’. The stories told about Giorgi were like an urban myth. The paradox derived from the fact that this building was on the plant’s premises and that one needed to pass door control to enter into the premises. This made his squatting a strong challenge to worker discipline in Mladost and raised questions about the management’s awareness of what was going on. For example, in the administration building, there were glass labels with the names of the managers carved on them hanging outside each manager’s door. I was repeatedly told by workers that Georgi had made these, information given to me as if to say that the management was fully aware of what went on inside the abandoned spaces. Whether or not these

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labels had actually been made by Giorgi, it was important that this rumour told other truths. These comments also spoke to the peculiarity of these buildings’ uses and the power of those who used them. The story continued in two directions. One was that it was Giorgi’s ‘communist past’ as a member of the Communist Party that gave him the power he was now using because he had connections with people in the upper management.1 The other direction was indicated by those workers who spoke of Giorgi with admiration for his love of the previous production process and his achievements in continuing handmade production in the new conditions, even though the factory had stopped such production after privatization. These comments also pointed to the relationships between formal and informal economic practices that were enabled through the activities in these buildings and to their ambiguity in respect of the management’s involvement in them and/or workers’ resistance to managerial power. Nadia, the tailoress, also used a room to continue her previous work. She, however, had occupied one of the empty rooms inside the main production building (see Figure 0.1). Although her basic income was her salary as a cleaning lady, she continued to view herself as a tailoress and to work as such. Initially, she repaired clothes for the workers, but as she gradually became known throughout the factory, she established herself in this room and would repair clothes for both workers and managers on an informal basis, while also getting paid by the company to repair worker’s uniforms at piece rates. Since privatization, Mladost ceased to produce uniforms itself and bought them from an outside company. Those that became damaged would be passed to Nadia’s for repair and preparation for further use. Although Nadia worked full time as a cleaning lady, she stayed longer in this room to do the sewing and would sometimes go there to work at weekends. Ironically, although she had sewn uniforms for years and was now repairing them for Mladost, she was now employed by an external company, which did not provide workers with uniforms or any kind of equipment. The need to provide their own work clothes was another expense casual employees had to cover from their meagre incomes and another strong sign of their low status within the plant. Nevertheless, casual workers often got used uniforms from Mladost workers which were often worn, and, with Nadia’s help, made them usable again. One could spot casual workers from the wear of their second-hand uniforms. Both Giorgi and Nadia occupied their spaces and carried out their previous ‘old’ work in them. Their experience, as well as their long presence at Mladost, allowed them to re-­establish themselves as, respectively, a craftsman and a tailoress, two of the numerous occupations that had disappeared with downsizing. I view their practices as a refusal to perform only their current official (and in Giorgi’s case, nil) position. Although

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there was an obvious economic benefit from these practices, they also represented an attempt by both to maintain their older skills and to find a way of continuing to use them. There were also other workers, less visible than Nadia and Giorgi, who silently carried on economic activities unrelated to glass production. Some electricians kept a space for their tools, where they would stay after work to repair items for clients outside the factory. Lily, a 30-­year-­old worker at the Cold End, who wanted to become a beautician, occupied an abandoned room next to the women’s changing room where she offered treatments for workers. Other women used the changing room as a space for bartering. They would sell bedsits and handmade embroidery they or their family members had made and exchange homemade food products, such as honey and tomatoes, and pepper sauces (lioutenitsa). Spaces in the old buildings also offered an opportunity for employees to create a personal space informally that was not just used for economic activities. Some workers used the empty rooms for resting, for having a quick and secret cigarette break, or even, usually before or after the shift, to meet their secret lovers from the plant. A worker at the Hot End occupied a room where he had installed a sofa, decorating the room with large pictures of nudes. He and his colleagues would use this room occasionally to take a rest during their breaks. Others also collectively occupied some of these spaces and decorated them with pictures and plants. Bobi and Katia, two workers aged 38 and 42, respectively, used an abandoned room for socializing and to rest. Although they rarely had time to make use of the room, since they had to pick up children from school or run errands right after work, they were happy to know that the space was there. They would often refer to the room they had occupied as their ‘office’, somewhere they could invite their colleague-­friends for ‘meetings’, mostly to have a hot drink before or after their shift. In describing these meetings, they used the word ‘sabranii’, the same word used by the management for the daily meetings that took place among managers or the monthly meetings of managers and workers. This was a humorous comment on those employees who actually did occupy offices and who were regarded as more privileged by those members of the work force who did not, like Bobi and Katia. The usual jokes on these appropriations of space by the workers were comments on the inequalities in the factory that were rooted in the use of space. The more important a position was, the more personal space was allocated to the employee by the management. Shop floor managers had their own offices, as did staff employed in non-­manual jobs. In calling the spaces they squatted in their ‘offices’, workers made claims to power while criticizing the distinction between manual and non-­manual employment and the strong hierarchies among those employed on the shop floor.

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Figure 5.4.  A room used by a brigade. © Dimitra Kofti

Another occupied space visually combined diverse temporalities that co-­ existed in Mladost’s hidden spaces (see Figure 5.4). One brigade of craftsmen occupied a space where they kept their personal belongings and sometimes spent time during their breaks. It was decorated with a red hammer and sickle flag as a curtain, pictures of the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, a figure of Christ, and medals the brigade had won in socialist-­era competitions. The seemingly paradoxical co-­existence of all these symbols together in the same room, from different periods and ideologies, is how I came to view the re-­use of this dilapidating space. Workers like Nadia and Giorgi reclaim their pasts and perform their past identities in the present. Giorgi maintained a mythical existence held over from the socialist past. Left alone by the

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new management, his peculiar hut was his only space of employment and, occasionally, his living space. He remained there, a leftover from the past, and established his place in Mladost’s present as the old talented craftsman who refused to leave his occupation. Although a liminal exception, Giorgi tells us a lot about the processes of transformation and change at Mladost. In workers’ conversations, he was either ‘the communist’ who made use of his previous power to make a living in the present, or a nostalgic presence of the ‘good old times of the past’, a reminder of a different type of skilled work. Nadia was not mythical like Giorgi, perhaps because, along with the performance of her past identity, she had a present position in Mladost’s post-­privatization existence as a casual worker. The brigade of craftsmen, which consisted of five workers from various generations, maintained a space away from the management’s gaze where the group’s past identity was demonstrated through their prizes and perhaps, although oily and dirt-­ stained from their work, through the hammer and sickle flag used as a curtain. In addition, the activities that took place in these spaces, such as the beautician services, barter exchange and the electricians’ services, were not unfamiliar with Mladost’s past, since, as described in Chapter 1, services such as hairdressers and food shops were available in socialist factories. This coexistence of symbols and activities from diverse periods, performed by both older and younger workers, suggests that workers in Mladost claim different relationships with their workplace than those the formal management insists on. Rather than maintaining unskilled or deskilled statuses, workers practice their multi-­skilled identities within Mladost’s multi-­temporal spatiality, enabled through the existence of supposedly abandoned former buildings. These buildings were infused with ambiguity: not merely active parts of capitalist production, nor merely parts of socialist production, they were spaces where the non-­linearity of modernity was visualized and practiced. This ambiguity provided liminal spaces where alternative economic and social practices took place; it was this liminality that made these spaces ‘safe’ for carrying out activities that challenged hierarchies and constituted a form of resistance. Workers in Mladost did not merely resist the disciplinary mechanisms applied by the management daily in the main production line building; they also challenged the alienating process that accompanied outsourcing, downsizing and deskilling by reclaiming their old skills (older workers) or by claiming alternative identities and skills than their current ones (younger workers). Furthermore, these squats were not merely places of alternative economic activity: they also challenged existing hierarchies in the plant, hierarchies as defined by those who had personal space and those who did not. This hierarchy was strongly experienced in the spaces of the production process.

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The less powerful had smaller amounts of space allocated for their use, while those who had better positions were allocated their own offices and more common space. There was a common room for all on the shop floor, a place where all workers could go, but this was a relatively small room facing the production space. It was designated as the only area within the Mladost complex where smoking was permitted, but it was useful for little more than a quick drink or cigarette during a five- to ten-­minute break. Staying in this room for longer was impossible for production-­line workers, since the line was in constant flow and they could only be there for the limited amount of time for which somebody had replaced them, if they were lucky. Those in positions not on the production line would stay a bit longer. Nevertheless, a prolonged stay in the common room of more than ten minutes was never possible because the room was visible to the managers, who assumed that anyone spending time there must be skiving off work. Squatted rooms served as places for secret breaks for those working at posts that were not directly related to the production line. There were no official spaces on the shop floor, other than the common room, where a worker could be during the break, besides the canteen where workers could have food or coffee. However, those on temporary, casual contracts could not afford to have lunch or coffee in the canteen, despite its low prices. Furthermore, workers on the conveyor belt could not have lunch there because of the limited time allowed for their break during the shift, a result of the shortage of workers in their sector. Therefore, the canteen usually hosted the more privileged Hot End men and craftsmen, as well as the managerial and administrative staff. Having meals in the restaurant was thus a statement that one occupied a slightly better position in relation to workers in casual or production line-­related positions. The squatted rooms offered a space to the less privileged. However, these spaces were not only used by the less privileged workers. Some of those who used these buildings as personal spaces, such as the craftsmen brigade with the decorated room or the workers who used their ‘office’ for a rest after their shift, would also, for example, go to the canteen in their breaks. These informally occupied rooms also served to humanize the workplace, challenging the distinctions between ‘work’ and ‘home’, between labour time and leisure. Carrier (1992) defines as alienation the distinction between ‘work’ and ‘home’, as one of the results of industrialization. Mollona (2009b) bases his analysis on Carrier’s (1992) definition of alienation, arguing that this separation may also be the result of precariousness brought by deindustrialization. Mladost workers experienced privatization and processes of outsourcing and downsizing as alienating. The uses they made of abandoned spaces are therefore practices against alienation that contribute to workers’ self-­realization through their reclamation

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Figure 5.5.  Preparing to celebrate a colleague’s birthday with ‘old production’ glasses, in a changing room inside the ‘in use’ premises. © Dimitra Kofti

of diverse skills, their humanization of workspaces and their appropriations of industrial spaces. Similar practices of space appropriation existed in the pre-­privatization period, as workers would often recall socializing inside the plant, such as to celebrate a colleague’s birthday or name day. Mladost provides a case where one may find not a mere abandonment of space, but a process of the creation of workers’ value; by reclaiming these spaces, workers valued their past and their old identifications. Furthermore, appropriation itself was becoming a valued practice that occurred through not only the parallel performance of past and present identities, but also employees’ practices of commemoration, as I shall discuss in the following section.

An Informal Museum of Past Production Litex workers are located on the ground floor of the former domestic production building, whereas Georgi occupied some of the space on the second floor. The first floor inbetween hosted many abandoned office spaces, as well as a large collection of the old domestic ware production

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housed in what, before privatization, had been a room where the factory products were displayed to clients. Kyril, a 60-­year-­old man who used to be the general manager of the domestic ware production sector, still kept the keys to this room and informally conserved the place, although this activity was not part of his current job specification, nor seemed to be in the company’s interest (see Figure 5.6). When he first showed me this room, he walked proudly past the exposed and dusty old products, explaining the techniques used in the production of each category of glass products, demonstrating his previous expertise and explaining his managerial duties in the ‘old times’ (edno vreme). He also said that during the negotiations over the plant’s sale, the then prospective owner visited the exhibition room and was impressed by the quality of its products: ‘He could recognize quality production, and he was impressed by our glass products here (in the exhibition room) … he could recognize quality well; he was already an owner of another glass f­actory … ­he asked me about the production process and he nodded while I was explaining the p ­ rocess … b ­ ack then I did not know he would later decide to stop our domestic glass ­production …n ­ obody knew we would end up making only bottles …’. Kyril, who used to be the general manager of the domestic ware production line until his unit closed down, had since taken a managerial position of much lower status in another sector. He was responsible for checking the quality of the materials used for the glass production and managed the ‘raw material brigade’. He visited the collection of the former production from time to time, along with other workers, usually with old craftsmen who used to work in the domestic production unit. However, they would also visit the place with younger workers who had been employed by the factory after this sector closed down. As Kyril said, he and the other older workers would inform the younger ones about the past production process. I did not have the chance to visit this room with other workers since the visits were not very frequent and would only occur in small groups, usually late in the afternoon when the daytime managerial staff had already gone and the managerial gaze was elsewhere. Kyril took me there only when he learned that I would be leaving the factory. He said that, after discussing it with other workers, they thought that I should not leave without knowing how production was carried out in the past, thus revealing the importance of their informal museum to the history-­making of Mladost.2 He emphasized that many clients had passed through this room in ‘the old times’ (edno vreme) and admired these domestic products and ornaments. ‘We even had rich Arab sheikhs who came here to order things for their countries … we often had Russian and other clients from European countries’. He proudly talked about the large numbers of orders they had in the past, before the crisis of 1996,

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Figure 5.6.  The ‘Informal Museum’ of the Old Production Exhibition. © Dimitra Kofti

echoing a repetitive narrative performed by older workers. While the higher management team often emphasized the failure of the previous production regime and their decision not to keep this production sector, which they considered unprofitable, as described in Chapter 1, Kyril’s story was one of a more successful past of domestic glass production and its more abrupt ending. Like those representations of the past described in Chapter 1, stories about past production in these buildings said little about the nuances and complexities of the past; instead, they were a forum for workers’ criticisms of their present conditions. The new owners initially resisted keeping the display, but ultimately, they left the keys and the responsibility for keeping the exhibition room open as an informal ‘museum’ of earlier glass products to Kyril. However, the management was not aware of these visits, which were kept silent. As Kyril said, nobody knew how long the management would allow the room to be maintained. He was always afraid that they would decide to throw these glass products away, as they had done with not only other old materials such as machinery, but also archives and book collections. After closing down domestic production and the service sectors, most of the materials had been thrown away. For example, the worker’s library was

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disposed of, while a great part of archival material containing pictures of social events and the factory’s everyday life was also damaged accidentally by water in a dilapidating room. Although there were still some dilapidated spaces with old furniture, this room containing past products was the only room that remained untouched. It was used as Kyril’s space, where he remembered and performed his old status, and as a collective space of memory and the transmission of history for the workers. These seemingly abandoned buildings provided a means to blur the lines between past and present, the blurring being done through performances of old practices and multiple workers’ identifications. Furthermore, these buildings were places of commemoration that provided an opportunity for alternative history-­making by the workers, a different history from that represented by the higher managerial staff. Industrial ruins are often discussed as places where alternative practices may occur (Edensor 2005a; Hoorn 2009). Often, these alternative practices are associated with middle-­class activities such as renovating housing, art projects and other kinds of reuse unrelated to the buildings’ previous uses as spaces of production, and they do not usually involve their previous users. Rather, middle-­class reuse of old industrial spaces often presupposes the exclusion of the working class, as often happens when old urban areas are gentrified. Deindustrialization and flexible capitalism, with their ongoing search for new products and cheaper production, result in rapid urban transformations and high levels of abandonment. Many industrial areas have been abandoned, as factories have been transferred elsewhere in search for cheaper labour. The transformation of production in Mladost did not follow this particular path of geographical delocalization. Its transformation, although dynamic in the context of flexible capitalism, was relatively static geographically. Mladost changed ownership status and followed a different path of deindustrialization in the process of downsizing. Its location was transferred to the buildings next door, leaving a space for workers’ creative reuses of the older industrial buildings. The spatio-­ temporal frame of these buildings significantly changed as a consequence. The reorganization of hierarchies post-­privatization were inscribed in these old buildings as material reminders of the status degradation experienced by employees such as Lydia and Kyril. These spaces were also a kind of time-­ machine for the workers, through which they could often transcend the boundaries between the pre- and post-­privatization periods by performing past and present identities and skills, while they were also places for the commemoration of a past that was no more. In making sense of their own pasts through their multiple reuses and continuations of this old materiality in the present, workers at Mladost practiced an ‘alternative archaeology’ (Hamilakis 2007) from below, which did not break from the past, as the

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visual contrast between the older and newer buildings in the plant suggests, but bridged the past with a multi-­temporal, yet contested, present.

Conclusion The dilapidation of Mladost’s old buildings also involved the flexibilization and informalization of the relations of production. The officially abandoned spaces are integral parts of the factory’s life. They provide Mladost’s management with an opportunity to cut costs and avoid running certain parts of the previous production process by outsourcing them to the company’s old workers, located inside the factory’s premises and under its supervision. Through this reordering of the workforce, the old ‘not in use’ buildings became capital that was important for current production in Mladost. They hosted some of Mladost’s earlier labour force, now working ‘externally’ as casual Litex workers, as well as some of Mladost’s current staff. Both groups not only perform invisible labour, but also invisible, alternative practices of use. By passively permitting the use of their dilapidating buildings, Mladost is playing host to a variety of services previously bankrolled by the company, but provided now through alternative economic practices and by new workers with insecure casual contracts. These contracts are in contrast to those that workers directly employed by Mladost have, as well as those the workers in these old building used to have. Uses of the ‘not in use’ spaces redefine ‘old’ and ‘new’ hierarchies among employees while materially defining and enabling techniques of inclusion and exclusion among employees with permanent and temporary work statuses. Moreover, these abandoned spaces provide the material means for alternative expressions of workers’ identities. Bob and Katia who use their secret ‘office’ to rest enjoy a privilege normally associated with higher-­ ranking employees who are provided officially with a personal space. Kyril still kept the keys of his old place, where he had enjoyed a higher position. Nadia used her sewing machine in the room she occupied to continue her previous work, both as a secondary income-­generating activity and as a primary labour identification. The availability of space provided a means for Nadia to continue her previous job and maintain her status as a tailoress, rather than the status her contract and waged labour as a cleaner indicated. Multiple identities were performed inside Mladost, blurring the lines between the ‘old’ and ‘new’, and creating a multitemporal and multidirectional epoch including various forms of each. The dilapidating old buildings were potential images of the future, relics of the fragility of the teleologies of industrial modernity, both socialist and

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capitalist. They were standing warnings that modernity might go in any direction and that epochs of decline might follow upon each other. The unfolding process of dilapidation as past, present and future was the material evidence of a time that might go backwards into the future, despite the dominant teleologies of socialist and capitalist ideologies experienced in the life of Mladost. This became more obvious in daily discussions since the more recent economic crisis, when further economic decline was the new approaching danger.3 The old buildings were viewed by employees not only as remainders of a previous era, but also as constant reminders that ongoing changes, staff redundancies and changes to ownership were always possible and forthcoming. The existence of ‘old’ and ‘new’ buildings, those ‘in use’ and those ‘not in use’ suggests images of clear-­cut dichotomies between what has been abandoned and what is new and being maintained. However, activities inside abandoned spaces and the interactions that take place between old and new spaces also suggest that the categories are blurred. Life within the abandoned buildings offered a space for renegotiations of ‘old’ and ‘new’ practices and hierarchies. Lydia lost her previous status and renegotiated this loss while working for Litex in the abandoned building. Kyril remembered his old position when visiting the displays of the old products. However, the majority of the workforce acquired some power because they were non-­users of these buildings; they drew, and/or identified, hierarchies at work and power relations in relation to these spaces. These dilapidating buildings, which were mostly viewed by the management as between ‘undesired’ architecture and ‘ruins’, enabled a variety of practices and performances to take place. Their liminality offered a space for creative reuse and for observing how images and meanings were performed and renegotiated during ongoing postsocialist transformations of global capitalism. None of the users or non-­users of these buildings questioned or seemed ready to question their existence at all openly. They stood there, as concrete objects, shifting between uses, meanings and multiple temporalities. One important reason for the existence of these buildings not being questioned was that they provided a way for management to reduce costs by acquiring cheap, casual labour under the conditions of lax safety rules and regulations. The abandoned buildings therefore played an important role in the informalization of labour in the new building next door. Buildings formerly in use and on the factory premises hosted some of these outsourced activities. New ‘independent’ companies of subcontractors were now also accommodated there. Another distinct place was repurposed in the immediate vicinity, producing a fragmentation similar to that of the larger companies that outsource to somewhere distant, in the context of post-­Fordist delocalization and relocalization processes. However, in the

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case of Mladost, this other place was just the building next door, or even where the contract worker could occupy one of the four positions in each shift. Although within the company’s private area and/or on the same production line with the regular workers, the outsourced workers were located where they could be employed by ‘another’ company at significantly lower wages, and with a different management and different labour relations. The arrangement between the outsourced company and Mladost, wherein once casually employed, workers could not be employed by Mladost, only made this distinction sharper. This fragmentation, although not affected by geographical remoteness, followed the characteristics of the geographical fragmentation of post-­Fordist production, a post-­Fordist dislocation and relocation that did not presuppose geographical distance. Mladost provides a strong example of the changing dialectics of work and space under capitalism; it suggests that geographical fragmentation and dislocation may even occur in close geographical vicinity by defining the actions and relations of a place as ‘other’, or as a place that becomes ‘other’ when there are boundaries creating a potentially controllable and exploitable economic, social or other distance. The vicinity of those diversified places enabled workers to situationally blur the boundaries between past and present labour practices and between present inequalities. Yet, they were rather sharply diversified by different types of employment statuses. This local dislocation may generate conditions of fragmentation for the workforce, described as broken glass by Mladost workers.

Notes 1. In the final chapter, I discuss the ways in which ‘connections’ were viewed and renegotiated by employees. 2. I have described the exhibition as an informal museum because many of the current workers visited it in order to learn about or commemorate the history of glass production at Mladost since socialist times. In this sense, I view it as a collection of materials that perpetuates the relevance of the past in the present. 3. The ethnography in the next chapter focusses on the responses to the ‘crisis’.

6

° Change, Continuity and Crisis During a period of widespread stress related to the ‘financial crisis’ of 2008 and early 2009, the following joke was circulating among workers at Mladost: Crisis is flying on her airplane above Europe. When she flies above Bulgaria, she thinks about landing. Finally, she decides to continue her flight and to land elsewhere. ‘I do not have to land here, I have always been here’, she says.

In this chapter, I discuss perceptions of continuity and change in the context of intense transformation and successive crises. Neoliberal templates have introduced new characteristics to the organization of production that have resulted in fragmentations of the workforce and inequalities on the shop floor that were reflected in changes to workers’ daily lives and sense of time, which, in this context, itself became a site of struggle. These effects were pervasive topics of workers’ daily conversations and complaints. Nevertheless, I argue that these radical upheavals and new distinctions within the process of production have not been followed by an equivalent transformation in the ways in which wider, encompassing inequalities are experienced and formulated. Although workers talk about the significant changes that took place on the shop floor and their effects on their lives, they also stressed the perpetuation of significant continuities of power. People’s visions of a lack of change refer to the enduring structural relations of power that bridge socialism and neoliberal capitalism. The words ‘communism’ and ‘communists’, which I treat as enduring ‘keywords’ (Williams 1985) of the postsocialist era, are used in both cases to characterize those in power. I therefore also discuss the wide spectrum of significations that the ‘communist’ takes as a trope of power. The phrases that speak of continuity and change were used by workers in their reflections upon power relations and the production process. Nevertheless, I do not make use of these narratives in order to reconstruct the past but rather seek to make sense of them in relation to shop floor

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practices and archival material while attempting to understand the empirical continuities and discontinuities of relations of domination and subordination that would otherwise not be evident or obvious. A factual analysis that does not take these discourses into account would fail to grasp these subtle threads of continuity in relationships of power and subordination.

‘Crisis’ as Continuity and Discontinuity Derived etymologically from the Greek infinitive κρίνειν (krinin), a crisis originally meant the practice of formulating, deciding and judging an opinion. In medical terms, it also came to mean a sudden deterioration in the symptoms of a chronic disease, stressing that each crisis is positioned in longer historical processes and chronic phenomena. While transformation and change are inherent in societies, crises can constitute moments or periods of abrupt changes, decisions and ruptures. However, prolonging phenomena that might be called a crisis tends to normalize experience of it and may blur the boundaries between normality and crisis. The 2008 ‘financial crisis’ was viewed by many of the workers at Mladost as just ‘one more crisis’ in Bulgaria, thus tending to view it as normality. The above joke vividly depicts ‘crisis’ in terms of both a ‘rupture’, as something that arrives suddenly (on a plane landing in the country), and continuity, as something that has already been around for quite some time. Rather, the end of the joke prefers continuity to rupture. Up until the mid-­2010s, the prolonged experience of this crisis, which was intensified by the fact that the mother company was now Greek-­owned, demonstrated the continuity of the state of crisis to Mladost workers. Shevchenko (2009: 2–3) points out that although the various meanings of ‘crisis’ are often associated with rupture in both public and academic discourses, when a crisis is embedded in daily life, the distinction between ‘normality’ and ‘crisis’ often becomes blurred. The example of Mladost’s employees’ responses to the ‘financial crisis’ of 2008–2009 and afterwards is, to a great extent, revealing of these blurred lines. Koselleck (2006) suggests in his historical study of the transformations of the concept of ‘crisis’ that one should be careful in adopting the term since the concept of crisis ‘has been transformed to fit the uncertainties of whatever might be favored at a given moment’ (ibid.: 399). News about the ‘financial crisis’ of 2008–2009 broke previous silences and triggered discussions and renegotiations over shifting post-­socialist and post-­privatization working conditions on Mladost’s shop floor. Thus, I make use of the moment of ‘global economic crisis’ as an ethnographic moment that provoked discussions about the conditions of labour among workers, bringing memories of successive ‘crises’ and discussions about

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change and continuity inside Mladost. In this book, I have provided an ethnographic account of employees’ responses during periods of ‘crisis’ and their multiple perspectives on changing production politics and power relations in the context of on-­going transformations related to the process of privatization. Employees constantly talked about the changes that had taken place in the plant since they started working there. Almost everyone would compare the current circumstances with ‘the past’ (edno vreme), which they positioned in relation to their age and work experience at the plant. Nevertheless, these comparisons were significantly intensified, along with the discussions on the new ‘crisis’. A common phrase among workers was that ‘everything has changed here’,1 which was accompanied by nostalgic comments on previous working conditions on the shop floor. However, another phrase, repeated less often but frequently h ­ eard – ­sometimes even from the same people who nostalgically regretted that ‘everything has changed’ – was that ‘everything is the same’2 and the ‘we workers have always been workers’ comments made in a bitter tone that implied that things have not got any better since ‘the past’. This bitterness about the inherited ‘past’ was often contrasted with other nostalgic images of the ‘past’. The phrase ‘everything has changed’ was gradually repeated with greater frequency during the financial crisis of 2008, and especially during the Russian–Ukrainian gas crisis of early 2009, which resulted in gas supplies being cut to many European countries, including Bulgaria. This affected Mladost by stopping work on two of its four production lines and causing fears of further layoffs. Employees used various ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ in their daily discussions and comments on their labour; the present was often compared to ‘before’, which sometimes meant during socialism, but at other times, it meant before privatization in 1998 or before the period of staff cuts. The temporalization of compared pasts could shift from worker to worker, sometimes even within one and the same narrative. Apart from turning points in people’s personal lives, other more common narrative turning points (though still related to personal lives) were seen as the end of Bulgaria’s socialist regime, the various periods of hardship since the 1980s, the Bulgarian economic crisis of 1997 and the subsequent privatization of the plant in the late 1990s. In late 2008 and early 2009, a new actuality began to emerge: a new ‘now’ related to the recent ‘crisis’ appeared and was used in another situational comparison with ‘before’. Indeed, the post-­2009 period created new narratives about the experience of crisis in Mladost and was viewed by its workers as new but similar to the past. As Portelli suggests, ‘In memory, time becomes “place”’: all the recollected past exists simultaneously in the space of mind. Speakers therefore may tend to arrange events

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along paradigmatic lines of similarity rather than along syntagmatic lines of chronological sequence’ (1997: 32). In the case I am presenting here, such paradigmatic lines of similarity formed two parallel and seemingly contradictory narratives of how ‘everything has changed’ and ‘everything is the same’. These I view as two sides of the same coin as they both represent ways of making sense of rapidly changing social, economic and political conditions. This chapter narrates the experience of privatization and the consequent intense transformations in Mladost by unpacking these phrases, which were often heard on the shop floor being spoken by workers in diverse positions. During a relatively short period, Mladost went through changes of ownership, production politics, power relations and labour structures. Thus, exploring what workers meant when they said ‘new’ in relation to ‘the past’ was somehow an easier task than understanding what they meant by the phrase ‘nothing has changed’, uttered mainly by workers from positions in the plant that were lower in the hierarchy. Nevertheless, it was not always easy to understand which periods were being compared in each case. This was not only because people were not explicit about such periods, but also because, I argue, there was a widespread sense of constant transformation which cut across conventional temporalizations. Here, I do not assert that workers at Mladost did not define periods in their narratives, but rather that their narratives, and their daily comments, expressed a sense of constant transformation that cut across periods. One might rightly argue that this is because people narrate and experience their lives and personal changes that affect them in relation to, but not in synchronization with, larger socio-­historical shifts. Changes to personal lives do not necessarily resonate with larger shifts, and they blur the periods’ lines in people’s narratives. This was the case with workers at Mladost as well. In addition, the successive transformations and the sense of intense changes generated by the collapse of socialism, the successive ‘crises’ and the rapid transformations of capitalism resulted in a habit of constantly making comparisons. I view this process of comparing as a daily attempt to make sense of transformations and time, as well as to position oneself in time. I will start here by giving a brief description of the Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev’s visit to the plant sometime after the gas crisis, a significant event in the plant’s daily life during a period of widespread stress and insecurity among workers, which vividly opened up discussions about what ‘has changed’ and what has remained ‘the same’. An account of what was described as ‘new’ will follow as a way to explore also what was, according to many employees’ discourses, not understood as ‘new’. Therefore, after describing changes that were perceived as such by many of the workers, I will go back to the Prime Minister’s visit and focus on the contexts in

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which things that stayed ‘the same’ were mentioned. By means of this ethnographic exploration, I attempt to discuss understandings of emerging capitalist relations and ongoing reorderings of the geography of power relationships at the plant. In doing this, I take account of Dunn’s (Dunn 2004: 23) question on the kinds of power relations in society at large, in the context of emerging capitalist relations, that we can view through the distribution of power at work.

The Prime Minister’s Visit: The ‘Crisis Kebabs’ News about the ‘global economic crisis’ had been the centre of attention since the autumn of 2008. The Bulgarian prime minister’s visit to the plant occurred in the midst of this ‘global financial crisis’ and shortly after the Russian–Ukrainian ‘gas crisis’, which resulted in Mladost’s gas supply being cut for ten days, affecting half its production lines. The cleaning staff had to work overtime to prepare the factory for the official visit. Cleaning extensively the day before and warning the workers to be efficient and to wear all the necessary equipment in accordance with the plant’s safety regulations (hats, earplugs, gloves) were common practices whenever there were important visitors in the plant or during audits. This time, it was not the owner or an audit committee who would be visiting, but rather the prime minister and some journalists. According to conversations spreading inside the plant, the prime minister would pay a visit to observe the factory in operation and see the potential economic difficulties it faced owing to the ‘crisis’, which, it was hoped, might lead to new state policies favouring private companies. Indeed, the next day the prime minister arrived wearing a suit without a tie and with his shirt casually hanging loose. The plant was full of journalists following him on the organized tour he made of the shop floor, along with the plant’s economic manager and the director. He stopped by some machines and had some very brief chats with the operators, asking how long they had been employed in the plant and about various production methods. The image of the plant’s powerful men walking behind the prime minister, who was speaking to the workers, was an extraordinary one that disrupted the plant’s daily routine, the higher managers hardly ever seen speaking to workers in the production spaces on ordinary days. After walking around some of the production spaces, Stanishev stated in front of the cameras that the government would support businesses financially and encourage investment to allow the private sector to overcome the crisis. Then, these men, along with some shop floor managers and both male and female workers from various positions who had been chosen by the management, went to lunch in the factory’s canteen. This lunch was also

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extraordinary for various reasons, not least because the higher managers had never had lunch with workers in the self-­service canteen before. They had a separate room next to the canteen, with more expensive furniture and tinted windows. Although the higher managers had arranged a meal for the prime minister in their lunch room, according to workers’ views, he insisted on eating in the canteen where the workers usually had their lunch. He took a tray and chose a soup, two kebabs, some bread and a bottle of Coca-­Cola, all of which he paid for at the till. It seemed like a typical worker’s lunch. The managers also queued up with trays, an extraordinary moment that made the workers laugh for many days. The lunch party sat down around the table, and the prime minister asked the journalists to leave the canteen. According to the lunch participants, the prime minister was very friendly with the employees and discussed various issues concerning workers’ legislation with them, although mainly he spoke about daily things such as fishing. There he was, approachable, eating with the workers in the canteen without a tie, sharing a daily conversation. After lunch, he spent an hour behind closed doors, holding a discussion with the higher managers inside the administration building. According to what I was told by some of the participants at this meeting, they spoke about the state subsidies and tax deductions that his government was planning to dole out to private companies because of the financial crisis. Images of the prime minister shaking hands with the workers and consuming ‘crisis kebabs in a factory canteen’, as many headlines put it, were extensively featured in the national media during the following days. The news also provided some information about the plant: according to a relevant national television report, Mladost was not planning any layoffs. However, staff cuts had already occurred, and the redundancies were an ongoing process. The report provided no information about the foreign ownership of the plant, nor was the prime minister’s meeting with members of the higher managerial staff mentioned in the news. Overall, media representations focused on the prime minister’s walks and informal chats with the employees, his approachable attitude towards the workers while eating a popular local dish and his reassurances that the government would work on investment programmes to assist the country’s workforce. Mladost therefore became the centre of public attention in the country for the next couple of days, and the prime minister’s visit stimulated discussions in the public domain, including in such media as websites and various blogs, which focused on the performance of the prime minister in front of the cameras. This was an incident that reminded numerous commentators of the socialist period, when the Communist Party’s General Secretary Todor Zivkov would visit factories to meet workers on the shop floor and to demonstrate the regime’s ‘closeness’ to the people. Similarly,

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inside Mladost, this meeting generated discussions of continuities with the socialist period. Before describing the workers’ reactions to this event and their related reactions to its media representations, I will discuss how the ‘everything has changed’ phrase, stressing discontinuity was expressed and various meanings that this expression included.

‘Everything Has Changed …’ ‘Everything has changed’ is a phrase referring to the fundamental changes at the ownership level, in the production process, in working conditions and to jobs within the plant that I have discussed in the previous chapters. Staff cuts, the sharp distinction between regular and contract workers and the changing rhythms of production were implicitly or explicitly apparent in contemporary discussions of labour relations and employees’ lives. These mainly focused on three sets of narratives that reflected significant changes to employees’ lives in relation to their experience of work. The first set was related to the changing daily and long-­term time schedules and time management, the result of shifting practices of production in the factory and the intensification of economic activities, which were not reflected in better wages. The second set concerned the widespread sense that downward mobility was one’s most possible future life trajectory. The third set of narratives focused on a common metaphor of the ‘past’ community of Mladost as a family that had ‘now’ become fragmented. In all these narratives, the ‘past’ took various forms according to the worker’s age and their ‘oldness’ in the factory. Despite generational and experiential differences, these themes cut across people of various ages and workers’ groups, who drew different examples but pointed to the same topics.

Changing Daily and Yearly Time-Management Saying ‘everything has changed’ was often followed by complaints that daily time was limited in relation to ‘the past’. While this is often the case when people grow older and have more responsibilities such as childcare, these complaints were closely related to the changing conditions at work and the wider economic environment. It was 2.30pm on a very hot day in July when Magda, a 55-­year-­old Cold End worker, stood at the bus stop in front of Mladost’s gate after her 6am to 2pm shift. She had just showered after her eight-­hour-­long shift, sweating at the quality control bench, where she had to work with fast Sprite bottles and production at high temperatures. She was ready to head back to her neighbourhood to do some shopping before going home

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to cook and take care of a plot of land she and her husband cultivated for household subsistence. However, her husband had not been much help lately because he was doing nightshifts as a security guard at a parking lot in Sofia, as he did not make much money in his day job working as a builder. Her 24-­year-­old daughter and her son, 27 years old, was living with them, however, Magda complained that they never helped her with work on the land. Her daughter was a university student studying economics, who also worked part-­time as a shopworker in central Sofia, a job which covered some of her expenses. Magda’s son was a worker in a garage. His salary was very important to the household because he would contribute to paying the bills. Magda’s family was relatively well off among workers in Mladost, given that all its members were employed and able to earn enough for their daily expenses and pay the bills. Nevertheless, Magda had to work all day, inside and outside the factory, in order to make ends meet. She often said that she did not remember the last time she took a rest. During her vacations over the last couple of years, she and her husband, like many others in similar situations, had worked on repairing their house. ‘I am always in a rush, I simply have no words’, Magda complained while waiting for the bus that her time schedule had been different during ‘edno vreme’ (in the old times). ‘I used to go to the sea in the summer, my salary was enough to eat, drink, go on day trips at weekends with my family … and not only … we even put money aside to buy a car … now I am working constantly to make ends meet for the day’. Magda was describing the very common experience of daily change to time among workers. While one’s daily work was intensified because of additional secondary activities, the time horizon of the outcome of this work shortened. Future plans that included spending on more than daily subsistence had been reduced, since salaries were not enough to permit such planning. Time had also changed within Mladost. Although the quantity of work hours remained the same, work became quicker owing to the application of new technology. Those mostly affected were those who worked on and around the conveyor belt, where the introduction of four-­day shifts had made a significant difference. While before privatization, production would run from Monday to Saturday and only a minimum number of staff would remain on the premises in the evenings and at weekends, the new technology required non-­stop production and nightshifts. Workers and shop floor managers around the conveyor belt now worked four-­day shifts, morning, afternoon and night, without weekend breaks. Therefore, planning one’s daily life was significantly affected by the shifts. Workers often complained that they could not synchronise their weekdays with their relatives’ activities and that their social lives had become limited owing to these shifts. Moreover, having to work at Christmas, Easter and on other

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days when they wished to be with their relatives was another source of discussion on the shop floor. In addition to changes to the daily and yearly planning of time, the speed and sense of time also changed during the shifts, as workers at production line positions often said: ‘I cannot breath during work’, ‘I cannot even go to the toilet’, ‘I have no words … it is always becoming even worse’ being among the daily comments. The Fordist-­type non-­stop production line that left almost no space for spare bodily movements and absolutely no change to the speed of the machines contributed to a sense of constant rush. In addition, the distinctions in employment status along the production line increased the experience of speed, as described in Chapter 2. Although there were strategies for coping with the rapid pace, such as ‘dancing with the machine’, workers experienced the shop floor as oppressive. Moreover, there was a common sense that things were constantly becoming more intense due to more redundancies, which left those who remain with more tasks, coupled with more stress over the potential loss of their jobs. The speeding up of the conveyor belt was extended to work positions in the plant in general. Workers in the mechanical and electrical sectors similarly emphasized that they had to synchronize their work with the pressures of the conveyor belt. They had to repair faults to the machine while production continued, and they had to do it at high speed. Similarly, those preparing the glass matrixes had to synchronize their work with the client’s orders, which sometimes changed abruptly, giving little time to prepare for new products. Although these jobs were not as pressing as those on the conveyor belt, they too had still shifted from a slower to a quicker tempo. Employees in these positions did point out these differences, but they did not complain as much as those at the Hot and Cold Ends did. Nevertheless, all narratives agreed that daily time had become ‘quicker’. Moreover, employment had become more insecure in relation to Magda’s past. Having worked at Mladost since the 1980s, she often said that in the past she was not afraid of losing her job, but now she had to always be prepared for this, and that her cultivation of her plot was a response to this insecurity. In fact, Magda had also cultivated her plot in the 1980s, but at that time, as she said, she mainly did it for pleasure, while now she described it as both a pleasure and a response to the insecure economic environment. ‘Taking care of my plants and vegetables calms me down. I can stay there for hours without getting tired … but we produce a lot to keep for the winter … it makes me feel sure we will have food … I could produce less, but I am afraid we might not have money in the winter … they have started firing people again, you never know who’s next’. The existing literature on socialist and postsocialist household food production in Bulgaria suggests that there has been continuity in the distrust of waged

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labour since socialist times that has resulted in such practices, as well as continuity with the pre-­socialist period, when a large proportion of the population would cultivate their own land (Smollett 1989; Kaneff 1998; Yuson 2009; Tocheva 2015; Kofti 2018b). Although Magda’s practice had also continued since the 1980s, she gave a different meaning to it, describing how her actions assumed a different meaning in the present context of job insecurity and more precarious work relations. Magda and other workers in the older generation often talked about the intensification of time pressures ‘after the Greeks’ (Sled Gartsite) or ‘now’ or ‘after the changes’ or, more rarely, ‘with democracy’ (Sus demokratsiata). Nevertheless, this sense of a change to the experience of the everyday that was gradually becoming more pressing was also expressed by younger generation workers who had not worked under the state-­owned factory regime. They were describing the gradual change that had resulted from the lay-­offs. As already described in Chapters 2 and 4, the shortage of workers imposed extra time pressures on those who had not been laid off but who now had to manage additional tasks. Moreover, this sense of time pressure seems to be connected with a second set of narrative patterns of change in the direction of downward mobility.

Downward Mobility Another significant feature of the new conditions of labour was related to the discrepancy between the new managerial myth of upward mobility and the reality of downward mobility, which was especially, but not exclusively, applicable to those in manual posts. Although the Human Resources department would often state that the more capable workers would be paid more and that they had the potential to improve their positions, the reality was more complicated. Gradually, the regular posts became fewer, in line with a global trend that also included postsocialist workplaces (Mollona 2009; Parry 2013; Keskula, 2018; Makram-­Ebeid 2018; Strümpell 2018; Trevisani 2018), while those who had previously been regular workers would seek employment in the plant by its subcontractors. More importantly, as already noted, although Mladost workers could be re-­employed by Litex after being made redundant, mobility in the opposite direction was not possible. This fragmentation, which significantly shaped shop floor relationships and spatial divisions (as described in Chapter 4), also shaped the sense of time in relation to employees’ life trajectories. The neoliberal teleology stressing the successes of the more efficient employees was less feasible than the neoliberal reality of exclusion. Successive cuts were not only made to shop floor workers but were also a reality in the administrative positions. Lay-­ offs took place in

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all sectors in Mladost, and a new round began during late summer in 2008 and continued up until the mid-­2010s, being justified by the ‘global economic crisis’. These cuts often occurred as a result of decisions from ‘above’, from the owners in Greece, and, as the workers complained, they did not necessarily correspond to the loss of clients or to downturns in orders. Sometimes, as many employees stated, there were redundancies even when orders increased. Surprisingly, the orders were expected to increase during autumn of 2008, and they did, owing to the recession. The expectation was that people would stop going out and would instead stay at home consuming drinks purchased from the stores. However, this did not result in a stabilization of job numbers, as some people still lost their jobs and, more importantly, there was a widespread rumour that this would continue. In the meantime, redundancies that did not coincide with falling orders were viewed by employees as discrepant between discourses and practices. While Mladost’s clients were important in daily discussions between workers and managers, and while the ‘market’ was seen as a strong motivation to work harder in order to earn better bonuses and positions, lay-­offs during periods when orders were increasing confirmed employees’ distrust of management’s discourses. Here, I am not claiming that this distrust was included in the ‘everything has changed’ phrase. On the contrary, there was a continuity of distrusting power, as I shall argue shortly. What workers described as ‘new’, however, was this threat of permanent downward mobility. Although the management emphasized that redundancies were the inevitable result of ‘the market’ and the potentially diminishing number of orders because of the ‘the crisis’, the workers did not view them as such. Rather, they often said that it was an unfair practice followed by the management in order to reduce the number of permanent positions. To prove this, workers would often comment on the growing queues of trucks outside the factory as evidence of the growth in orders being placed by clients. Indeed, according to the statement of the sales department, orders had only continued to increase since Mladost was privatized. Given the numbers of trucks that were queuing outside the factory every morning to load the company’s products, the connection between the fear of fewer orders being placed by ‘the market’ and the ongoing lay-­offs seemed weak. Workers counted the trucks on a daily basis, acquiring a sense of the trend in orders and the connection between their output and the market. They would often say, ‘They are lying to us’, ‘so many trucks are waiting again outside’, ‘where is the crisis in our sector?’, ‘they simply say this to make more lay-­offs’. One might argue that, since production continued to respond to the demands of the market with fewer workers, the redundancies were justified. Indeed, this was often the explanation voiced by the upper management;

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namely, that their policy was ‘rational’. This ‘rationality’ did not take into account the intensification of pressure on those who remained on the production lines, the flexibilization of the lives of those who were passed to the subcontractor next door or into unemployment, or the common threat of downsizing. Downward mobility also contributed to the changing sense of time. As previously described, the sense of daily time had changed due to the intensification of production and the growth of secondary labour practices. The threat of downward mobility shaped the ways people viewed their futures, seeing them as uncertain and insecure, and preventing them from further planning. Workers’ narratives shared the lack of planning, echoing Guyer’s (2007) argument about the difficulty in planning for the future in a variety of settings. Although they would say that they wished in the future to have good healthcare and education for their children, a common response to questions about their future would just be ‘I have no words’ (niamam dumi). However, there were also some generational differences between the responses here. The inability to speak about the future was a stronger reaction among older people who connected their current disappointments with their living conditions to their experiences after the fall of socialism. Their narratives from the period of socialism focused on the sense of security that their then stable jobs and the services offered by the welfare state had afforded them. As a consequence, they looked more like narratives contrasting this with their current difficulties, rather than narratives that aimed simply to narrate the past, similarly to other ethnographies of Bulgaria (Creed 2010; Tocheva 2020). Nevertheless, the fall of socialism, according to Mladost’s workers’ life stories, was welcomed with some happiness and expectations. Employees looked forward to opportunities such as the ease of travel, the products they would be able to consume and the wide of range of new experiences that the new era had promised them. However, these visions were soon denied due to the realities of hardships, job losses and perpetual downward mobility. The younger generation, workers in their thirties and younger, also often used the phrase ‘I have no words’ to talk about the future. Although they would talk more about future plans such as having a family, buying a car or an apartment, or making a career change, they would often say that they had a constant fear of losing their jobs and that their tight incomes did not allow them to plan for the future. One of the most common long-­ term plans was for their children to study at university and to be able to find better positions in the job market than they themselves had. Many often said that they worried they could not provide their children with the necessary education and complained about the expenses they had to pay

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for schools, which had been provided by the state when they were at school in the 1980s. Young waged workers were afraid that their wages were in danger because of the risk of lay-­offs, and many of them said that they constantly thought about alternative means of making money, besides the alternative means of food production. Both older and younger workers filtered their personal views of the future through the threat of downward mobility and the constant demand for increasing expenditure from smaller incomes. As one might expect, migration was an option often discussed among workers, both young and old. In resonance with Pine’s (2014) ethnography in Poland, such plans related to the household, the family and the individual person. However, it was most often discussed as an option they had already missed. Older workers said that they had thought of migrating on various occasions over the last twenty years, but that their family obligations usually did not allow them to do so, as in the case of Gergana, as dealt with in Chapter 3. They also said that, being in their mid-­forties, they felt too old to be making such a change to their lives. However, in retrospect, many felt their decision had been wrong, remarking that if they had known that things would only get worse, they would have migrated. Nevertheless, most workers in Mladost had close kin abroad.3 Interestingly, some older women who were close to pension age thought of migration as an option after retiring, a common trajectory of older Bulgarian women who migrate to Spain, Italy and Greece to care for children or the elderly, using the money they earned to help their children and grandchildren back in Bulgaria (Deneva 2012). Billy, a 65-­year-­old casual Cold End worker, expected to get her pension in early 2010 and had started exploring the possibility of moving to Spain or Italy in order to assist her two children in Bulgaria. She often expressed her disappointment at not being able, after decades of work, to enjoy a better living: ‘I did not expect I would retire like that when I was younger’, she said bitterly, expressing the widespread fear of downward mobility. Men of Billy’s age mainly spoke of migration as an opportunity they had not taken when younger, but could no longer take given that the contemporary migration market had nothing to offer them at their age. Billy migrated to Italy in 2014 and occasionally took care of elderly women by using the contacts of fellow Bulgarian care-­workers. In this way, she assisted her two daughters and two grandchildren in Sofia. Fedyuk (2015) has analysed women’s migration patterns for care work from Ukraine to Italy to support families in Ukraine. Similarly, migrating for care work was a potential plan for women workers in Mladost. Younger workers in their thirties also talked about migration as an opportunity not taken because most of them already had children and

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they thought it would be too difficult to risk moving. They preferred to stay in Bulgaria, where they usually lived with their extended families and so had networks of support available. Some of them did have an elderly member of their family or a sibling working abroad who helped support the family. Moreover, as described in Chapter 2, younger skilled workers earned better salaries at the plant, motivating them to stay at Mladost. Nevertheless, this did not dispel fears of the imminent risk of downward mobility, and occasionally both young men and women workers would quit in order to move abroad. Toshko, a 28-­year-­old electrician, decided to leave in 2009, reasoning that he could still do so since he did not yet have children of his own. He was planning to migrate to France to work as an electrician and to support his family in Sofia. In 2014, Mina, a 43-­year-­old worker and a single mother of two, migrated to the UK in order to provide for her then high school-­age daughters, as her Mladost salary was not enough to do so. Discussions about migration were very common on the shop floor, but they mainly described opportunities not taken for various personal reasons. One could describe Mladost workers’ self-­presentations in terms of those who remained there, as compared to others who were laid off, yet potentially the next ones who could be laid off, those who did not migrate and perhaps missed this opportunity and also, to an extent, potential future migrants, all qualities that added to their precarious positions.

Fragmented Relationships: The Company as a Dispersed Family, or a Broken Glass The words ‘everything has changed’ often described fragmentations of the workforce using examples of past cohesion in relation to the present. Sometimes these discussions would use metaphors of the workers as a broken family, or a broken piece of glass. Once, when I stopped for a chat next to a machine which required quick movements and a high degree of concentration, Eli, the 50-­year-­old woman operating it, said: ‘Once we used to sing all together during the breaks … during work as well …’. Although what she said did not make any explicit comparison with the present, it was clear that under the new conditions, workers could neither sing together during b ­ reaks – ­because they never had common breaks but only as ­individuals – ­nor could they sing while operating a non-­stop, noisy machine. Before privatization, she used to work in the domestic glass sector. In another conversation, Eli said that back then there was no competition over who would be staying at the factory, and people had closer relationships; once again she used the example of singing as proof of these relationships. Another similar comment was ‘once we used to play football altogether after work …’, which was often mentioned by male workers.

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This image of having close relationships and sharing common activities in the past was repeated in various ways. Ivan, a 35-­year-­old worker who started working only two years before privatization, once stated while viewing the production building from the yard: ‘Once we used to be like a family here …’. I asked him how things were now, in search of a direct answer about the present. He told me to follow him to his sector, the Hot End. He pointed to the supervisor, who was sitting on a chair, in a relaxed manner, while two workers were busy working on the high temperature machines, and he said: ‘Do you see now? Do you know how much bigger his salary is in comparison to ours? At least four times more’. We then walked close to the machines, where he showed me a bottle and said: ‘That’s how we used to be …’. He then pointed to some broken glass on the floor and said: ‘This is our family, these are the workers after the Greeks (bought the company) … a broken working class.’ This repeated narrative about idealised past working conditions may not have helped me understand those that prevailed during previous periods, but they certainly told me something about the present. As Portelli argues, such idealized images may be ‘­another – ­perhaps the only ­possible – ­way to tell other truths’ (1997: 20). I rather perceived these apparent comparisons, which often lacked a direct comparison with the present, not necessarily as facts about the past, but as potentially idealized images of the past that represented the contrasts with the present labour conditions under privatization. In this way, they were telling me about their present understandings of labour conditions. They were explaining what was ‘new’, often implying that this ‘new’ did not benefit them, but rather that it presented a fragmentation of the relationships at work and the fragmentation of the workforce. Competition and asymmetric pay were the main themes and reasons for this fragmentation, according to such discourses. Such narratives underlined both the inequalities and the complex relationships between the workers, as well as a strong memory of unity, as current images of fragmentation not only indicated that the glass was broken, but also that the pieces were still there. As Kasmir and Carbonella have emphasized, rather than using pre-­existing typologies of workers, we should look at the fluidity of class relations and class experience (2008: 7). Workers at Mladost attempted to make sense of current class turbulences by describing the complex relationships with the workforce, largely affected by post-­ Fordist production politics. The supervisor, Martin, forty years old, who was sitting on the chair, was the shift manager and, in fact, received almost double (not four times) Ivan’s salary. Nevertheless, it was obvious that his work required less physical effort than Ivan’s, though he had more responsibility. The salary attached to his position had been more or less similar to those paid to

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workers at the Hot End until the early 2000s, when large differences in salaries started and a larger pay gap was introduced for different positions. A further pay gap started in the late 2000s, this time with different pay for the same positions, resulting in competition between and disputes among workers, but not necessarily, as I argued in Chapter 4, resulting in higher productivity. Ivan’s comment about Martin had an unspoken, silent aspect, as often happened in such conversations. Martin was the son of a former Hot End manager. A few days later, while Ivan and other male Hot End workers exchanged ringtones with their mobile phones under the sun in the yard during their break, Martin passed in front of us and went to the restaurant. Then, Ivan asked: ‘Do you know who is Martin’s father?’ The workers’ attention suddenly turned from their phones to Ivan’s comment, and everybody anticipated my reaction. I nodded and said, ‘I think I know’. After a few silent seconds, mobile phone talk continued. There were many implicit moments like this one that indicated a continuity of power. During interviews, such comments became more explicit, especially when they were not recorded. There was a widespread belief that relationships of power were inherited or acquired through personal relationships, as I shall argue in the next section. While this was viewed as continuity, there was also a sense of discontinuity related to the fragmentation of previously strong social relationships among workers, expressed through the metaphors of ‘the family breaking’ or ‘glass breaking’ after privatization. Here, I have explored the meanings of this family breaking. The metaphor of the company as a family that breaks, expands and/or re-­unites is found in several work places (Kondo 1990; Dunn 2004; Müller 2007; De Neve 2006; Kesküla 2014). The relationships between a patriarchal management structure and the children it benefited in the Polish factory where Dunn (2004) conducted research were very prominent. These took new shapes after privatization because the female workers who worked there continued to view relations within the factory through kinship models and their role in producing baby food through motherhood: they were not merely workers selling their labour to the company, but mothers producing baby food. Understandings of kinship-­type relations remained in place despite assuming diverse forms after privatization. This does not seem to be a common trajectory for post-­socialist enterprises. In Müller’s (2007) ethnography of a privatized elevator factory in East Germany, the idea of the company as a family emerged as a metaphor along with the arrival of its western management: it did not draw on past discourses about the patriarchal socialist state (Verdery 1996). In Mladost, metaphors of the company as a family in the ‘past’ were used specifically to describe the relative equality in pay and the relative lack of competition and disputes among workers before the implementation

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of production politics which divided the workforce through the use of different contracts, statuses and pay. They described the closer social relationships among workers during the socialist period, which were destroyed during the capitalist period and, mainly, after privatization. Nevertheless, employees also talked about previous inequalities during the socialist period that were related to the inheritance of positions of power that secured easier access to resources in the past. Though the image of the company as a family was not associated with a socialist company as a family that provides equally, it did emphasize the relatively more equal wages compared to the present ethos of competition and the pay gap. The words ‘everything has changed’ described a wide range of changes within the plant, which also extended to the lives of the workers beyond Mladost’s doors. In this context of new forms of competition and hierarchies, workers would also say that ‘everything is the same’. I will now continue by investigating what was viewed as ‘the same’ in the context of these changes.

But ‘Everything Is the Same’ Many workers viewed the post-­2008 period of crisis as having continuity with the successive crises. The ongoing parallel process of machinery renovations, staff cuts and changing labour contracts, which explained the much repeated phrase ‘everything has changed’ in the plant, was already underway before news of the crisis arrived in 2008. New plans for the introduction of more efficient automatic machines on the shop floor had been in progress since the spring of 2008. In addition, building an extension to the production line had started a few months earlier, beginning from the end of the production line where I was positioned. This daily construction work was surrounded by various rumours circulating among the workers about the ability of the new machines to pack the pallets instead of workers packing them semi-­manually with the help of an older machine that would be replaced. The new construction triggered many admiring comments about the technological innovation that would do the job, as well as prompting fears over further potential job cuts. During the same summer of 2008, employees were expecting news of salary increases for the current year. However, with inflation reaching 12.5% in Bulgaria that year, the 2% they finally received seemed inadequate to many of them. During the winter of 2008–2009, new redundancies were made and new, more precarious contracts introduced by the management. While interviews with white-­collar employees revealed these changes to have been the product of long-­term planning, management presented them as resulting

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from the ‘economic crisis’, and they were indeed implemented gradually in the years to follow up until the eventual sale of the company to another transnational company in 2017. The ‘crisis’ reminded workers of other periods of hardship in previous decades. People would refer to Bulgaria’s economic decline in the 1980s, but would focus mostly on the more recent lived experience of the 1990s. An often-­repeated aspect of the crisis of 1996 was the surplus of unsold products. Compared to this occasion, many viewed the ‘new crisis’ as not a ‘real’ one; this time, production was not in surplus. Workers felt that the management used each new ‘crisis’ to justify implementing new cuts. ‘How come there is a crisis here? Lorries still queue outside the plant every morning in order to get our products. Sales continue, but they (the management) lie to us in order to fire people once more’, Nikolai, a 55-­year-­old worker, said during a break, with some of his colleagues nodding in confirmation. Many of these comments blurred the line between what was said by journalists and politicians on TV and the announcements of cuts by managers inside the factory. These comments expressing suspicion referred to both the wider political scene and the micro-­scale of the factory. The ‘they’ who lied were the journalists, the prime minister and the factory managers. In a way, they echoed the general view that the ‘crisis’ would be used to bring about changes, implemented by those in power and targeted against those not in power, either in government or in the factory’s management. In exploring further my question about what is ‘the same’, the ‘crisis’ did not seem to be considered ‘new’ in employees’ responses. However, this was still not enough to explain the meanings of the phrase ‘everything is the same’. The phrase described a wide range of transformations related to changes to production and the instability and precariousness they caused. In this context, the crisis was not viewed as something ‘new’, not only because of the series of deep financial crises that had hit Bulgaria in recent decades, but also because of the ongoing changes which led to workers’ increased insecurity. There was thus continuity in the context of these changes. As such, I wondered what else might be ‘the same’, in relation to which period, if any, and in what contexts of comparison? Whenever someone said ‘everything is the same’, I would ask ‘what is the same?’ Responses were usually brief, such as, ‘we are always the workers’, ‘we are like slaves’, ‘we are always the ants, and they are always the ladybugs’, ‘they’ referring to those in powerful decision-­making positions at the factory. In exploring this distinction further, I first attempted to understand who ‘they’ were. Were they the shop floor supervisors, the managers and/or the owners? Or not necessarily connected to typical hierarchical positions of power alone? I will attempt to answer these questions by returning to some

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of the responses to the Bulgarian prime minister’s visit to the plant and by drawing on employees’ life stories. In private conversation, some workers complained about the way the meeting was organized and the lies broadcasted on television claiming that nobody had been fired. In particular, the complaints about the organization of the meeting revealed another crucial aspect of the phrase ‘everything is the same’. The day after the prime minister’s visit, copies of newspapers were found in every communal area of the factory. In the workers’ common room, during the course of a small break, eight to ten people were hunched over several newspapers, opened to the pages where the previous day’s visit was mentioned. People were laughing at the photos of the prime minister eating kebabs, sitting at the table they used daily. Some even seemed happy and announced proudly that ‘our factory is important’ since the prime minister had decided to visit it. The group soon returned to the machines, and I remained in the room alone with Boris, a 55-­year-­old engineer: ‘Look at the communists!’ he said, pointing at the pictures of those around the table. ‘Who knows why they arranged this meeting …’. Since the party in power was the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), I initially thought that by ‘communists’ he meant the prime minister. However, he continued by explaining how, in one way or another, all the lunch participants were in fact ‘communists’. Thus, it was well known in the factory that the financial manager used to be a party member. Accordingly, it was he who knew how to manage the factory and to negotiate with the Bulgarian state; neither the owner in Athens nor the Greek general manager in Sofia knew how to do that. Boris continued by echoing another general view held by all groups of workers: that the financial manager used the networks he had developed in communist times, allowing him to improve his position during privatization. The power he now had, twenty years after the collapse of socialism, made him a ‘communist’. According to Boris, his picture, standing next to a Bulgarian Socialist Party prime minister, only proved his point. He then continued talking about Yanko, a shop floor manager who was depicted eating lunch close to Sergei Stanishev. ‘He is a full red (communist) … he was in the army’. This shop floor manager, according to his own life story, had indeed joined the army after he took the entrance exams in the early 1990s, serving it as an engineer for some years. His parents were without significant political power, formerly being workers at a small factory in Shumen. I could not see how his serving in the army in the mid-­1990s made him a ‘communist’. As far as I could tell, it was rather his previous studies and the organizational skills he had acquired in the army that were viewed as positive by the new management and that gave him a powerful position at the plant during the early 2000s.

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In describing the photo, Boris also focused on Kyril, a 60-­year-­old shop floor manager who was a member of the communist party under socialism and an active member of one of the workers’ unions. Kyril, the museum key-­holder dealt with in Chapter 5, used to occupy a high managerial position in the domestic glass production section that closed after privatization. He then remained at the factory working in a significantly less important position, hence experiencing a degradation of his status. He still had a relatively powerful position at the factory, but he was an example of those people who lost significant amounts of power after privatization. It was not obvious to me on what basis he was now exploiting his previous resources and power. However, according to Boris, he was still a ‘full red’, his previous party membership being an indication of obscurely acquired power, although his current position at Mladost did not suggest this. Other participants at lunch included some young workers from the lowest levels of the factory hierarchy who not only were very young during socialism but also occupied no positions of power at present. It was hard to understand what ‘full red’ connections they had that had allowed them to take part in lunch with the PM. One of them was one of the few workers, if not the only one, in an ‘unskilled’ position who had a degree. She used to work in the administrative staff of another company until the late 1990s, when the company closed down, and, after a year of unemployment, began working at Mladost as an ‘unskilled’ worker. Indeed, she was regarded as an efficient worker by her manager, something widely known within the plant. Her ‘communist’ manager, Yanko, the ex-­military service engineer, chose her, out of all her colleagues, to join the lunch that day. Boris concluded by staring at the picture once more and saying, ‘Everything is the same, the communists have the power … whatever extras existed, they cut into it. Every social benefit.4 Everything.’ He then began listing all the bonuses and privileges employees used to receive that had gradually been removed from their contracts. Although labour conditions were no longer the same as before, since ‘everything social’ had been cut, all these ‘new’ things were introduced by ‘the same people’, i.e. the ‘communists’. Interestingly, in such discourses ‘communists’ were also those who had contributed to the plant’s transformation towards more flexible working relations within the broader context of neoliberal ideas and practices. In order to understand who the ‘full reds’ were, according to Boris and other people in the plant, I went back to their personal stories. Some of them had benefited from positions they had held before privatization, which allowed them to get powerful positions at the new plant. Others who were viewed as ‘communists’ by Boris and by other employees were young enough to have benefited from their previous personal careers; for

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example, the ex-­military engineer. The ‘communists’ were also people who lost a previous higher status but retained a position of relative power. It was as if a ‘communist’ was not just someone who had power during socialism and continued to have it today: it seemed that anyone could qualify if they held a position of power or distinction either during the previous times only or under the new conditions as well. Thus, ‘communist’ was almost a metaphor for people holding power. The lines between those who used previous resources and those who developed their powerful positions after privatization did not seem distinct in Boris’s comments, and in many of his colleagues’. Interestingly, ‘communist’ ideas were also attributed, in a negative tone, by the new managers to those workers who, according to the manager’s view, could not get used to the new conditions of flexible capitalism, as I have shown in chapter 1. The attribution of ‘communist’ and notions and meanings of ‘communism’ take different shapes in postsocialist Bulgaria. Meanings often change according to the speaker and their political views and in relation to each period’s shifting assessments of the socialist past and of its legacy in the present. Tsoneva’s (2017) study on the 2013 anti-­government and pro-­ government protests in Sofia shows how images of self-­ identified liberal protesters were associated with entrepreneurial ideas and free-­ market ideology and were opposed to negative images of ‘communists’ as people in favour of dependency from the welfare state. Tocheva’s research in Belan, a South Bulgarian village, has shown how ‘communists’ are associated mainly with elder people and how local discussions and tensions about ‘communists’ and notions associated to the communist past are still relevant not only to the elders but for the whole community, including migrants who visit occasionally. By looking at vernacular communism, as well as vernacular Islam, Tocheva demonstrates how entanglements of the two bring together common notions that connect the members of the community in the postsocialist present. Besides going back to the life stories of the ‘full reds’, I also went through the stories of those who described others as ‘full reds’ or ‘communists’. Boris, who was not unique, was himself an engineer during the socialist period and had been the factory director of another plant which had closed down in the mid-­1990s. Although he attempted to become a party member in the 1980s, he never managed to do so. In the late 1990s, he started working at Mladost as a safety engineer, a position of reduced authority entailing a loss of personal status. Some others who also described all managers as ‘communists’ and who voiced similar complaints to those expressed by Boris had likewise experienced loss of status in the context of privatization. Others had always been in the lowest hierarchical positions and viewed themselves as being continuously under the control of the

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‘communists’. Ivan, a worker employed by Mladost for more than 25 years and always relatively low paid, once told me that Boris was in fact a ‘communist’ himself. The ‘communist’ was almost always higher in the factory’s hierarchical scale than the person speaking. The phrase ‘everything is the same’ forms a narrative that employees use to express feelings of powerlessness and to make sense of emerging power relations through familiar dichotomies of weak versus strong and communist versus non-­communist. This narrative embraced a general view, held by many employees, that power has been inherited by the communist past. Many employees, especially workers, often said they would never be able to get a better position; they were always the ‘ants’ in the factory, others, the ‘communists’, being the ‘ladybugs’. Already during the third decade after the collapse of socialism, the ‘communists’ in the factory were those who were believed to be in powerful positions by those who believed they themselves were not. How the ‘communists’ acquired their positions was often viewed as due to their use of the resources and networks of past times. This occurred to such a degree that even those who were not employed during the socialist period, and whose families were not in key positions, were still described as powerful ‘communists’ because they held relatively higher positions in the new capitalist era. As a result, the designation ‘communist’ is often detached from the actual history of party membership and/or political involvement and is used instead to explain why, under the present conditions, some people have power and others do not.

Conclusion The narratives proclaiming that ‘everything has changed’ and ‘everything is the same’ seem to be ways of making sense of multiple, shifting production practices and hierarchies in the postsocialist period. Doing research on the shop floor and comparing current fieldwork data with past archives and workers’ oral histories made the ‘everything has changed’ phrase relatively easy to explain. Mladost gradually became an outsourcer for bottling companies. The demands of clients like Coca-­Cola, Heineken and others and their virtual inspections were present at each production line and played a vital role in Mladost’s managerial techniques. While Mladost’s managers gradually increased the speed of production, requiring harder work from those on the conveyor belt, they blamed the clients and the pressure of ‘the market’ for the ‘inevitability’ of such changes. While Mladost was an outsourcer for bottling companies, it also outsourced parts of its production. The main outsourcer on Mladost’s own production site, Litex, provided Mladost with workers who would cover nominally ‘casual’, yet regularly

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required aspects of the production work. As a result, Litex employees worked on shifts alongside regular workers employed directly by Mladost, albeit with significantly lower salaries and benefits. Downsizing along with outsourcing made downward mobility the most probable trajectory for one’s working life in the factory and contributed to the intensified competition among workers. Massive lay-­offs and the newly introduced distinction between regular and casual workers strongly reproduced distinctions of age, gender and ethnicity and enabled power over the casual workers to be exercised by the regular workers across the conveyor belt. Still further divisions were caused by paying different salaries to regular workers in the same position. The plant’s environment changed significantly as well, with abandoned buildings becoming constant reminders of previous practices of production and previous relationships among the members of the workforce. Working practices from the socialist period that were rooted in social relationships at work had been significantly transformed after the plant’s privatization. It is in this context that one may view the visual metaphor of the workforce as broken glass, expressed by workers. Narratives of continuities existed in parallel to narratives of ruptures. ‘Crises’ seemed to form narratives of continuity involving a common experience of the constant degradation of living conditions for those in lower positions occurring since the late years of the socialist period and the early 1990s. Another parallel narrative of continuity was related to power, which was seen as being inherited from the communist past. Mistrust of those holding powerful positions inside the plant, accusations of corruption and suspicions of anyone viewed as a power-­holder and therefore ‘communist’ were widespread on the production lines. Nevertheless, the life stories I collected in Mladost suggest that it was not always clear who the power-­ holders were or who made use of previous resources and positions to serve their current interests. The term ‘communist’, as used in daily conversation, was inflated, being used too much, and hence became almost devalued in meaning, yet it retained its force as a metaphor of complex and obscure relations of power. Ongoing transformations of production and its hierarchies in Mladost were often viewed through familiar idioms related to the designation ‘communist’ and in comparisons with an idealized past marked as ‘edno vreme’ (in the old times). On the one hand, the word ‘communist’ is often used in pejorative ways, for instance, to explain the acquisition of power, and often implied inequalities and practices of corruption. As a result, broader processes of neoliberal production are often described through the lens of communist practices. On the other hand, idealized images of the past that referred to socialist times are positioned as ‘edno vreme’ (in the old times) rather than as ‘socialism’, making ‘edno vreme’ a frequent

Change, Continuity and Crisis  *  217

metaphor of socialism without actually naming it. One might ask why there are apparently no current alternative idioms able to conceptualize former socialist and emerging capitalist relations on the production line and beyond. One answer could be that Mladost employees make sense of emerging neoliberal practices by adopting postsocialist hegemonic idioms of condemnation that were used to comment on the failings of past socialist production practices. Idioms widespread in discourses voiced by the Bulgarian media and by public intellectuals in Bulgaria are also to be found on the shop floor. It is in this context that I view this seemingly contradictory formulation of criticisms of both past and present working conditions. This chapter has focused on how employees and especially workers who describe present labour conditions as unequal and complain about the destruction of social relationships and community responded to on-­going changes to production and relations of power in Mladost in times of ‘crisis’. I began with a snapshot of the prime minister’s visit to the plant which opened up intense discussion about the ongoing transformations of labour. Significant changes to the production process, working practices and workforce hierarchies in the context of capitalist privatization were often viewed with bitterness as creating ‘new’, difficult circumstances by employees in lower positions and by those who had experienced status degradation. These new circumstances, which might be described as global processes of neoliberal capitalism, trigger various responses from the standpoint of the shop floor. Various past turning points, often described as ‘crises’, have prepared workers for ‘one more crisis’, which many imagined to be ‘fake’, merely being manufactured for the benefit of employees in better positions. Insecurity and mistrust over wage labour, the plants’ micropolitics and the state’s politics were explicitly voiced during periods of crisis. Through comparisons, workers made sense of the transformations in their daily lives and attempted to define what was ‘new’ and what was the ‘same’. Employees, especially workers and those who had experienced status degradation, often describe transformations as based on inequalities that were intrinsic to the new capitalist relations and were also the results of inequalities that emerged under socialism but were now being reproduced by the inheritors of ‘communist’ power. Nevertheless, the terms ‘communism’ and ‘communist’ appear as generic terms to designate continuities of broad inequalities of power, being themselves detached from concrete historical events and bridging different periods. Their generic aspect often obfuscates direct expressions of criticism of capitalist practices. Crisis, as both continuity and rupture, causes further temporalizations for comparisons and for the complex ways in which workers make sense of the ongoing transformations and destructions of their intergenerational labour and social relations.

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Notes An earlier version of this chapter appeared previously in an article entitled ‘ “Communists” on the Shop Floor: Anti-­Communism, Crisis and the Transformation of Labor in Bulgaria’ in Focaal, Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (2016 [74]: 69–82. 1. The often repeated phrases which are here translated as ‘everything has changed’ are ‘всичко се промени’ (vsichko se promeni) (everything has changed), ‘нищо вече не е както преди’ (nishto veche ne e kakto predi) (nothing is like it was before anymore/nothing now is like it was before) and ‘всичко се разсипа’ (vsichko se razsipa) (everything has been destroyed). 2. The often-­repeated phrases which are here translated as ‘everything is the same’ are ‘всичко е едно и също’ (vsichko e edno i sashto) (everything is the same) and ‘все едно и също’ (vse edno i sashto) (always the same story/everything one and the same). 3. Similarly, the majority of workers’ families in Pernik had a close relative abroad (Kofti 2018b). 4. He only said ‘social’ (Социални) (Sotsialni), but actually meant социални придобивки (sotsialni pridobivki) which means social benefits. These included health and social insurance, as well as extra payments for food during working time, transportation to work and holiday vouchers.

° Conclusion In the summer of 2008, a ‘teamwork’ trip was organized by Mladost’s management, which included a visit to another factory in the Arethousa group in Plovdiv, to allow workers to see ‘how this factory operated and to exchange ideas’, according to the HR manager. The machinery had recently been changed in the Plovdiv plant, including the Cold End machinery. At the Plovdiv plant, the Mladost workers silently walked around its comparatively neat and clean shop floor, where much of the work they were doing manually back in Sofia was automated. They returned from the trip worrying about what would come next in Sofia. The news soon reached casual workers who were not included in the trip, adding once more to their invisibility and exclusion. While women at the Cold End were ‘running after’ or ‘dancing’ around the machines on a daily basis, they were also expressing concerns about the possibilities of the further automation of production. They also shared thoughts about how much their daily struggles to manage the machine and to ‘dance’ mattered for their immediate futures. Indeed, by 2014 all the lines in Sofia had gradually been automated, and the space looked now more organized, with less broken glass on the floor. More regular workers had shifted onto casual contracts and passed into the more invisible spaces of contract labour, while the redundancies continued as well. While the possibility of a change of ownership was not explicitly discussed, daily life in Mladost was filtered by this potential event through constant efforts to please both clients and the market. The clients now included not only purchasers of bottles but also potential buyers of the factory itself. The new change of ownership in 2017 therefore did not strike employees as a surprise. My ethnographic exploration has focused on the everyday politics of labour and the ways in which wider socio-­ economic transformations are being experienced and renegotiated on Mladost’s shop floor and in workers’ lives. It has attended to employees’ understandings, concerns, struggles, experiences of and participation in global transformations of

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work. Successive changes have brought about successive adaptations, resistance and compliance with the new conditions. The non-­stop production line that ties workers’ bodies together in absolute synchronization, the distinction of workers’ contracts between regular and casual, the clients’ virtual control of the conveyor belt, shareholder pressures, market forces on the shop floor, managerial practices of flexibility and anticommunist discourses all suggest that no clear-­cut shift from Fordism to post-­Fordism has occurred at Mladost. In exploring new conditions of precarious labour in the factory, I have asked how global connections become tangible on the production line and how impersonal economic forces interact with personal lives. The experience of intense transformations since the economic decline of the 1990s, the collapse of socialism and the earlier economic crises that followed it have strongly influenced the workers’ lives. While interconnected, yet diverse, processes of deindustrialization and reindustrialization and the flexibilization of labour are intense and ongoing in many parts of the world today, these processes have added complexities in a postsocialist context in which they have been filtered by transformations of hegemonic ideologies and the shift from socialist to capitalist teleologies of modernity. My analysis has focused on work relations in flexible capitalism and on how privatization brought about new patterns of subcontracting that fragmented the workforce and affected previous social relations. Moreover, it provides a study of how these new patterns are being practiced in Bulgaria where, similarly with other counties in eastern Europe, a large number of factories have not closed down, but rather significantly transformed in the context of de/re-­industrialization and the relocalization of production sites. I have attempted to bring together the material experience of changing production and managerial practices with their links with wider shifts in the political and economic order. Mladost’s production line is connected to diverse forces, both distant and proximate, that have shaped the experience of work and workers’ relationships. I have described the fragmentation of the workforce and of production at Mladost as a localized dislocation and have further suggested that Mladost cannot be understood merely as a factory producing products, but also as a company that produces itself as a product in the global market. This shift has strong implications for the ways in which the everyday politics of labour are being implemented and experienced. The question of what motivates workers to work once they are at work (Parry 2005) has helped unpack the conjunction of the dynamic forces that meet across the production line. By taking a close look at their interconnections with the conveyor belt, I have attempted to explore work and production relations. Some concepts that have helped me analyse these

Conclusion  *  221

relationships are ‘consent’ and ‘coercion’ (Burawoy 1979). A broad use of these concepts (De Neve 2006; Mollona 2009) led outside the production line to workers’ households and abandoned industrial spaces where, behind the unpretentiously humble course of everyday life, the forces of past and present, social elevation and downgrading, gender, age and ethnic differences, along with a sense of tumultuous upheavals and underlying continuity, are brought into tension, into mere conflict, or are made unexpectedly compatible. This ethnographic detour has shed light on relationships on the shop floor and has contributed to gaining some insights into how workers mobilize multireferential sources in order to create value in their own work (Harris 2007). The bewildering richness of subjective views can be subsumed, though imperfectly, within several crucial variables: the speed of the machines, the type of employment (regular or casual), and the differences in pay between piece rates and wages, and between the more highly valued Hot End and the strongly depreciated Cold End. Quicker production means better pay for the male-­dominated Hot End and intensification of pressure without reward for the female-­dominated Cold End. Conflicts between the Hot and Cold Ends and between regular and casual workers within the same task groups on the shop floor occur because of the managerial organization of differences in employment status and pay. Who is then responsible for the pressures caused by the speed of the production line and the coercive power of quality control? I have suggested that ‘the market’ is a latent source of coercion, the moving force behind the process and the source of power exercised by its protagonists, be they present or absent. The managers discharge themselves of responsibility for the hard-­working conditions, blaming faceless shareholders, distant owners and clients who are both remote and de-­humanized, and who act through the inspection cameras placed for this purpose on the shop floor. The expectations of invisible, anonymous shareholders, a distant owner, and powerful and disembodied client-­inspectors enhance the fragmentation already caused by outsourcing, downsizing and higher production objectives. In all this, impersonal (Lee and LiPuma 2002) and unforgiving, ‘the market’ seems a key player, almost acquiring its own existence as a person on the shop floor. It is this ambiguity of being both impersonal and present on the shop floor that makes its coercion latent. ‘The market’ is used as a metonymy for clients (both bottling companies and drinkers) and shareholders, but it also develops an existence by itself. In speech and on placards, ‘the market’ is instilled with a peculiar agency by the management, who present it as the ultimate authority making decisions, which supposedly are then simply and inevitably ratified by the managers. From the point of view of the workers, as well as some managers, the concrete

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terms of the implementation of every new decision have been ever harsher that the previous one. In response, instead of reacting by generating their own explanatory narratives or by creating ritual mechanisms of resistance (Ong 1987), the workers in Mladost cultivate an acute, non-­mystifying awareness of this process, which I have described as the latent coercion of the shop floor by the ‘market’. Yet, this awareness of being caught within the global networks of power and exploitation is complemented by a kind of complicity that is directly dependent on the workers’ employment statuses. Workers assess their positions through the relationships they develop with the machines and the production line. Cold End, regular workers consent to the pressures of the speed of the line and to their own divisions by defining themselves as skilful ‘dancers’ and attributing the qualities of ‘stupid’, ‘clumsy’ and ‘chasers’ to the casual workers. There has long been a managerial emphasis on the highly valued skills of Hot End workers. The high self-­esteem in which Hot End workers have consistently held themselves draws on their image as the creators of the product. In the context of downward mobility, another factor for self-­esteem is generated through workers’ pride in their past positions, rather than their self-­esteem being found in their current work situations. In this context of intense transformations for the lives of the workers, the ethnography has paid attention to workers dynamic understandings of class relations in light of the ongoing fragmentation (Kasmir and Carbonella, 2008). Although workers are dispersed and valued differently, their daily experience being imbued with conflict, daily tensions and solidarities, they also maintain a sense of common class belonging. In particular, at this common level of class consciousness they often view their employment divisions and their possibly conflictual relationships and hard working conditions as being influenced by the coercive power of ‘the market’ and by the practices of the higher management, a coercive power that is often compared with the coercive power of the Communist Party of the past. The boundaries between coercion and consent are not clear on Mladost’s shop floor. Workers do not merely consent to inequality (Burawoy 1985): they live with both coercion and consent without tracing a clear-­ cut boundary between them, or tend to draw on the one or the other at different moments of daily practice and in self-­reflective conversations. This resonates with Mollona’s observation that there is ‘a new despotic regime in which capital reproduces itself through the whole of people lives so that coercion and consent … are hardly distinguishable’ (Mollona 2009b: 177). Relatedness and kinship ties between workers on the shop floor beg for an even more refined ethnographic analysis. Drawing on anthropological literature that discusses kinship ties on both small- and large-­scale

Conclusion  *  223

production sites (Goddard 1996; Narotzky 1997; Ngai 2005; De Neve 2006; Parry, De Neve, and Mollona 2009; Smart and Smart 2006), I have discussed ways in which kinship relations motivate work on the shop floor. While kinship, friendship and sexual intimacies significantly shape the relationships between workers, household reproduction is more important in ensuring the cohesion of the production process. Workers who are married to each other consent to structural inequalities of pay and labour prestige by often giving priority to the commonality of the household income rather than the solidarity of their separate brigades. In addition, female workers in the lowest hierarchical positions consent to their badly paid positions because their employment may reverse the power relations back home, with them now being acknowledged as the breadwinners and thus enjoying a more independent life away from their extended families and the requirements of domestic work and food production. Gender inequalities within the families influence women’s unequal positions on the shop floor in similar ways to the gender inequalities that occur in small family production units (Goddard 1996; Narotzky 1997). Although the focus on postsocialist household surviving strategies has been criticized for the way it seems to restrict people’s individual choices (Smith 2002), my study of Mladost has underlined the heuristic utility of concentrating on such strategies (Pine and Bridger 1998b; Pine 2001). Workers still make individual choices and develop further relationships beyond their households, but the economic unity of the household is still of great, even crucial importance.The economic constraints of the postsocialist experience and the demise of the welfare state have contributed to strengthening kinship and household solidarities and to related household tensions and conflicts, among workers in Mladost. Although managerial discourses have continued to emphasize workers’ individual worth and their pursuit of strictly individual self-­interest, the integration of kinship and intimate bonds into the production cycle has been revealed as not detrimental to, but in favour of, recruiting and keeping staff. Regular and casual workers often belong to same households, blurring the lines of these deepening workplace divisions. This adds to the sense of common, yet under fragmentation, class belonging among casual and regular workers. The post-­privatization era has been followed by a new language of flexibility that contrasts it with an earlier ‘rigidity’, a language also documented in other postsocialist privatized settings. This new managerial language that criticizes the past has been viewed as shaping new types of personhood in eastern Europe (Dunn 2004). My study continues the discussion on the new managerial language and its practice of flexibility (Dunn 2004; Smart and Smart 2006) through a focus on the relations of production.

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The various uses of the concept of flexibility make it an almost empty concept that the management may use for almost any purpose. In Mladost, ‘flexibility’ and ‘individual responsibility’ are top-­down discourses that fail to reach the shop floor, which is precisely where the constraints due to the shortage of workers generate managerial discourses based on ‘collectivity’ and ‘collective responsibility’. This rhetoric clashes with other discourses and practices of flexible capitalism that require strong diversity between rates of pay on the shop-­floor. Workplace ethnography that looks at both discourses and their intertwinement with the production line enabled me to grasp such discrepancies, contestations and coexistences between discourses and practices. Moreover, it provided the ground to challenge ‘rational’ ideas of Homo economicus that bind competition to productivity and view collectivities as detrimental to production. Furthermore, the focus on the factory space may allow a view of the changing dialectics between work and space under circumstances of neoliberalism. As the case of Mladost suggests, geographical fragmentation may occur in absolute geographical proximity, bringing the boundaries between ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ work into the building next door, and enabling conditions of localized dislocation. This suggests that a focus on global processes of flexible capitalism needs to take into account not only the interactions between distant owners, shareholders and fragmented production across national boundaries, but also the ways in which the space may be otherized in the closest vicinity of a single enterprise; this happens in Mladost, along with the fragmentation of the workforce through subcontracting and the downward mobility of the workers, which creates boundaries resulting in an exploitable economic distance within the same factory. Workers approach their fragmentation between casual and regular employment in terms of the generation of tensions, conflicts and inequalities on the one hand, and the challenge to previous solidarities and creation of new ones on the other. However, the threat of downward mobility they share, the omnipresence of ‘the market’ invoked by their managers and the sense of insecurity created by the fear of capital flight contribute to workers viewing themselves as a single group and a single, yet broken, working class, despite their strong inequalities. Mladost’s space has changed due to transformations in its ownership and in the production process. While production has been dispersed and flexibilized and new forms of informal practices of production have been introduced side by side with formal production, the space was also used for various alternative practices. Through an archaeology of Mladost’s contemporary past (Buchli and Lucas 2001), the ethnography followed both the visible and invisible practices of production. The dilapidated buildings in Mladost offer a space for the employer to outsource work to somewhere

Conclusion  *  225

that is controllable, simultaneously enabling managerial responsibilities to be avoided. In this way, along with the flexibilization of labour, space in Mladost has also been flexibilized, following similar patterns of informality and serving practices of inclusion and exclusion as with flexible capitalism documented worldwide. Moreover, the dilapidated space has been reclaimed by workers as somewhere to perform their old identifications. The squatting that created personal spaces and an informal museum permitted them to indulge in hidden practices that were forbidden in the formal spaces and that allowed workers to choose alternative paths, discretely subverting those imposed by the management. These paths were multitemporal. Despite the dominant teleologies of capitalism and socialism, workers in Mladost constantly drew on the past, with its multiple and situational periodizations, in understanding their present experiences at work and in expressing visions of the future. This ethnographic focus on space has shown how practices from both the socialist and capitalist eras coexist, indicating the non-­linearity of modernity. It has also been emphasized that time itself and its various periodizations, as expressed in Mladost through a variety of ‘old’ and ‘new’ categories, has been a site of struggle, suggesting how the continuity of time has been politicized in Bulgaria since socialist times (Kaneff 2004). The dominant teleologies proved to be inadequate, resulting in a disconfirmed telos. Elapsed time and the promises of capitalism that were once welcomed by workers in the early 1990s have not materialized. Rather, the previous relative stability, which had been lost, was replaced by the inflexible flexibility of downward mobility, employment uncertainties and financial insecurity. Workers view these changes as both ruptures and continuities: ‘everything has changed’ but ‘everything is the same’, at variance with the claims of earlier postsocialist ethnographies (Müller 2004; Kideckel 2008), workers in Mladost do not experience the change of power in the factory after the collapse of socialism and subsequent privatization as radical. In Mladost, workers explicitly discussed their positions as ones of subordination to power and described their struggles with various forms of its exercise by making references to continuity with the previous periods (Dunn 2004). They viewed the power exercised at present as drawing on the past, namely on the ‘communists’. Workers both valued positively their positions in the past, ‘edno vreme’, and were critical of the large structural power that, in their understanding, bridges socialism and the different spans of postsocialism. Their simultaneous criticisms of and appreciation for different aspects of the past, as well as their senses of change and the absence of change, are the seemingly paradoxical, yet the sole meaningful ways in which transformation is experienced in Mladost. One probably needs such a complex conceptualization of continuity and rupture, despite

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it being fraught with contradictions, in order to make sense of the deeply unsettling processes that have been shaking Bulgarian workplaces so relentlessly in order to continue to live through them, as Mladost’s workers do.

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° Index abandoned, 3, 31, 43–44, 132, 168, 170–75, 181–83, 190–92, 224 agency, 62, 74–75, 97, 103, 115, 126, 137, 221 agricultural, 19, 38–39, 50–51 Angelidou, Aliki, 52, 68n26, 92, 128, 154 anticommunist, 220 architecture, 32, 168–69 undesired, 172–73, 192 Arethusa, 6, 35, 41–42, 46, 71 Ashwin, Sarah, 20 Austria, 38–39, 67n12 automation, 48, 219 Balkans, 19 bankruptcy, 67n10 Black Sea, 44, 139 bonuses, 79, 96, 101, 113, 124, 139, 204, 213 bottles, 2, 39–40, 58, 67n7, 70, 75, 81, 86–87, 94, 98–100, 102–5, 107, 109, 148, 158–60, 178, 200, 208, 219 defective, 74, 91, 95–96, 100, 104, 107, 138 production of, 29–30, 39, 42, 68n15, 74, 92, 94–95, 100–1, 103–4, 106, 152, 155, 159–60, 175, 188 bottling companies, 41, 74, 91, 215, 221 Boym, Svetlana, 16 breathing problems, 89 brigades (brigada), 139, 150, 155–56, 160–61, 184–86, 188 Buchli, Victor, 168–69, 224 Buck-Morss, Susan, 18 Bulgaria, 1, 3–6, 13, 15–17, 19, 22–24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 33n2, 34n13, 34n16, 35, 38–44, 48–56, 60, 63, 65–66,

67n3, 67nn10–13, 68n26, 72, 78–82, 84–85, 92, 111, 118nn3–5, 119n8, 123–24, 126–28, 133, 137, 142n1, 148–49, 153–54, 166n2, 167n6, 174–75, 194–96, 198, 202, 205–7, 210–12, 214, 217, 220, 225, 226 Beloslav, 39 Bulgarianness, 6 Druzba, 24 Lozenets, 128 Novi Pazar, 39, 41 Pernik, 4, 7, 24, 33n2, 218n3 Pleven, 39 Plovdiv, 39, 41, 219 Sofia, 1, 4, 7, 24, 30, 33, 33n2, 34n16, 35, 38–39, 41, 43, 51–52, 54, 60–61, 67nn5–8, 68n15, 68n17, 68n20, 78, 110, 126, 128–29, 132–33, 137, 149–50, 153, 168, 171, 201, 206–7, 212, 214, 219 Svoge, 129, 133, 137 Zaharova, 54, 137 Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAN), 26, 67n3 Bulgarian State Archives, 28–30, 34n16, 67n5–n8, 68n17, 68n20 Burawoy, Michael, 9, 14–15, 25, 31, 71, 74, 81, 99, 103, 108, 112–14, 148, 220–22 call centers, 23 capitalism, 3, 5–6, 8–9, 12–18, 20, 23, 25, 30, 32, 35, 37–38, 42–43, 45, 55, 65–66, 74–75, 81, 97, 112–17, 120, 122, 126, 143–47, 163–66, 171–73, 185, 190, 192–94, 197–98, 210, 214–15, 217, 220, 224–25 disorganized, 5, 144

244  •   Index

capitalism (cont.) emulation, 39, 42, 67n13 fast capitalism, 9 financial, 3, 6 flexible, 3, 5, 6, 12, 15, 30, 81, 112, 143–44, 164–66, 171, 173, 190, 214, 220, 224–25 (see also flexible: capitalism) global, 6, 25, 32, 66, 122, 126, 144, 163, 192 model worker, 16, 35 petty, 120, 122, 145–46 capitalist economies, 5, 55 Carbonella, August, 6–7, 93, 208, 222 Carrier, James G., 186 casualization of work, 12, 71, 80 Central National Bulgarian Bank, 67n12 Chavdarova, Tania, 22–23, 51 Chayanov, A.V., 19 chemical industry, 20 childcare, 15–16, 128, 200 in-laws, 54, 129, 133, 137 class, 6–7, 9, 24, 37, 54, 60, 93, 111–12, 117, 121, 123, 126, 128, 172, 190, 208, 222–24 middle, 123, 128, 172, 190 working, 6, 24, 54, 93, 111, 190, 208, 224 cleaning staff, 2, 28, 60–61, 64, 77, 83, 91, 93–94, 182, 191, 198 clientelism, 23 clients, 3, 10, 23, 29, 71, 74–78, 90–91, 93, 95–98, 101–3, 105, 113–17, 122, 132, 151, 153, 156, 165, 183, 188, 202, 204, 215, 219–21 coercion, 68n21, 71, 73–76, 96, 101, 103, 112–16, 144, 146, 221–22 cold end. See under production line collective responsibility, 143, 154–57, 164, 224 collectivity, 25, 31, 111, 154–55, 158, 160–61, 164, 224 collectivization, 19 Communist Party, 96, 182, 213, 222 Communism, 13, 57, 153–54, 194, 214, 217 nostalgia for, 13

communists, 13, 22, 24, 32, 58, 63–64, 85, 92, 118n6, 119n7–8, 171, 177, 182, 185, 194, 199, 212–17, 225 as metaphor, 33n9 competition, 11, 25, 31, 41–42, 49, 67n13, 87–88, 93, 103, 109, 114, 154, 156, 158–59, 164–66, 184, 207–10, 216, 224 consent, 31, 71, 74, 76, 90, 103, 108, 112–14, 116–17, 120, 125, 140, 172, 221–23 consultants, 3, 10, 80, 164–65 consumerism, 51 continuity, 3–4, 13, 21–22, 24, 40, 45, 55, 64–66, 111, 153, 194–96, 202–4, 209–11, 216–17, 221, 225 contracts, 2, 11, 30, 43–44, 46, 49, 53, 60–62, 72, 74, 81–83, 85, 87, 91, 109, 112, 125, 131, 143, 161, 165, 179, 186, 191, 193, 200, 210, 213, 219–20 conveyor belt, 3, 7, 9, 11, 29–30, 67, 68n19, 70, 72, 76, 78, 81, 86–87, 89–94, 100–1, 103–9, 115–17, 142, 146, 152, 155, 157, 160, 165, 186, 201–2, 215–16, 220 overloaded, 101–3, 107, 155, 161 core production, 2–3, 43–44, 47, 144 corporations, 5–6, 165 corruption, 4, 6, 22–23, 34n13, 80–81, 85, 118n4, 216 Creed, Gerald, 15, 17, 19, 32, 39, 121, 205 crisis, 3–5, 12, 15, 17, 28, 32, 40–41, 51, 55, 57, 66, 67n10 103, 133, 135, 137, 141, 150, 156, 165, 174–75, 188, 193n3, 194–96, 198–99, 204, 210–11, 216–17, 220 as continuity, 66, 195–99, 210–11, 217 as rupture, 195–99, 216 cultivation of land, 202–3 Czech Republic, 153 De Neve, Geert, 25, 73–74, 89, 112, 114, 118n2, 119n9, 121–22, 124–25, 142, 209, 221, 223 decollectivization, 19 Deindustrialization, 4, 7, 9, 175, 220

Index  *  245

Deleuze, Gilles, 8 democracy, 23–24, 28, 32, 34n10, 56–57, 66, 129, 135, 203 Deneva, Neda, 15, 127, 206 deskilling, 62, 64, 98–99, 115, 148, 185 deterritorialization, 8 dilapidation, 30, 83, 130, 168–69, 172, 174, 177, 179–81, 184, 190–92, 224–25 Dimova, Nevena, 48, 128, 133 dislocation, 8, 10–12, 193 local, 8–9, 11, 120, 193, 220 downsizing, 3, 8, 43–44, 47–48, 144–45, 162, 174–75, 182, 185–86, 190, 205, 216, 221 Dunn, Elizabeth, 7, 13, 17, 19–21, 31, 48, 68n22, 81, 89, 119n9, 122, 133, 143–48, 150–51, 164, 166, 198, 209, 223, 225 Dzenovska, Dace, 168, 175 East Germany, 19, 21–22, 209 Edensor, Tim, 173, 190 ednakvi, 161, 167n6 edno vreme, 32, 34n17, 37, 55–57, 124, 130, 132, 174, 180, 188, 196, 201, 216, 225 elasticities, 143–44, 146 electrician, 52, 90, 159–60, 162–63, 183, 185, 207 employees, 1, 3, 7, 11, 15–16, 18, 20–23, 25, 27, 29–32, 36–38, 41–56, 58–60, 62, 64–66, 67n1, 67n3, 68n27, 71–72, 74–84, 88–90, 92, 94, 101, 107, 116, 123–24, 139, 143, 146–47, 149–54, 156–59, 161–62, 164–166, 171–72, 174–75, 179, 182–83, 187, 190–192, 193n1, 195–97, 199–200, 202–5, 210–217, 219 employment, 2–3, 6, 10–12, 15–16, 20, 23–24, 29, 31, 37, 49, 51, 53–54, 59, 62, 66, 70–71, 75–76, 81–83, 87, 92, 111–12, 116–17, 120, 122–24, 127, 129, 133, 143–45, 149, 159, 165, 174, 179, 181, 183, 185, 193, 202–3, 205, 213, 221–25. See also workers schemes, 112

England, 8, 50 London, 151 entrepreneurial self, 82, 116 ethnicity, 1, 19–20, 23, 34n12, 71–72, 82, 114, 216 ethnocentric, 12 Europe, 6, 15–16, 41, 43, 130, 170, 188, 194, 196 eastern, 5, 13, 15, 18–20, 22, 40, 42–43, 127, 147, 220, 223 western, 5, 15 European Union, 35 extra-marital affairs, 134, 139 factory buildings, 44–45, 60, 168–69, 189 as commemoration, 43–44, 169, 175, 190, 192, 216 used by workers, 31, 169–75, 177–83, 185–86, 190, 192, 224 fairness, 138, 140, 165 family, 24, 28, 31, 38, 51, 54–55, 61, 68n23, 79, 89, 120–21, 124, 126–29, 132–33, 136–42, 142n1, 183, 200–1, 205–7, 223 broken, 207–9 at work, 45, 52–53, 85, 121–22, 124–25, 201, 210 Fedyuk, Olena, 15, 20, 206 Ferguson, James, 8, 18 fieldwork, 3–4, 16, 24–26, 32, 33n2, 40, 43–45, 50–51, 54, 66, 68n15, 74, 137, 153, 215 financialization, 5 flexibility, 3, 5, 17, 20–21, 25, 30–31, 49, 68n21, 80, 87, 93, 119n10, 120, 143–49, 151–52, 154, 156, 158–59, 162–65, 220, 223–25 flexibilization of production, 2, 4, 6, 17, 20, 120, 125, 147–48, 166, 191 flexible, 131, 143–44, 146, 152, 213 accumulation, 5, 121, 145 body, 146 capitalism, 3, 5, 6, 12, 15, 30, 81, 112, 143–44, 164–66, 171, 173, 190, 214, 220, 224–25 (see also capitalism: flexible) family, 146

246  •   Index

flexible (cont.) households, 146 management, 3 subject, 147, 166 workers, 15, 49, 69n27, 85, 116, 121, 126, 128, 143, 151–52, 154, 156, 163, 165, 179, 205, 220, 225 flirting, 118n2, 134, 139, 141 food production, 39, 51, 129, 202, 206, 223 Fordism, 3, 11–12, 18, 31, 70, 76, 115, 121, 144–45, 147, 165, 202, 220 fragmentation, 1–2, 6–7, 16, 22, 81, 93, 111, 115–16, 118, 124, 144–46, 159, 164, 192–94, 203, 207–9, 220–24 Friedman, Thomas L., 8, 144–45 Fukuyama, Francis, 33n10 General Electric, 33n8 gentrification, 171, 190 Germany, 38–39, 42, 151, 153 Georgia, 170 glass, 1–4, 6, 17, 31, 35, 38–43, 47–48, 51, 58–59, 64, 67n7, 71, 75, 79, 85–89, 91, 93–94, 96, 98, 101, 103, 106, 107, 115, 144, 148, 153–54, 160, 163–64, 174–75, 177, 181, 183, 187–89, 193, 193n2, 202, 207, 208–9, 213, 216, 219 broken, 1–2, 6, 91, 93, 103, 106, 115, 160, 193, 207–8, 216, 219 production, 31, 39–41, 48, 64, 86–88, 96, 98, 101, 164, 175, 177, 181, 183, 188–89, 193n2, 213 workshops, 1, 38–39 global factory, 5 global forces, 112, 117 global market, 4, 24, 114, 126, 220 Global North, 12 globalization, 5, 9, 122, 144, 146 glue, 105, 109 Goddard, Victoria, 12, 101, 122, 142, 223 Greece, 35, 40–42, 48, 52, 77–78, 204, 206 Greek Civil War (1946–1949), 24 Greek Crisis, 4, 28

Green, Nancy, 146, 148 Guattari, Felix, 8 Guentcheva, Rossitza, 127 Guyer, Jane, 175, 205 hammer and sickle flag, 184–85 handmade, 39, 148, 182–83 Haraszti, Miklós, 25, 30, 75, 148 Harvey, David, 5, 15, 121, 144–45 healthcare, 84, 205 hegemonic, 3, 16–17, 29, 37, 41, 65, 75, 113, 126, 144, 146, 217, 220 Heineken, 215 hierarchies, 1, 6, 37, 49, 54, 62, 65, 71, 75–76, 78, 93, 103, 108, 111, 114, 119n8, 120, 134, 149, 163, 171–72, 179, 184–85, 190–92, 197, 210–11, 213–17, 223 gender, 30, 123, 134 historicity, 4, 37 Holmstrom, Mark, 123 hot end. See under production line households, 7, 11–12, 20, 27, 29, 31, 51–54, 120–27, 130, 133–34, 136, 138–42, 146, 201–2, 206, 221, 223 income of, 52, 138–40, 201, 223 reproduction, 53, 134, 141, 223 housing, 16, 53–54, 127, 170–72, 190 human resources (HR), 26, 30–31, 49, 69n27, 78–79, 82, 85, 116, 124–25, 132, 150–52, 154, 156, 165, 219 Humphrey, Caroline, 5, 14, 16, 18–19, 44, 169 Hungary, 19, 75, 119n8 hyperinflation, 41, 67n10 immobilities, 8 India, 10, 80, 123, 133 Bangalore, 123 individual responsibility, 17, 143, 154, 156, 158, 164–65, 224 individualism, 21, 153, 157 industrial modernity, 11–12, 16–18, 32, 153, 191 industrial ruins, 172–73, 190 industrialization, 9, 18, 37, 45, 50–51, 175, 186, 190, 220

Index  *  247

inequality, 1, 3, 6, 9, 24–25, 29–32, 33n2, 48–49, 70–72, 75, 81, 90, 108, 113, 118, 118nn1–2, 120, 123–24, 127, 132, 138, 140, 161, 166, 177, 183, 193–94, 208, 210, 216–17, 222–23, 224 age, 1, 29–30, 71, 85 ethnicity, 1, 71 gender, 1, 29–30, 48, 71–72, 85–86, 113, 118, 118n2, 127, 132, 223 global, 6, 9–10, 31, 70–71, 166 local, 6, 10, 166 pay, 25, 88, 118, 223 (see also salaries) informal economy, 23, 32, 145, 182 informal networks, 22–23 International Women’s Day, 71, 82 investors, 5, 97 invisible spaces, 30, 168, 219 Kalb, Don, 6, 93, 117 Kaneff, Deema, 5, 14–15, 17, 19, 37, 65, 127, 142n1, 203, 225 Karr, Alphonse, 33n6 Kasmir, Sharryn, 6–7, 93, 208, 222 Kesküla, Eeva, 7, 20, 85, 118n6, 203, 209 Kideckel, David A., 14, 19–20, 225 kinship, 3, 19–20, 29, 31, 51–54, 63, 72–73, 85, 89–90, 111, 118, 120–25, 127, 133, 138–39, 141–42, 209, 222–23 Kornai, János, 17 labour, 1, 3–9, 11–12, 15–21, 24–25, 27, 29–32, 33n8, 37–38, 41, 47–53, 66, 70–71, 75, 80–82, 84–88, 92, 99, 114–15, 117, 119n7, 120–23, 126, 128, 132–33, 138, 141, 143–46, 148, 157–58, 164, 168, 172–73, 186, 190–93, 195–97, 200, 203, 205, 208–10, 213, 217, 219–20, 223, 225. See also workers conditions, 18, 27, 30, 32, 99, 172, 195, 203, 208, 213, 217 deregulation, 121 experience of, 37, 117 invisible, 8–9, 30, 71, 81, 97, 113, 116, 121, 168, 173, 177, 179, 191, 219, 224

relations, 24, 66, 200 visible, 8–9, 12, 30, 71, 81–82, 84, 168, 172, 179, 181, 183, 224 wage, 27, 51–3, 114, 141, 217 Lawrence-Zúñiga, Denise, 9, 33n7 layoffs, 47, 90, 104, 107, 131–33, 137, 196, 199 Lee, Benjamin, 97, 116, 221 liminality, 185, 192 LiPuma, Edward, 97, 116, 221 Litex, 46, 48, 60, 82, 84–85, 87, 91–92, 100, 103, 107–8, 110–11, 116, 125, 133, 160–61, 175, 177–79, 181, 187, 191–92, 203, 215–16 local forces, 3, 8, 112 machines, 2, 9, 11, 13, 25–28, 30, 33n3, 38–40, 42, 47–48, 55–56, 61, 68n14, 70, 74–75, 77, 86–95, 98–99, 101, 103–9, 112–13, 115–18, 120, 124, 132, 138, 145, 151, 153, 155, 159–62, 166n3, 167n7, 168–69, 173, 177–79, 181, 189–91, 198, 202, 207–8, 210, 212, 219, 221–22 chasing the, 103, 108 dancing with, 103, 108–9, 113, 167n7, 202, 219 malfunction, 89, 155, 159, 160, 162 macro-economics, 21, 25 managerial practices, 2, 4, 21, 24, 30, 32, 41, 59, 63, 68n26, 71, 143, 147, 153, 165–66, 172, 220 managers, 1, 6, 13, 17, 20, 22, 24–26, 28, 40, 42–43, 45, 51, 59–60, 67n1, 67n13, 68n26, 70–71, 76–81, 84, 90, 92–93, 95–97, 101, 103, 107, 111, 113, 116–17, 118nn2–3, 118n5, 122–24, 126, 128, 134, 140, 144–45, 147–154, 156, 158–59, 161, 164–66, 172, 177, 181–83, 186, 198–99, 201, 204, 211, 214–15, 221, 224 Bulgarian, 79–81 Greek, 13, 78–80, 153–54 market economy, 6, 14, 22–24, 34n13 market reforms, 23 market, the, 3–6, 29, 31, 41–42, 71, 76, 80, 85, 94–98, 101, 103, 113–14,

248  •   Index

116–17, 126, 129–31, 142n1, 148, 153, 156, 174, 204, 215, 219, 221–22, 224 marriage, 134 Marxist, 115 Marxist-Leninist, 14 meritocracy, 125 Mexico, 146 migration, 15, 20, 52, 127, 136, 206–7 mining, 4, 20 Mladost Archive, 34n16, 67nn5–8, 68n17, 68n20 Mladost glassworks, 1, 3–13, 15–18, 20–26, 28–31, 33n2, 33n6, 34nn15–16, 35–47, 49–55, 58, 60–61, 65–67, 67nn2–3, 67nn5–9, 68nn16–18, 68n20, 68n26, 70–72, 74–78, 80–82, 84–88, 90–94, 97–101, 103, 110–17, 118n2, 118n5, 119n8, 120, 122–28, 130–37, 139–45, 147–49, 151, 153–54, 158–59, 161–66, 168–69, 171–79, 181–82, 184–88, 190–93, 193n2, 194–210, 213–17, 219–20, 222–26 mobility, 5, 8–9, 15, 24, 50, 52, 54, 85, 145 downward, 32, 60, 62–63, 72, 82, 93, 99, 110–11, 116–17, 123, 146, 162, 181, 200, 203–7, 216, 222, 224–25 upward, 82 modernization, 16–17, 37–41, 45, 54, 65 Mollona, Massimiliano, 7, 9, 25, 68n23, 73–74, 86, 88, 99, 112, 114, 116, 121–22, 125–26, 142, 145, 186, 203, 221–23 moral economies, 9, 31 motivation, 49, 71–72, 74, 76, 107–8, 112, 115, 117, 120, 125, 132, 134, 154, 158, 162, 165, 204, 207 multinational companies, 5, 35, 43, 65, 131, 153, 165 Nash, June, 33n8, 121 National Palace of Culture, Sofia (NDK), 110 nationalism, 19, 34n12, 68n24, 80

neoliberalism, 6, 13, 20–22, 31–32, 45, 66, 81, 116, 166, 194, 203, 214, 216–17, 224 capitalism, 14, 144, 164, 166, 194, 217 flexibility, 146 management, 24 restructuring, 3, 8, 13–14, 46–48, 66 New Economy, 9, 127, 144–45, 147 Ngai, Pun, 118n2, 122–23, 145, 166, 223 nostalgia, 12–13, 16, 21, 33n9, 57, 59, 66, 175, 185, 196, 208 October Revolution, 16 offshoring, 10 Ottoman, 34n13 outsourcing, 3, 6, 8, 10–12, 23, 30, 43, 71, 76, 80, 82, 84, 91, 114–17, 144, 169, 172–73, 177, 179, 185–86, 191–93, 215–16, 221, 224 overtime, 77, 90–91, 151–52, 198 owners, 22, 27, 38, 43, 48, 54, 63, 71, 78–81, 93, 96, 114, 116–17, 118n2, 122, 124–25, 146, 150, 156, 165, 171, 189, 204, 211, 221, 224 ownership, 5, 36–38, 43, 54–56, 78, 81, 98, 171, 190, 192, 197, 199–200, 219, 224 pallets, 91, 100, 104–5, 107, 109, 159–60 patriarchy, 118n2, 121–22, 127, 133, 209 pay, 25, 85, 93, 118, 118n5, 154, 156–59, 161–63, 165, 179, 208–10, 221, 223–24. See also salaries peasant societies, 19, 50 Pelkmans, Mathijs, 170–71 pension, 2, 5, 84–85, 133, 137, 162, 174, 206 periodizations, 28, 38, 57, 225 Pine, Frances, 5, 14–15, 18, 34n12, 48, 68n23, 126–29, 132, 135, 142, 206, 223 Poland, 14, 18–19, 39, 68nn22–23, 151, 206 political economies, 8, 76, 115 politics of production, 5, 17, 21, 44, 53, 76, 103 populism, 20 Portelli, Alessandro, 196, 208

Index  *  249

post-Fordism, 1, 3, 6, 8–9, 11–12, 18, 31, 43, 70, 76, 93, 112, 115, 144–45, 165, 192–93, 208, 220 postmodernity, 144 postsocialist, 3–7, 9, 11, 13–21, 23–24, 28, 30, 32, 33n9, 35, 37–38, 41, 44, 47–48, 51, 53, 55, 60, 65–66, 81, 93, 112, 115, 118n6, 119n8, 127–28, 130, 141–42, 142n1, 144, 147, 150, 164, 168–69, 192, 194, 202–3, 214–15, 217, 220, 223, 225 decentralization, 42 ethnographies, 130, 225 factories, 7, 9, 11, 38 framework, 13, 18 production, 9 societies, 15 studies, 15, 19, 164 transformations, 17, 21, 23, 32, 127, 192 poverty, 5, 15, 48–49, 57, 127, 129 precariat, 12, 123 precaritization of work, 2 precarity, 1, 12, 15, 142, 144, 146 Prentice, Rebecca, 15, 27 pre-socialist, 1 prime minister, 197–99, 211–12, 217 privatization, 1, 3–4, 7–9, 11, 20–22, 28–32, 35, 37, 39–42, 44–50, 54–60, 64–66, 67n9, 67n11, 68n26, 71, 79, 81, 89, 92, 101, 118n1, 124, 126, 132, 137, 147, 169, 173–75, 177, 179, 182, 185–88, 190, 195–97, 201, 207–10, 212–14, 216–17, 220, 223, 225 Procoli, Angela, 15 production line, 8, 10–11, 13, 26, 28–31, 48, 59, 62, 68n25, 71–72, 74–77, 82, 86, 89–92, 94, 96–98, 100–3, 106–8, 110, 112, 115–16, 120–21, 133–34, 140–41, 144, 146–48, 152, 154–56, 159, 161–62, 165–66, 172–75, 178–79, 185–86, 188, 193, 196, 198, 202, 205, 210, 215–17, 220–22, 224 coercion, consent and control, 68n21, 71, 73–76, 94, 96, 101, 103, 108, 112–17, 120, 144, 146, 221–22 cold end, 11, 26, 30–31, 62–63, 70–72, 75, 83, 86–104, 108, 112–13, 118n5,

120, 123–25, 132, 136–38, 154–55, 157–59, 178–79, 183, 200, 202, 206, 219, 221–22 hot end, 30, 48, 63, 70–73, 83, 86–89, 92, 94–103, 113, 118n5, 120, 123–25, 137–38, 140, 157–58, 183, 186, 208–9, 221–22 speed of, 89–90, 106 production practices, 4, 19, 21, 43, 65, 70–71, 175, 215, 217 productivity, 3, 25, 31, 113, 143, 158–59, 162, 165, 209, 224 profitability, 114 quality control, 20, 48, 62–63, 87–88, 92, 95–97, 100–1, 104, 107, 152, 160, 179, 200, 221 Rajković, Ivan, 7, 11–12, 20, 34n11 Red Star tractor factory, 75 redundancies, 4, 8–9, 13, 16, 27, 31, 47, 50, 56, 63, 68n14, 133, 147, 149–51, 154–55, 157, 164, 174–75, 179, 192, 199, 202–4, 210, 219 reindustrialization, 9, 175, 220 relocalization, 145, 220 restructuring, 3–5, 8–9, 21, 43, 46–50, 66, 132, 137 retail, 142n2, 146 reterritorialization, 8 Rofel, Lisa, 168, 172 Roma, 61, 72, 82, 85, 119n8 Romania, 19–20, 41, 71 Rothstein, Frances, 9, 122, 146, 166 Rowlands, Michael, 168 Russia, 16, 19–20, 153, 169–70, 174, 188, 196, 198 Russian-Ukrainian gas crisis (2009), 198 salaries, 4, 10, 29, 49, 54, 78–79, 83, 88, 91, 154, 156, 158, 174, 177, 182, 201, 207–208, 210, 216 age affected, 49, 85, 90, 162, 207 inequality, 30, 49, 83–84, 87–92, 118n5, 119n9, 119n19, 151–52, 154, 156, 158–59, 161–62, 165, 167n6, 179, 208–9, 216

250  •   Index

Sanchez, Andrew, 80, 82, 85, 145 Sander, Irwin Taylor, 19 scientific management, 115 second jobs, 52 self-regulation, 164 Serbia, 19–20, 40 shareholders, 20, 114, 116, 220–21, 224 shift rotation, 83, 89 shifts, 26–28, 52, 71, 83–84, 89–91, 106, 108, 113, 132, 152, 172, 201–2, 216 shop floor, 1–4, 6–7, 9, 11, 13, 17–18, 21, 24–27, 29–32, 42, 45–46, 55, 66, 68n21, 71–83, 85–88, 90–99, 101, 103, 105, 107–9, 111–18, 118n5, 119n8, 120–25, 134–35, 137–44, 146–54, 156, 159, 164–66, 172, 179, 181, 183, 186, 194–99, 201–3, 207, 210–13, 215, 217–24 Slovenia, 17, 20 Smart, Alan and Josephine, 9, 101, 121–22, 142, 145–46, 223 Smith, Adrian, 5, 121, 126–27, 223 Smith, Gavin, 7, 9, 23, 121, 126, 142 social benefits, 213, 218n4 social welfare, 49, 128, 135 socialism, 3, 6, 9, 12, 14, 16–20, 22–23, 28, 30, 32, 33nn10–11, 35, 37–38, 42, 44–45, 48–51, 54, 56, 60, 65–66, 68n22, 75, 84–85, 111, 118n1, 124, 127, 141–42, 142n1, 148, 164, 174, 194, 196–97, 203, 205, 212–17, 220, 225 classless society, 37 collapse of, 5, 6, 9, 14, 23, 32, 37, 48–50, 65, 84–85, 127, 142, 174, 197, 212, 215, 220, 225 socialist centralization, 41, 116 socialist economies, 6, 17, 38 socializing, 62, 181, 183, 187 Sofia. See under Bulgaria solidarity, 11, 20, 31, 76, 93, 100, 114, 121–22, 124, 138–39, 141–42, 222–24 Soviet Union, 39–40 spatiality, 3, 6, 8–9, 99, 172, 185, 203 spatio-temperality, 12, 31

specialization, 5, 59, 90, 109, 129, 137, 144, 148, 162 Sprite bottles, 74–75, 94, 160, 200 Stacey, Judith, 68n23, 121, 125–26, 146 Standing, Guy, 12, 15, 123 state subsidies, 54, 199 subcontracting, 8, 43, 46–47, 61, 79–82, 100–1, 120–22, 144, 151, 192, 203, 205, 220, 224 surveillance, 10, 71, 122 tailoring, 1–2, 22, 61, 182, 191 Tata Factory, 80 tax deductions, 199 Taylorist, 100 technology, 1, 3, 5, 10, 12, 37, 39, 42, 60, 88–89, 98, 101, 112, 115–16, 145, 150–53, 169, 201, 210 temporal regimes, 3 temporality, 3, 9, 12, 17–18, 29–32, 33n3, 35, 37, 43, 55–57, 59, 61, 65–66, 99, 101, 103, 162, 168–69, 172, 174–75, 184–85, 190–92, 196–97, 217, 225 temporalization, 32, 174, 196–97, 217 Thompson, Edward Palmer, 6, 50, 93, 99, 117 time, 3, 12, 14–15, 18, 21, 27, 32, 37–38, 55–57, 65, 90, 100–2, 104–5, 107, 109–10, 113, 115, 118, 127, 129–31, 135, 137, 152, 156, 160, 166n5, 174–75, 178–81, 183–86, 188, 190, 192, 194, 196–97, 200–3, 205, 216, 225 Tocheva, Detelina, 13, 24, 126, 142n1, 203, 205, 214 Todorova, Maria, 6, 13, 33n9 training, 13, 26, 42, 48, 68n14, 88, 145, 151, 153, 166n5 Tsoneva, Jana, 4, 214 Turkey, 40, 55, 96 Ukraine, 41, 174, 206 unemployment, 2, 16, 51, 60, 93, 111, 129, 131, 150, 174, 205, 213 unfairness, 63, 88, 98, 107, 110, 119n19, 136, 138–40, 143, 157–58, 162–63, 166n4, 204

Index  *  251

unions, 20, 33n8, 84–85, 118n6, 123, 213 KNSB, 84 Podkrepa, 84 United States (US), 10, 33n8, 68n23, 145 unpaid work, 7, 111, 131, 142n2, 178 urban studies, 19 Van der Hoorn, Mélanie, 172 Verdery, Katherine, 13–15, 17, 148, 209 Vodopivec, Nina, 7 voluntary work, 110–11 welfare state, 15–16, 54, 128, 142, 145, 205, 214, 223 White House, 60, 63, 71, 76–80, 92, 158 workers. See also employees casual, 1–2, 7, 10–12, 21, 28, 30–31, 45, 47–49, 58, 60, 71–72, 79–85, 87, 92–93, 98, 100–1, 103–4, 109–11, 114, 116, 120, 123–24, 139, 141, 157–59, 161–63, 165, 166n5, 169, 171, 178, 180, 182, 185–86, 191–93, 198, 206, 215–16, 219–24 conflict among, 25, 76, 86, 89, 93–97, 100–1, 103, 107–8, 113–14, 117, 118n3, 121–24, 126, 138, 154, 159, 161, 165, 221–24 cooperation among, 11, 63, 79, 92, 100, 107, 109, 119n19, 150, 154–56, 158, 160–62, 164 manual, 48, 58, 67n1, 70, 119n8, 153, 183, 203, 210, 219 migrant, 8, 15, 68n14, 128, 207, 214 motivation, 49, 71–72, 74, 76, 82, 85, 99–100, 107–8, 112–13, 115, 117, 120–21, 123, 125, 132, 134, 136,

139–40, 154, 156, 158–59, 161–62, 165, 204, 207, 220, 223 new, 21, 37, 51, 55, 58–66, 72, 168, 192, 225 old, 13, 21–22, 37, 48, 54–56, 58–66, 72, 92, 150–51, 168, 191, 225 regular, 1, 7, 11, 21, 28, 30, 58, 62, 71, 79–85, 87, 91–93, 98, 100, 103–4, 108–11, 118, 118n5, 119n8, 119n19, 120, 123–24, 139, 141, 156, 158–59, 161–62, 165n5, 169, 171, 179, 181, 193, 200, 203, 216, 219–24 resistance, 20, 32, 42, 63, 68n26, 71–72, 75–76, 100–1, 103, 107, 112, 115, 119n12, 125, 163, 169, 172–73, 182, 185, 189, 220, 222 rigid, 143–45, 147–48, 164, 224 sense of belonging, 68n24, 140 sexual relations among, 118n2, 134, 139–42, 223 skilled, 42, 48, 68n14, 68n25, 71, 85–88, 90, 92, 99, 131, 162, 185, 207 solidarity among, 11, 20, 31, 76, 93, 100, 114, 121–22, 124, 138–39, 141–42, 222–24 unskilled, 48, 51, 59, 68n14, 71, 86–88, 91–92, 99, 119n8, 158, 185, 213 work ethics, 20 workflow, 178 working conditions, 23, 75, 78, 99, 109, 114, 116–17, 119n18, 133, 161, 175, 181, 195–96, 200, 208, 217, 221–22 impact on health, 75, 133 Yelvington, Kevin, 119n9, 122, 134