Loading...
State Labour Control and Women’s Resistance in Austro-Hungarian Transylvania Tobacco Manufacturing (1897–1918)
Title / Series / Name
Publication Volume
Publication Issue
Pages
Authors
Editors
Keywords
Tobacco
European history
Smoking
Cigarettes
European history
Smoking
Cigarettes
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/14295
Abstract
This chapter explores women’s labour activism and labour organising practices in Austria-Hungary, with a focus on two major labour conflicts, in 1897 and 1911, in the state tobacco factory in the Transylvanian city of Kolozsvár/Cluj Napoca/Klausenburg. In Europe, Hungary was a key producer of tobacco leaf but it exported little beyond Austria; most of its finished products were destined for internal consumption. Since the end of the nineteenth century, numerous new tobacco manufactories had been established in Hungary by the state tobacco monopoly organisation. During this era, women tobacco workers became more willing to engage in labour conflicts and had stronger links than before with the regional and national labour movement. The chapter documents their labour activism—rooted in their gendered experiences as low-paid women workers—and shows how their demands were countered and neutralised through site-specific forms of paternalistic benefits alongside discipline and control. The chapter shows that the labour activism of the women workers in Transylvania was closely linked to processes of capital accumulation as well as the social and political movements developing in Austria-Hungary after the 1890s. It demonstrates how the state tobacco factory became increasingly less a site for negotiation and rather one of confrontation that met with hard-line employer retribution, and that this reconfiguration ultimately weakened Kolozsvár tobacco women’s organising.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Book chapter
Date
2024-12-25
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1007/978-3-031-64411-5_11