Open Research Repository - Central European University
The Open Research Repository (ORR) is the official institutional repository of the Central European University. The repository provides access to the research output of the CEU community by collecting open access versions of scholarly works authored or co-authored by CEU faculty and students.
For more information, please contact us at: scholcom@ceu.edu
Recent Submissions
Item Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU. Vol. 29, 2023(Central European University, Department of Medieval Studies, 2023)Item A “Special Category of Women” in Austria and Internationally: Migrant Women Workers, Trade Union Activists, and the Textile Industry, 1960s to 1980s(Brill, 2024-05-04)At the beginning of the 1960s, Austria joined Western and Northern European states in recruiting temporary migrant workers. While the European “guestworker” and migrant labour regimes have been subject to multiple studies in the last 40 years, migrant women have rarely been at the centre of these investigations, although their specific issues have comprised a facet of the international labour movement since the 1970s. Female migrant workers faced a double marginalization in the labour movement, both as migrants and as women. By analysing printed source material, archival documents, and interviews with women trade unionists, this chapter examines this specific double marginalization; how gender, class, and ethnicity shaped the labour activism of domestic and migrant working women; and how the international, national, and local levels interacted in the context of the deindustrialization of the Austrian textile industry.Item Renegotiating Skills, Wages, and the Right to Work: On the Gender of Labor Activism around Rationalization in the Bulgarian Tobacco Industry in the Early 1930s(Cambridge University Press, 2024-02-19)Starting from the early 1930s, structural changes in the Bulgarian tobacco industry, prompted by the advent of the world economic crisis and German economic expansionism into Southeastern Europe, led to a deep restructuring of the labor processes, known in the terminology of the time as rationalization, in the Bulgarian tobacco industry. The introduction of the tonga rationalization technology had a deskilling and deeply gendered effect on the industry, making a significant number of skilled male workers redundant, disproportionately decreasing average male wages and leading, in turn, to a further feminization of an already majority-female workforce. The introduction of the new system provoked a strong response from the organized labor movement, which used a variety of tactics to fight against the new technology: from strikes to petitions to tripartite negotiations. Organized labor's reaction was deeply gendered, an aspect that only becomes truly visible if, in addition to gender and skill, we employ the analytical lens of scale. By following trade union policies on the local, national, and international levels, the article goes beyond the carefully crafted gender-neutral language in official documents to reveal tensions between the conservative attitudes of rank-and-file activists and the official trade union agenda. This is especially evident in communist labor politics, where Bulgarian trade union policies on the local and national levels provoked an intervention on the part of the Profintern between 1930 and 1931. The movement's internal contradictions resulted in a polyvalent, ambiguous, and non-linear trade union policy formed through the clash of and negotiations between local activists’ conservative notions of gendered work and family roles and the radical gender program of international communism.Item Radical and Utopian or Partnership between Men und Women? Austrian Trade Union Women, Autonomous Feminists and Labour Related Concerns, 1970s-1980s(2024-04-01)This contribution explores the interplay between labour and feminist activism in Austria during the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on the often overlooked nexus of the women’s liberation movement and the trade union movement, the analysis looks into the forms of organisation and protest used by women activists from various political affiliations on the left, including social democrats, communists and emerging alternative and green groups. These protests included the struggle for reproductive rights, conflicting ideas on the inclusion of domestic labour into labour activism, the significance of partnership as an activist concept, and the challenges of joint actions. The material is analysed using a combined source-critical and theory-driven approach, employing hermeneutic methods to reveal specific debates and the complex dynamics of cooperation and distinction in both labour and feminist activism. The study thus shows that the activism of women organised in communist, alternative (radical) left and socialist trade union contexts was part of the activist cycle of feminist movements in the 1970s and 1980s.Item Women workers’ education at the Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions: excavating histories of transnational collaboration with the ICFTU(Informa UK Limited, 2023-11-8)This article explores the relationship between the Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions (Türk-İş) and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) from the 1960s until the 1990s with a focus on the transnational collaboration of activists who organised educational activities for women workers and trade unionists to empower them as rights-seeking political subjects and strengthen their position within the trade union movement. Demonstrating how women’s trade union education evolved within the framework of local politics as well as global processes such as the Cold War and the emergence of a UN-led gender equality regime, it argues that global inequalities, geopolitical differences, and Türk-İş leaders’ ambivalent attitude towards women’s status in the trade union movement led to a loose, sporadic relationship between local activists and those from the west. At the same time, it was often these activists’ sustained efforts towards collaboration and the circulation of their agendas that pressured Türk-İş to invest in women’s empowerment in trade unions. Utilising archival and trade union sources as well as oral history interviews, the article integrates the work of women labour activists in feminist labour historiography, offering a more comprehensive understanding of trade unions’ gender politics in Turkey and globally.
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