Women, Transition and Strikes in Serbia

Abstract

he author, in a sociological way, describes and analyzes the concepts of transition, privatization and strikes in Serbia, particularly the place of women in it. It examines the most important economic and social causes and consequences of these phenomena. The main hypothesis is: women’s strikes in the Serbian transition are less efficient than strikes and public protests of women in the developed world and the second Yugoslavia. A strike is a class conflict, in which the workers are fighting for their social and economic rights, threatened by the capitalist class. Elites in government and state authorities protect the interests of big capital at the detriment of the interests of the majority of workers. Exploring women’s strikes in transition reveals the nature of the social and political system. Their strikes in enterprises, the blocking of public spaces and public protests are systemic, ie. class determined. As the transition was very fast, the resistance of the strikers was inefficient, and the protests of women became an expression of desperation against the loss of jobs and basic resources for lifehood.
In short, this research is about the main causes, the organizational forms and the consequences of strikes in which the majority were women. For this purpose, the author chose to describe an array of strikes in the industries and the companies where women are most employed. The choice of strikes in the economic sector is not accidental, but a consequence of the fact that the women there were the most vulnerable. Women in public institutions and companies had much higher financial and social position. They are less likely to strike and publicly protested. After 2000, these strikes were more successful than worker’s strikes in textile, food processing, manufacturing and trade. Relationship between the government and the public towards them was tainted by self-interest and selective.
The main criterion for the selection of companies and institutions in which women stroke was the type of property. Specifically, the paper explores the women’s strikes not initiated by privatization. The second type are those that are initiated by the privatization law of 1997, and carried out under the new law in 2001. The third is about privatized enterprises and workers seeking annulment of that. The fourth about companies sold to domestic and foreign capitalists, and workers forced to lose their jobs and wages. Fifth strikers from the company in which the interests of the state associated with shareholders and together oppose workers who have shares in the company. The sixth category of strikers were those in the public services and institutions that were effective after 2000. With the acceleration of privatization in the red came people who lost a new job, or those who were employed in the banking sector and in public enterprises. There were employees of the elite strata of women, which resulted in greater success of the strikes and protests. Among the most persistent and least effective strikers were women from the failed textile sector, trade and privatized companies that were deliberately destroyed.
The most important requirements of women in the strikes were payment of salaries, the funding of social programs, the payment of pension and disability insurance, the certification of health cards, the resumption of production, the rights of small shareholders, the annulment of privatization, government assistance in finding the owner and corruption etc. Strikes were „on the tiny”, ie. without any form of solidarity in the companies, business and the local and wider environment. Dissatisfied workers were organized spontaneously, with the help of old and new unions. They often protested and blocked public spaces, theirplants, their workplace, within the company and in the streets, squares, public roads, in front of the courts, agencies, and local and national institutions. Strikes and protests by women belonging to the lower layers of the hierarchy of economic, educational and political power were inefficient. Against them were entrepreneurs, government and public opinion. Number of well organized strikes, from classical forms to hunger strikes (and incineration, mutilation of their own bodies as a form of protest) were far less than successful.
In the end, it is concluded that unemployment, poverty and job loss during the transition Serbia was systematically determined, a consequence of the „shock” privatization of the neoliberal model and the concept of transition. This has led to socio-economic decline, further stratification and impoverishment of workers, especially women. Their resistance to it, strikes and public protests, were mostly unsuccessful in the second decade of transition. In relation to women strikes in the developed capitalist world, it can be said that they were inefficient.