CARGA DE PROBAR QUE YA REALIZÓ EL PAGO TOTAL DEL ADEUDO O BIEN QUE, EN SU CASO, ES MENOR AL

On other fronts employers have continued to be very successful in influencing policy discourses in a bid to involve the state into getting more workers in the factories. In 2010 Utrinski Vesnik interviewed a number of textile factory managers in Shtip who claimed that the main reason for the shortage of labour was the recent opening of the new university in the town which absorbed the vast majority of high-school graduates and so greatly reduced the working population of the town. The opening of the

university had been part of the national strategy of extending tertiary education opportunities beyond the capital and raising the educational profile of the working population (Ministry of Education 2004). The strategy has come under heavy criticism from the local industrial business community in a familiar format. “We have plenty of vacancies … but everyone wants a degree and a job in administration”, said one, while another complained that “there are 250 students in the faculty of philosophy and only twenty studying textiles. Are we going to live from philosophising or from production?” (Bojadziski 2010).

In stark contrast with events back in 2006, in 2011 the local mayor stood in unison with the owners of the five largest garment factories in the town made a joint statement that “an inaccurate picture has been created in the public about the working conditions in the garment industry ... and this has had an impact on the decision of many young people to avoid enrolling in the secondary school for textiles. Young people should know that the work in the garment factories is on a European level, in well-lit and spacious shop floors, with perfect cooling and heating systems and with the latest technology machines that are easy to handle ... and that wages are within the town’s average.” (Bojadziski 2011). It was once again reiterated that the opening of the university has had a negative effect on the economy.

The pressure seems to have had an effect and by 2013 the government announced that a portion of the latest World Bank loan will go towards developing the capacities of vocational secondary schools in response to the needs of the economy. The Ministry of Education announced the implementation of special programs to connect vocational schools with employers who will provide opportunities for practical experience (Utrinski Vesnik 2014). The President of the Parliament of the Business Chamber of Macedonia, Antoni Peshev, described this program as burdensome for the companies and instead suggested the state should subsidize companies for training workers at the cost of 500 Euros per worker. “If foreign investors have been promised cheap labour, and the latter is deficient or overvalued, then it is inevitable that we should start thinking about subsidies” (Tomikj 2014).

Peshev’s message to the government is quite clear: the market needs cheap, skilled labour in the form of welders, electricians, bricklayers, locksmiths and it is the state’s responsibility to produce such labour:

“I would like to issue a warning that the level of education and the size of income do not always go hand in hand. We can see that very well in our current situation. We have a deficit of workers with vocational skills, for which is offered high remuneration, opposed to an existing highly educated workforce that cannot find employment. Globalization, rising regional competition, new technologies and the development of the economy all point to a merciless conclusion. In the times that lie ahead there will be no room for the lazy, the unschooled and the privileged. Competition will be tougher not just here but in the whole world. This is why we have to invest all our efforts to have a strong,

competitive young generation, ready to deal with the challenges of the economy” (ibid). The state’s response came a few months later through the Minister of Education who urged parents to encourage their children to choose vocational secondary schools and

prepare graduates for immediate entry into the labour market. The current government of Gruevski has also accepted the practice of subsidizing training programs for new employees as a form of state support for new foreign investments in the country’s Special Economic Zones (but not for domestic companies).

The outstanding feature of Peshev’s comments is that he recognises, in an almost common sense way, that the “market” by itself does not generate the “right kind” of labour, in this case meaning cheap, skilled, flexible and willing. The latter is nothing but a promise that the state has given to both foreign and local investors that it must fulfil. It is implicitly stated that labour is not really a commodity whose value is determined by self-regulating markets but a social relationship that must be engineered by a concerted social effort involving all the available mechanisms of a state that is placed in the full service of international capital (see Polanyi 2001: 239). Peshev’s is thus able to both reverently invoke the cruel realism of the market as the overarching determinant and the need for state intervention. His is certainly not an isolated occurrence and it is quite common practice for industrialists to both pressure governments for subsidies, whether for technological investments or training, and invoke self-regulating markets whenever they have to negotiate wages with workers. Market ideology here becomes selectively deployed as the handmaiden of new industrial interests, and rather than diminishing, the state has found new ways to increase its regulatory role (Polanyi 2001: 147).

These developments are certainly not limited to Macedonia and the transformation of the state as an agent mediating the relationship between markets and workers has been a trend in many European countries as the hallmark of market reforms. Such links

certainly did exist during socialism but whereas the promise of the socialist state was employment, the neoliberal state promises employability (Bacevic 2014). But it has also been part of the strategy against the refusal of large numbers of potential wage-

labourers to participate in the capitalist economy on asocial terms by avoiding the ranks of assembly line workers. It has been an attack on the moral discourse of mutuality and the legitimacy of non-participation. With the stechajci out of the limelight, the

unemployed have been even more firmly repositioned as “the lazy, the unskilled, and the privileged” for which there is no room in society, i.e. as “matter out of place”.

6.8 Concluding Remarks

In this section, I have outlined the larger context and some of the major transformations taking place in Macedonia by analysing concrete changes in the dominant economic ideology, the role of the state and the subjective remaking of “free” labour, especially the efforts made towards its greater commodification and “disembedding” to use Polanyi’s term. Indeed, as Parry (2005: 146) has noted, much of Polanyi’s masterwork,

The Great Transformation, is a consistent analysis of institutional revolution in England that made labour a “free” commodity on the market. However, the picture emerging from my analysis is not a binary one, with uniform “market forces” at one end and “society” at the other, tugging in opposing directions. Nor can we speak of a moral economy of the dispossessed shaping political praxis along class lines. Such an image would not do justice to the multiplicity of actors, voices and ideologies as they come together in a specific social situation, in which they may invoke a variety of historical traditions or symbols and deploy them in often unpredictable ways.

Workers are clearly and quite consciously not only not acting as a class, but are also ambiguous about their relationship to the dominant. Their actions and strategies can be seen to operate through existing structures of power rather than outside of them, or in direct opposition to them (Rofel 1999: 32). Both the condition of operating “outside” of

webs of dependence or in “opposition” to them appears to hold little value for workers both practically and imaginatively. Whereas direct, and particularly class based,

opposition is seen as futile or unworkable, individual autonomy is seen as the equivalent to ruthless exposure to the detrimental vagaries of free market capitalism. It is in the interstices of these two poles of power that strategies of dependence seeking are resorted to as a means of rearranging the operations of power in ways that allow workers to edge closer to their social, moral and economic needs. Such are the pleas to both the “social capitalist” and the “social state,” whether uttered by the skilled, the unwanted surplus, the aging, the young and the variously gendered.

Liminality and abjection are important concepts which I have used to show the

subjective and symbolic ambiguity which workers were thrown into by the remaking of labour. The very process of remaking underscores the process of unmaking of previous social relations and of their corollary systems of signification and modes of personhood. The transition did not simply impose a new cosmological blueprint from above. It opened up existing categories and meanings that became the ground for competing moral discourses where ideologues of the self-regulating market are never alone. I have suggested that the language of criticism deployed by workers can be usefully analysed in its “performative” dimension, or as an attempt to create their own collective (moral) definition of the social context. Or, in Bourdieu’s language, to rattle the habitus and wrestle part of the symbolic power from the dominant who define the “rules of the game” (2005: 201).

But how successful was this strategy and what does it tell us about political agency? In summarizing Gramsci, Parry writes that “in order to win others to its view of the world, to its social, cultural and moral values” the working class cannot “triumph by confining itself to ‘corporate-economic’ struggles – to its own class interests. It must forge

alliances … and patiently build up its own counter-hegemony” (Parry 2009: 176). Similarly, Parry goes on, “Polanyi stresses that for a class to act as an effective historical agent it must stand for something more than its own interests. It must persuade other classes that it represents the interests of society” (ibid).

In many ways the various discourses of workers have tried to do precisely that. They have drawn upon the symbolic capital of kinship, the “moral society” and the “national community” in order to represent their struggles as part of a much larger whole. Dunn (2004: 133), describes a similar process in Poland where workers relied heavily on kinship metaphors in order to articulate such moral claims and thus re-contextualize labour relations in ways that are seen as more advantageous for workers. This is of course hardly new or limited to the context of post-socialism. For example, using kinship morality to challenge working class poverty and demand higher wages in the name of the family, resulted in the nineteenth century concept of the family wage (May 1982: 401). In the case of the stechajci, and in spite of the fact that they became the subject of political intrigue and manipulation, the very fact that they imposed upon the government the need to extend some kind of recognition for their status suggests that such strategies can produce change.

However we must not idealize such cosmologies as effective political platforms. Neither the government, nor the new capitalist elite have at any point been reduced to “the prisoners of the people”; or subdued by a “moral economy of the poor” (Thompson 1971: 79). Kinship or family morality can often be appropriated to serve as a

mechanism for establishing effective control over the workforce and to reinforce forms of gender and age discrimination (May 1982: 418; also Narotzky 1997: 88). For

example, appeals to employers that overtime labour does not allow working women sufficient time to “care for their children” may lead to a reduction in labour time spent

in the factory, but also reify the division of labour in the household to the detriment of women and their political role in society. Owners can often position themselves as protective patriarchs who “care” for their workers and the latter are often perceived as “little children” who often fail to comprehend processes designed “for their own good”. The kinship networks that are ubiquitously used in recruitment strategies by employers can create a docile workforce and circumnavigate the real difficulty of finding labourers for an industry encumbered by a reputation of economic cruelty (De Neve 2008: 218). In other words, overreliance on kinship metaphors often comes at the expense of

narrowing the possibility of class based strategies and a failure to recognize a “common interest” for workers as a corporate group. Even though workers share a common refusal to become little more than labour commodities governed by market forces, they have not been united in themselves as “workers”.

As such they have not been entirely without results, as seen in the production of a reluctant labour force and the constant necessity of investing great efforts in maintaining a pool of available workers in conditions of severe unemployment. But the historical tide seems to be pulling in the direction of business interests as seen in the growing resolve of the state to stand firmly on the side of capital. The odds, today more than ever, appear stacked heavily against labour and their fight against commodification. It is this complex social situation that will be the object of further analysis in the following chapters, which explore the unfolding of some of the themes already introduced at the more intimate, ethnographic level: the lives of ordinary workers inside the garment factory. This will allow us to have a closer look at the technologies by which a non- consenting workforce is ushered in and managed on the assembly line.