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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2020
From the 1960s to 1989, thousands of female Polish workers were sent to Czechoslovak enterprises. I analyze how the Polish women used their stay in the CSSR during the peak period of labor force cooperation to escape the dual burden of production and reproduction. My argument is that the advantageous position enjoyed by skilled male workers in state-socialist regimes could also partly apply to the otherwise vulnerable and marginalized unskilled female and migrant work force. Mutually countervailing policies of the two “cooperating” states, which in fact competed for the same workers, forced Czechoslovakia to relax control over the Poles and allowed the workers to choose relatively freely whether to stay in the host country or return. I conclude that these favorable conditions endowed the female Polish workers with agency and empowered them to flee from their determined roles in paternalist state-socialist society.
An early draft of this essay was presented at the 2017 ASEEES Annual Convention in Chicago. Many thanks for insightful comments go to our panel discussant Aaron Hale-Dorrell. I also wish to thank Malgorzata Fidelis, two anonymous reviewers for Slavic Review, and Editor Harriet Murav for their constructive criticism and great encouragement. I am much obliged to Tomek Szyszlak for his help in conducting my research in Poland. Finally, I am particularly grateful to the former Polish workers for their openness in sharing their intimate stories with me.
1 According to my estimation, at least 65,000 Polish workers (more than 90% women) experienced employment in Czechoslovakia. Dariusz Stola reckons some 30–40,000 Poles worked in the GDR and a few thousand in other countries in the 1970s. See Stola, Dariusz, Kraj bez wyjścia? Migracje zagraniczne z Polski 1949–1989 (Warsaw, 2010), 275Google Scholar. The CSSR was surpassed by East Germany in terms of the total number of foreign workers in the eastern bloc, but they were mainly of non-European origin. Also, the share of foreign workers (around 1 per cent) in the GDR labor force was the highest among the COMECON countries. See Bade, Klaus J., Migration in European History (Oxford, 2003), 246CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Thousands of Polish men worked in the same period in Czechoslovakia. They were employed by specialized Polish “service export” companies such as Polservice or Budimex. This far more expensive import of Polish labor was based on a COMECON trade agreement from 1962.
3 Státní oblastní archiv Zámrsk (SOAZ), fond (f.) Krajský NV Východočeského kraje Hradec Králové, inventory number (i.n.) 1535/58, “Zápis z porady s polskými pracovnicemi, která se konala v pondělí dne 19. června 1973 v n.p. Východočeské mlékárny Pardubice,” June 1973.
4 SOAZ, f. Krajský NV Východočeského kraje Hradec Králové, i.n. 1535/58, “Komentář k pololetnímu statistickému výkazu o zaměstnání polských pracovnic za I. pololetí 1973, Veba Broumov,” undated, probably July 1973.
5 SOAZ, “Zápis z porady.”
6 SOAZ, f. Krajský NV Východočeského kraje Hradec Králové, i.n. 1535/58, “Komentář k pololetnímu výkazu MPSV ČSR o počtu polských dělníků pracujících v ČSR v I. pololetí 1973, Velveta n.p. Varnsdorf,” June 30, 1973.
7 Compare 9,500 Polish workers to 21,200 Vietnamese workers employed in Czechoslovak companies already in 1982.
8 Here I refer to a notion that has been settled for quite some time. See Chris Corrin, ed., Superwomen and the Double Burden: Women’s Experience of Change in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (London, 1992). However, different definitions may occur in the literature. For instance, Maria Bucur speaks about the “triple burden,” which “refers to the expectation that women had to serve as the primary caretaker at home, a paid worker in the wage economy, and an active member of the socialist society,” in Bucur, Maria, “Women and State Socialism: Failed Promises and Radical Changes Revisited,” Nationalities Papers 44, no. 5 (June 2016): 847–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Giustino, Cathleen M., Plum, Catherine J., and Vari, Alexander, eds., Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (New York, 2013), 1, 4Google Scholar.
10 Pittaway, Mark, The Workers’ State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958 (Pittsburgh, 2012)Google Scholar.
11 Pittaway, Mark, “Workers, Management and the State in Socialist Hungary: Shaping and Re-Shaping the Socialist Factory Regime in Újpest and Tatabánya, 1950–1956,” in Brenner, Christiane and Heumos, Peter, eds., Socialgeschichtliche Kommunismusforschung. Tschechoslowakei, Polen, Ungarn und DDR 1948–1968 (Munich, 2005), 105–131Google Scholar, here 128–131.
12 Burawoy, Michael, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism (London, 1985), 163Google Scholar.
13 For example, Alamgir, Alena K., “Recalcitrant Women: Internationalism and the Redefinition of Welfare Limits in the Czechoslovak-Vietnamese Labor Exchange Program,” Slavic Review 73, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 133–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alamgir, Alena K., “From the Field to the Factory Floor: Vietnamese Government’s Defense of Migrant Workers’ Interests in State-Socialist Czechoslovakia, “Journal of Vietnamese Studies 12, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 10–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Alamgir, “From the Field,” 11. Alamgir explicitly points to works of R. Zatlin, Jonathan, “Scarcity and Resentment: Economic Sources of Xenophobia in the GDR, 1971–1989,” Central European History 40, no. 4 (December 2007): 683–720CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Alamgir, Alena K., “‘Inappropriate Behavior’: Labor Control and the Polish, Cuban and Vietnamese Workers in Czechoslovakia,” in Siefert, Marsha, ed., Labor in State Socialist Europe, 1945–1989: Contributions to History of Work (Budapest, 2019)Google Scholar. The very little scholarship dedicated to Polish workers in the CSSR contrasts with the much broader attention given to non-European labor migrants in the eastern bloc, especially in the GDR. See, for example, Schwenkel, Christina, “Rethinking Asian Mobilities: Socialist Migration and Post-Socialist Repatriation of Vietnamese Contract Workers in East Germany,” Critical Asian Studies 46, 2 (April 2014): 235–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Verdery, Katherine, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, 1996), 63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Verdery, What Was Socialism, 64. To underline the “parental” role of state (i.e. the Party) she coined the term “zadruga-state,” referring to the Romanian word for an extended patriarchal family. Similar phenomenon was termed “welfare dictatorship” (Fürsorgediktatur) by Konrad Jarausch in the case of the GDR. Jarausch, Konrad H., “Care and Coercion: The GDR as Welfare Dictatorship,” in Jarausch, Konrad H. (ed.), Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York, 1999), 60Google Scholar.
18 Verdery, What Was Socialism, 22–23.
19 Burawoy, The Politics of Production, 161.
20 See, Kornai, János, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 223, 226.
21 Indeed, coal miners were no less important than spinners or weavers. In the case of male workers, however, it was a much smaller problem for the government to increase their salaries significantly.
22 Šulc, Zdislav, “Mzdová soustava,” in Kocian, Jiří et al. , eds., Slovníková příručka k československým dějinám 1948–1989 (Prague, 2006), 34Google Scholar.
23 Burawoy, The Politics of Production, 165.
24 Poland joined the group of eight most indebted countries in the world. By the end of communism, Polish foreign debt had increased beyond $35 billion, which was ten billion higher than the entire foreign debt of the USSR. Pula, Besnik, Globalization under and after Socialism: The evolution of Transnational Capital in Central and Eastern Europe (Stanford, 2018), 77Google Scholar.
25 Pula, Globalization, 87, 98.
26 Although the pace of investment continued to grow in the second half of 1970s, problems with paying-off the debts hit the Polish population especially in terms of consumer-good prices mid-decade. Karpiński, Andrzej, “Drugie uprzemysłowienie Polski—prawda czy mit?” in Rybiński, Krzysztof, ed., Dekada Gierka: Wnioski dla obecnego okresu modernizacji Polski (Warsaw, 2011), 13Google Scholar.
27 Karpiński, “Drugie uprzemysłowienie,” 17.
28 Hirszowicz, Maria, Coercion and Control in Communist Society: The Visible Hand of Bureaucracy (Brighton, 1986), 89Google Scholar.
29 See Stola, Kraj, 274. According to Stola, salaries in Czechoslovakia at beginning of the 1970s were roughly 25–50% higher than in Poland. For this reason, Stola argues that the level of wages was the decisive motivation for Polish female workers to come to Czechoslovakia. Stola, Kraj, 275. However, this might have changed during the first half of the decade.
30 However, Piotr Perkowski points out that in the 1970s, prolonged maternity leave was mostly unpaid, which did not really help blue-collar families that could not live on the husband’s income alone. Mothers were pushed back to the household more by what the government did not do (neglected institutional child care) rather than by what it did. This changed significantly a decade later, when paid holiday leave was prolonged to three years, and around 800,000 mothers decided to leave the labor market. Perkowski, Piotr, “Wedded to Welfare? Working Mothers and the Welfare State in Communist Poland,” Slavic Review 76, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 455–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 475–76.
31 Státní okresní archiv Trutnov (SOAT), f. Texlen s.p. Trutnov (1958–1991), i.n. 3043/227, “Rozbor příčin fluktuace pracovníků kategorie 8 se zaměřením na ženy-matky, n.p. Texlen Trutnov,” September 1976.
32 Unlike in the 1960s when Polish workers sent to the CSSR were registered at labor offices as an available workforce, in the 1970s Polish clerks had to actively search for and “convince” workers already employed in their home companies.
33 In addition to the recruitment compensation that was introduced by the 1972 Agreement, Czechoslovakia transferred directly to the Polish treasury health care insurance (for their workers and their families), and part of retirement and disability pensions for those concerned, as well as the income tax of the individual workers.
34 As Polish comrades put it, “the option to revoke what was already agreed is undesirable given the settlement of mutual relations of the COMECON countries as well as the technical-legal concerns of the concluded agreements.” AAN, “Informacja w sprawie.”
35 AAN, “Informacja w sprawie.”
36 The Polish National Economic Plan for 1971 presupposed a surplus of labor by 100,000–150,000 people. In the plan it was explicitly suggested that the labor surplus was to be “exported” to Czechoslovakia and the GDR. AAN, “Informacja w sprawie.”
37 Philip Martin analyzes the “distortion” and “dependence” effects of guest labor programs in Managing Labour Migration: Professionals, Guest Workers And Recruiters (New York, 2005), 12.
38 SOAT, “Rozbor příčin fluktuace.”
39 Similarly, Stola quotes a Party document that recommended “not to put an effort to fulfill the quotas [of the contracted workers] completely.” Stola, Kraj, 274.
40 AAN, f. Ambasada PLR w Pradze, Wydział Zatrudnienia, zespół KC PZPR/Wydział Zagraniczny, i.n. 888 (837/12), “Notatka w sprawie zatrudnienia polskich pracowników w CSRS, Prague,” April 24, 1979.
41 Jirásek, Zdeněk, “Polští pracovníci v textilkách severovýchodních Čech po druhé světové válce,” in Etnické procesy v ČSSR. Polské etnikum (Ostrava, 1989): 174–187Google Scholar, 185.
42 AAN, “Notatka w sprawie.”
43 AAN, “Notatka w sprawie.”
44 Between 1972–1978 about 5,000 mixed marriages took place. See AAN, “Notatka w sprawie”. This trend changed into the 1980s, when the average age of Polish workers in Czechoslovakia increased and their overall number significantly decreased. See Stola, Kraj, 364.
45 Archiwum Państwowe Wrocław (APW), f. Prezydium WRN we Wrocławiu, i.n. 1/1170, “Zápis o jednání, které bylo uskutečněno za přítomnosti zástupců polské strany (. . .), Stap n.p., Vilémov,” November 24, 1971.
46 Partly resembling the situation in the GDR before the Berlin wall was erected. Małgorzata Mazurek, Socjalistyczny zakład pracy. Porównanie fabrycznej codzienności w PRL i NDR u progu lat sześćdziesiątych (Warsaw, 2005), 101–102.
47 Verdery, What Was Socialism, 64.
48 In this context, it is important to keep in mind that the political changes at the beginning of the 1970s empowered to some extent female industrial workers also in Poland itself. Malgorzata Fidelis mentions as an important milestone a strike by female textile workers in Łódź in 1971, when the Polish government was for the very first time forced to halt a planned increase of food prices. Malgorzata Fidelis, Women, Communism and Industrialization in Poland (Cambridge, Eng., 2010): 246.
49 AAN, “Notatka w sprawie.”
50 No doubt the local workforce utilized the lack of labor in a similar way, especially with low-wage but physically demanding jobs. Extremely high job turnover beset this sector regardless of the foreign workers. But unlike the local workers, the Poles could easily take a job back in Poland without any proper severance of labor relations in the CSSR, or even if they were dismissed for disciplinary reasons. SOAZ, f. Krajský NV Východočeského kraje Hradec Králové, i.n. 1535/58, “Komentář k pololetnímu výkazu MSP ČSR o počtu polských dělníků pracujících v ČSR, Preciosa n.p., Jablonec n. N.,” January 1974.
51 SOAZ, f. Krajský NV Východočeského kraje Hradec Králové, i.n. 1535/58, “Komentář k pololetnímu výkazu polských dělníků pracujících v ČSR za 1. pololetí 1973, Východočeské papírny, n.p., Lanškroun,” July 6, 1973.
52 AAN, “Notatka w sprawie.”
53 For instance, Czechoslovak clerks on a regional level (Hradec Králové) reported that Polish female workers frequently lodged complains directly to “various institutions and authorities both in Poland and in the CSSR that could have been solved on the spot.” APW, f. Prezydium WRN we Wrocławiu, i.n. 1/1170, „Sprawozdanie z wyjazdu służbowego do CSRS w dniach 27–29.05.1971 r.,” June 7, 1971.
54 The Polish spouses of Czech men as a rule did not apply for the CSSR citizenship but received a “consular passport” that granted them permanent residency and the same rights as Czechoslovak workers, so that the worker could move freely in the labor market, was erased from the “protocol number” of “foreign” workers, and partly “disappeared” from the sight of the Polish authorities.
55 It is important to say that there were groups of Polish workers who neither intended nor used their stay in the CSSR as an escape from any burden. They were either satisfied with their role as producer and mother or returned from the CSSR once they realized that the actual wages were lower than expected. In the conditions of insignificant wage level differences, Polish authorities faced serious problems in recruiting workers. In an internal Polish document from 1974, it is openly declared that the authorities had to present Czechoslovak salaries as being more attractive (muszą uatrakcyjniać) to find at least some applicants for work in the CSSR. See AAN, f. Archiwum KC PZPR, Wydział Ekonomiczny, i.n. not available, “Informacja o zatrudnieniu polskich pracowników w Niemieckiej Republice Demokratycznej i Czechosłowackiej Republice Socjalistycznej,” July 1, 1974.
56 Franiciszka W., interview, digital recording, Wałbrzych, Poland, May 31, 2017.
57 For instance, the watch-making company Elton reported that “the sickness rate of Polish female workers is still higher than of our workers. The sickness rate grew especially due to medical certificates issued in Poland.” SOAZ, f. Krajský NV Východočeského kraje Hradec Králové, i.n. 1535/58, “Komentář k statistickému výkazu V (MPSV), n.p. Elton, Nové Město nad Metují,” January 1974.
58 SOAZ, f. Krajský NV Východočeského kraje Hradec Králové, i.n. 1535/502/1, “Zápis z jednání zástupců Východočeského kraje ve věci zaměstnávání polských pracovníků, konaného dne 1.4.1968 ve Wroclawi,” April 1968.
59 Both higher rate of sickness of Polish workers and high number of certificates issued by Polish doctors was noticed by many companies in the 1970s and 1980s and was also acknowledged by the Polish authorities. Cf. AAN, “Notatka w sprawie.”
60 SOAZ, “Komentář k pololetnímu.”
61 SOAZ, f. Krajský NV Východočeského kraje Hradec Králové, i.n. 1535/509, “Zápis z prověrky zaměstnávání polských pracovníků v n.p. Veba Broumov dne 27. srpna 1973,” August 27, 1973. This motivation was even more salient during the long economic and political crisis in Poland in the 1980s. After the GDR, USSR, and CSSR returned to a strict border regime with Poland in 1981, the attempts to find a legal way to cross the border and possibly bring demanded goods increased rapidly. Stola reckons that the number of Polish workers employed in CSSR and GDR enterprises increased for precisely this reason by about 7,500 people in the early 1980s. See Stola, Kraj, 307.
62 See Jirásek, “Polští pracovníci v textilkách,” 179.
63 Jerzy Kochanowski, “Pašeráci, turisté, kšeftaři. Neoficiální obchodní výměna mezi Polskem a Československem v letech 1945–1989 (pohled z polské strany),” Soudobé dějiny 18, no. 3 (2010): 335–48.
64 A Polish report from 1974 openly admits that to reach a higher “income,” Polish workers “very frequently trade with goods brought to their home country.” The authors even predicted that a planned tightening of border and custom regulations would cause a “decrease in the attractiveness of taking a job in Czechoslovakia.” AAN, “Informacja o zatrudnieniu.”
65 Her sentence of three years in jail was pardoned by an amnesty, so that she was “just” deported. See SOAZ, f. Krajský NV Východočeského kraje Hradec Králové, i.n. 1535/58, “Komentář k pololetnímu výkazu MPSV ČSR o počtu polských dělníků pracujích v ČSR v I. pololetí 1973, Seba Tanvald,” July 6, 1973. In between 1977–78, 115 Polish workers were dismissed from Czechoslovak companies because of “illegal trafficking” and other disciplinary transgressions. AAN, “Notatka w sprawie.”
66 Franiciszka W., interview, digital recording, Wałbrzych, Poland, May 31, 2017.
67 Similar motivations could be noticed when looking at the internal migration of young women from villages to cities. The case of Polish women “escaping” to industrial cities in the 1950s and 1960s was well captured by Fidelis, for instance. Fidelis, Women, 2.
68 Halina B., interview, digital recording, Prague, January 1, 2007. Halina worked in the Tesla company in Prague, 1971–73. She married a Czech and settled in Prague.
69 Irena C., interview, digital recording, Wałbrzych, Poland, May 31, 2017. The generalized image of promiscuity and prostitution among the Polish female workers in the CSSR, particularly widespread in Poland, made the return of the women to their home communities quite difficult. See Kristen, Vladimír, “K současné etnické situaci polských pracujících v ČSR (na základě sondáže v okresu Jablonec nad Nisou),” Etnické procesy IV (Prague, 1986), 194Google Scholar. It is worth mentioning that Fidelis writes about the same stereotype of promiscuity, sexual appetite, and moral “disorder” that circulated in Polish society regarding young and single industrial female workers in the 1950s. Fidelis, Women, 180–87.
70 Unwilling pregnancies were often solved by secret delivery, giving children up for adoption, and frequent abortions. See also Kristen, Vladimír, “Ke studiu polských zahraničních pracujících v ČSSR po druhé světové válce,” Etnické procesy v ČSSR. Polské etnikum (Ostrava, 1989), 193Google Scholar.
71 AAN, f. Ambasada PLR w Pradze, Wydział Zatrudnienia, zespół KC PZPR/Wydział Zagraniczny, i.n. 888 (810/3), “Notatka w sprawie sytuacji w grupie pracowników polskich ‘Zora’ Olomouc i zarzutów do kierowniczki grupy Danuty Bogusz,” May 8, 1976.
72 APW, “Sprawozdanie z wyjazdu.”
73 Franiciszka W., interview, digital recording, Wałbrzych, Poland, May 31, 2017.
74 Jirásek, “Polští pracovníci v textilkách,” 179, 185.
75 SOAZ, f. Krajský NV Východočeského kraje Hradec Králové, i.n. 1535/58, “Komentář k zaměstnávání polských pracovnic v n. p. SEBA-Tanvald za II. pololetí 1973,” January 10, 1974.
76 SOAZ, f. Krajský NV Východočeského kraje Hradec Králové, i.n. 1535/58, “Komentář k pololetnímu výkazu o počtu polských dělníků za I. pololetí 1971,” July 29, 1971.
77 SOAZ, f. Krajský NV Východočeského kraje Hradec Králové, i.n. 1535/58, “Zápis z jednání u s. ředitele závodu Východočeské mlékárny n. p. 06 Pardubice ze dne 19.6.1973,” June 1973
78 Ibid.
79 At this point I subscribe to Burawoy’s remark that “neither bargaining nor despotic institutions can alone capture the dynamics of state socialism.” Burawoy, The Politics of Production, 158.
80 Pittaway, The Workers’ State, 15.
81 An interesting exception in Poland (and partly in Czechoslovakia as well) was the Stalinist period (until 1956) when “women were encouraged to enter jobs traditionally performed by men.” Instead of complaints, the women generally enjoyed this radically gender-equalizing policy since the jobs were often “fully mechanized and well paid.” Fidelis, Women, 1–2.
