Roma: the invisible workforce of Ostrava

Metamorphoses of Roma employment

Roma started migrating from eastern Slovak provinces to Czech industrial urban areas after the second world war. Initially they came temporarily for work, but many of them stayed and started a new life. ²

Ostrava offered employment in coal-mining, coke production, steel and heavy industry. Some state enterprises provided their workers with apartments, but many Roma lived in central Ostrava in dilapidated houses that the municipality would occasionally demolish, without providing families with any alternative accommodation. ³ In the 1960s and 1970s, most Roma worked in construction, especially as road menders, in street cleaning, waste collection and in recycling. ⁴ In other words, the same jobs in which Roma in Ostrava work today; the only notable exception being waste collection.

During the large-scale changes in the economy that ensued after the fall from power of the Communist Party in 1989, most of the mines in Ostrava were closed – the last one in 1994 – and their workers made redundant. Other industries in the city underwent ‘profound restructuring’ ⁵ which led to a significant decrease in employment. Since 1990, the main industries in the city, steel and energy, carried out a series of redundancies. Between 1990 and 2005 over 80,000 people lost their jobs in Ostrava, a significant number for a city with a population of around 300,000. Most, over 40,000, were made redundant in the early years of the ‘restructuring process’ between 1990 and 1993, marked by major lay-offs in the mining industry and in the steel concern Vítkovice. ⁶ Roma were also affected indirectly by these changes in the major industries. As the large mass of workers were left without jobs, kinship and social capital become profoundly important. Through networks and friends, laid-off workers could secure jobs in sectors unaffected by the closures and diminution of production, sometimes at the expense of existing employees who then lost their jobs. Waste management was one such sector. Until the early 1990s, the city’s waste collectors were mainly the Roma. ‘It was a Gypsy company’, one informant once told me. But the company was privatised in 1993 and, at the same time, a number of Roma workers were made redundant. Currently ‘only gajos [non-Roma]’ work there. One of the former Roma waste collectors recalls the sequence of events: ‘They first sold the state company, then fired all the Gypsies, then increased wages and finally hired gajos.’ Another former worker added that the privatisation corresponded with the closure of mines that rendered a lot of people in the broader Ostrava region unemployed. ‘They [bosses of the waste management company] wanted to secure jobs for their friends and relatives.’

According to estimates from the Czech Agency for Social Inclusion, unemployment of Roma living in ‘socially excluded neighbourhoods’ in Ostrava in 2010 ranged between 70 and 100 per cent. ⁷ In other words, the majority of Roma in the city, as only a handful ever managed to find housing outside racially segregated neighbourhoods. Although these figures may – more or less accurately – reflect the number of individuals who are recipients of welfare benefits, they misrepresent the actual numbers of unemployed Roma in Ostrava. By focusing solely on formal employment, they contribute to the trope of Roma as ‘chronically unemployed’, one that does not hold if the focus is extended to the world of informal labour and one looks at individual trajectories of Roma workers. A repeated pattern in these trajectories is a cyclical movement between various forms of formal and informal labour: a few years on an assembly line in one of the ‘Korean companies’ in Ostrava’s industrial zones offering jobs in automobile and electronic production are frequently followed by years of informal work on a construction site, from where many move back to formal work, for example as street cleaners. This pattern, of course, bears out the ‘surplus population’ thesis; that it is a result of a contradictory tendency of capital to ‘employ as little labour as possible … in order to produce surplus value’. ⁸ Left without any countervailing-tendency the result is ‘more and more workers rendered superfluous to the production process’. ⁹ This is manifested in situations of ‘crisis’ when large numbers of workers are ejected from the labour process.

Despite severe decline, industrial work did not disappear in Ostrava. New forms of production have emerged since the 1990s that provide employment for a large number of workers. However, as I argue below, these new forms of production brought a rise in low-income and highly racialised jobs, as a result of a combination of factors. The main one was the diminishing proportion of available industrial work – albeit it did not completely disappear, it shrank significantly. And there was also the emergence of structural conditions that allowed for the reproduction of intermittent labour in the form of short-term agreements and informal work. Having been on the margins of the labour force historically during communism, Roma have experienced further marginalisation after its fall at the end of the 1980s. Through the operation of all these processes, Roma have been rendered a significant part of the reserve army overrepresented among informal and precarious workers.

When I first became interested in the situation of Roma workers in Ostrava, I assumed that a major marker (apart from racism) of their class experience would be a lack of jobs that has continued to affect their life in the city since the 1990s. This assumption proved not entirely accurate. Although the level of government-recorded unemployment in the Ostrava metropolitan area continues to be one of the highest in the country, at 9.4 per cent, ¹⁰ the number of newly created jobs in Ostrava has been growing since 2004 as a result of the local government’s attempts to establish Ostrava as the assembly line of the region. Government agencies report that over 12,000 new jobs were created in the city’s new industrial zones ¹¹ between 2004 and 2011.The total number of newly created jobs is estimated even higher at 25,000 and also includes jobs in various companies supplying foreign investors. ¹² What we do not know from these figures, however, is the nature and legal status of these jobs; i.e., whether or not they come with an employment contract arranged directly with a company or through a temporary agreement with a job agency. The experience of my Roma informants was mostly limited to the latter.

Karel, for example, had worked at H for two years as an agency worker. His agreement with the agency was renewed after the first year but after the second year the agency went out of business so he lost his job. He said he preferred to be an agency worker rather than getting an employment contract directly with H as the agency paid well. For low-skilled workers a job agency is the usual entry point to employment in foreign companies. ‘We test them and once a worker passes the one-year probation period, ¹³ he or she could be employed directly by the company’, a manager of one of the job agencies in Ostrava told me. Testing a prospective employee is not the only role of the agencies. They operate as intermediaries that can swiftly pull relatively large numbers of workers in and out of the labour process, depending on the needs of the firm. For a worker this then translates into cycles during which he or she can expect to be hired and fired relatively easily. Karel had observed such cycles at H, ‘When needed, they would hire workers for up to six months … After that they would be unemployed again.’ Rene had worked eight years as a team leader at Z, a company assembling TV sets and other appliances:

We [the team leaders] would usually know three weeks in advance that we are going to be hiring new people … They would usually come on a referral from a job agency for three months. Usually these were the same people [so it wasn’t necessary to train them each time].

In October and November, a peak pre-Christmas period for retailers and suppliers, there were new opportunities for temporary jobs at some supermarkets and warehouses that paid between £0.60 and £1.20 per hour more than the minimum hourly wage (of 59 CZK or £2). The regularity with which these companies – retailers, warehouses but also assembly lines – bring in workers on temporary job contracts whenever the business cycle requires it, implies the existence of a model within which capital operates with a reliance on a significant reserve labour force.

Movement of labour between formal and informal sectors

Although a lot of informants, both male and female, had some experience of working for companies in the city’s industrial zones of Hrabová or Mošnov, for most of them it did not prove to be long-term employment. The time spent on an assembly line varied between a few months and two to three years. In contrast, those who worked for a construction or cleaning company would last several years. Even though construction work is physically harder and the working hours are longer, it comes with a degree of freedom: the disciplining of workers is based on a relationship with the foreman, not on a depersonalised system; the work is in the open air and allows some engagement with people in the city and small cigarette breaks can be taken more easily; there is a sense of camaraderie among the road workers. The sense of relative freedom is important for understanding a worker’s experience of exploitation. The complicated and depersonalised management structure of the companies in the industrial zones strengthens the sense of social distance in those workplaces and allows the workers to characterise their experience there as one of exploitation.

‘Those companies [in Ostrava’s industrial zones] are exploiters. They say: if you don’t want to work, there are thousands of others outside … I said it myself’, admitted Rene recalling his days when he worked as a team leader at Z. These words reflect the outcome of deindustrialisation in the 1990s; a situation in which the workers in Ostrava currently compete on the labour market with a significant mass of reserve army of labour. Jobs created mostly by foreign investors in the industrial zones do not absorb labour at the same rate as the state enterprises did during the communist period. Although over 20,000 jobs had been newly created since 2004, these do not match the 80,000 redundancies that affected the workers between 1990 and 2005. Ostrava can be seen as a case of a crisis of the reproduction of the capital-labour relation itself, with more and more workers finding themselves unable to return to the production process. ¹⁴ In such a situation, they have to look for alternatives. Some of them emerged during the restructuring and liberalisation of the economy in the 1990s.

Racialised and precarious work

Vlado, a Roma man in his forties, has been working for various small entrepreneurs since 1994 when he moved from Slovakia to Bohumín, a town near Ostrava. ‘Yes, the mines got closed but there were a lot of new jobs in construction, especially digging.’

Market liberalisation and the rise of a class of entrepreneurs in the 1990s brought new employment opportunities in small firms. However, the period coincided with an unhindered rise of racism in public spaces and the labour market alike. ‘I’m a trained shop assistant. I don’t stand a chance to get a job in a shop. I never did’, 50-year-old Žaneta, a former colleague who worked as a cleaner at a municipal company, told me. Shortly before the regime change in 1989, she got pregnant and went on maternity leave. When she attempted to return to work in the 1990s, she experienced a sequence of rejections, until she eventually found a job as a cleaner in the city’s steel industry. After she lost that job she was unemployed for several years and finally got a job as a cleaner through a government programme for the long-term unemployed. We were discussing this in a changing room at the end of our shift. The other women interrupted Žaneta’s recollections saying in unison that during communism no one made them feel they were Gypsies, in other words, ‘different’. Things started to change in the 1990s:

First, they wouldn’t let us into some pubs. And then it continued … The pubs introduced membership cards … Of course there was no such thing but it was something they would say to the Gypsies. ‘You don’t have a membership card, sorry you can’t get in.’ So we started going to our pubs … Then the skinheads started to target the Roma and then … everybody would target us.

Since that coversation, I have heard on many occasions, and from practically all informants, the story of the fast-paced normalisation of racial distinction and how Roma repeatedly experience being made unwelcome in the city where many of them were born.

The experience of rejections from prospective employers – in small and medium enterprises – is widespread among the Roma. But that doesn’t mean that there are no firms that will employ them. The racialised labour market has its winners and losers. There are dozens of small, and about half a dozen medium, construction firms in Ostrava that do most of the road and infrastructure work in the city alongside the two large corporations, Strabag and Skanska. Some of these companies are owned by Roma entrepreneurs, some have racially mixed, or completely non-Roma management. In at least three of the medium-sized ones, Roma are the majority of workers. L is one of the most successful of the medium-sized construction companies. The owner (a non-Roma) is praised by his Roma workers as a ‘self-made man’ and admired as a ‘millionaire’. Although they work long, ten- or eleven-hour shifts, six days a week, have no guaranteed employment from December to March, and lack other benefits of formal employment, they appreciate the company and the owner because ‘he pays what he agrees to pay’, pays on time and also because of small symbolic gestures, such as Christmas packages for workers. The hourly wage at L ranges from 80 to 90 CZK (£2.60 to £2.90) which is considered fairly good by the road workers. Wage policies are an important factor when making comparison between workers’ experiences in industrial zones and in informal work (such as construction). A gross monthly wage on an assembly line ranges from 17,000 to 20,000 CZK (£566 to £666), which is about 14,000 to 17,000 CZK (£466 to £566) net. However, many workers have accumulated debts in the past decade and if they work formally with an employment contract, the wage is further reduced; typically by between 1,500 to 5,000 CZK (£50 to £166) per month. In contrast, workers on construction sites work on the basis of an agreement with a company which doesn’t entitle them to employment benefits (sick leave, annual leave, pension scheme payments). Under an arrangement that is common and widely used by a number of employers in the city, ¹⁵ they can continue being formally registered as job-seekers whose health insurance is paid by the state and who are also eligible for welfare benefits. Working on the basis of an agreement rather than a contract also usually means that the gross wage equals the net wage, there is no risk of automatic debt payments being taken out. This practice involves many workers regardless of their ethnicity. Both Roma and non-Roma have experiences of working under an agreement rather than full employment contract. It’s a result of – among other things – low wages that are effectively subsidised by the state through benefits. The relatively high precariousness of this arrangement – e.g. the risk of being caught by the Labour Office inspectors, ¹⁶ and the health and safety risks – is completely individualised (if a worker suffers an injury or long-term illness, it is he or she that has to bear the burden) and the workers have learned to live with the risk which they consider a matter of their choice.

Conclusion

Racial hierarchies at work, albeit pre-existing in the socialist economy in Ostrava and Czechoslovakia in general, have taken on new forms and functions after the fast-paced re-establishment of market capitalism in the region. Overrepresentation of Roma in precarious, informal and invisible jobs is a product of capital’s tendency to produce a population out of the mass of workers that is relatively redundant. In a context where privatisation and closure of state enterprises created a large mass of industrial workers left without jobs, ‘race’ has become an important factor in consolidating a sizeable ‘reserve army of labour’.

As the study shows, this category of workers is not, as the racist myth goes, outside the labour process, but is, instead, overrepresented in intermittent work in the informal economy.