Abstract
This article focuses on alcohol consumption among the migrant workers living in the dormitories in the Pilsen region, Czech Republic, to understand different notions of personhood in the changing and uncertain environment of multinational industrial companies. The authors combined garbological analysis of waste with interaction with the inhabitants of two dormitories to account for potential bias in exploring a sensitive topic such as alcohol consumption. They argue that drinking provides an arena for becoming a person embedded in social relations, acting and experiencing the world in a way that contrasts with the neoliberal emphasis on individuality and flexibility. It is a strategy that pursues stability and mutuality in uncertain times. Also, drinking helps to temporarily escape inequality and dissatisfaction with the living conditions of those who became doomed to the symbolic bottom of the social hierarchy.
Introduction
In March 2017, one of us (DS) was listening to the news on a local radio station while driving home from the city of Pilsen in the Czech Republic. The last news of the day described a car accident that happened next to one of the dormitories for workers located on the outskirts of Pilsen. The radio reporter used a hushed tone to tell a short story of a foreign woman from the dorm who visited the convenience store located across the street and was hit by a car. When the driver went out to help her, an enraged crowd of fellow inhabitants of the dorm appeared on the street yelling at and attacking the driver. The police were called to calm the crowd down. Although the radio reporter was not explicit in his condemnation of the workers from the dorm, the message was suggesting the presence of danger hidden in the dorms. It reinforced the stereotypic image of migrant workers from the dorms as irresponsible drunks and potential criminals who threaten law and order. Indeed, this perception has recently been boosted by personal ‘raids’ of the Minister for the Interior in the dorms and his call for preventing the foreign workers from spending too much time in the bars. 1 There is little concern, however, about why they consume alcohol in the first place.
Workers in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) represent an ambiguous category. They have become assets in the market because of recent high demand for industrial labor (Čermák and Janská, 2011: 429; cf. Dunn, 2004: 45). Therefore, workers became the focus of interest from the actors who recognized their market value and developed various strategies to benefit from their presence and labour. Parallel to this line of perception, there is the worker as a forgotten category of humans that disappeared from the imagination in the course of post-socialist transformation (Kideckel, 2008: 15). Once a powerful group that was the subject of admiration in socialist ideologies, workers have almost disappeared from public discourse and become an unattractive and unfashionable group not worthy of any attention. In the Czech Republic, this sentiment has affected even academia where studies of the working class almost vanished after 1989, with a few notable exceptions (Delanová, 2015; Holubec, 2009; Katrňák, 2004; Lupták Burzová, in press; Nedbálková, 2018).
Recently, worker as a social category has re-emerged but in a very different sense from during socialism or the earlier post-socialist period when workers disappeared from the media as Kideckel (2002: 122) argued. Contemporary workers may embody dangerous otherness, a foreign element incompatible with local norms and values, or a source of crime. Since there are not enough local people who would be willing to do menial work in several CEE regions, industrial companies have to bring in new labourers from other regions of the same or other countries. Therefore, workers tend to be associated with migration by the general public. Also, as the word migration carries strong negative connotations across the entire CEE, it casts a shadow on workers via this association in public discourse. Given the already existing disenfranchisement that workers face, not only at work but also in their whole habitat (Kalb, 2009: 210), the recent influx of migrant workers to several CEE regions reinforced the negative perception of them. Migrant workers became the embodiment of two negative sentiments: fear of migrants and reminiscences of backward socialism and its working class.
One of the most effective ways of understanding migrant workers is to study them via the concept of personhood. Since the process of personal becoming has been identified as one of the critical dimensions for understanding the rise of market and neoliberalism in post-socialist CEE (Dunn, 2004: 20; Kalb, 2014: 198; Makovicky, 2014: 2), it provides a conceptual tool for research on drinking patterns where persons become what they are in relation to others. Drinking provides an arena for exploring tensions between different forms of personhood because there is no single way to construct a person. As Carrithers (2000: 374) demonstrated, using a trope of hedgehogs and foxes in former East Germany, and Dunn (2004: 126) in Poland, personhood is neither entirely individual or socially embedded but rather a mix of both. The construction and transformation of personhood takes place not only in the factories, which often become the primary targets of the analyses, but also outside work. The social environment in the dorms is unstable and unpredictable, resonating with the general conditions in neoliberal capitalism (Ong, 2006: 14) and migrant workers have to cope with it. One never knows who will appear in the kitchen or bathroom tomorrow, what their linguistic competence would be and whether kitchen utensils would disappear or not. The reaction to these conditions is not uniform but the migrant workers living in the dorms in rural areas or small towns face the problem of limited mobility, lack of opportunities to pursue their interests and the antagonism of local inhabitants. The most common solution to this frustration is alcohol consumption.
Becoming a person via drinking may contrast with becoming an individual via labour in a factory. When viewed from the outside, drinking seems wasteful and contradicts the essential reasons for moving to a different region: earning money. The seeming wastefulness of drinking requires approaching it as a form of social practice (Heath, 1987: 46) that may create social relations and take part in the process of value transformation (Uzendoski, 2004), establishing hierarchy via competition (Dietler, 2006: 232), or representing a form of resistance to oppression (Fiskesjö, 2010: 121). The seemingly wasteful and ‘anti-productive’ practice of drinking may serve as a vehicle for reinforcing mutuality and collectivity (Gefou-Madianou, 2002: 13; Stewart, 2005: 169). Since consumption, in general, is an arena in which various contradictions unfold (Miller, 1995: 34), it is not surprising that drinking in the dorms may produce contradictions as well. It is even reinforced by the fact that alcohol is a special substance that, on the one hand, represents a link to traditional strategies for building mutuality and, on the other hand, represents a superb commodity for the generation of profit in an impersonal market.
In the following, we argue that consumption of alcohol among the migrant workers living in the dorms in the Pilsen region in the Czech Republic provides an arena for becoming a person. Personhood is constructed not only at work under the neoliberal pressure on flexibility and individuality but also in the dorms where drinking creates more socially embedded persons who search for stability and recognition in a world of uncertainty and condescension. The migrant workers face both structural obstacles and symbolic barriers built by employers, job agencies and local inhabitants who prevent the migrant workers from becoming part of the communities they live in. Combining research among the migrant workers in the dorms with garbological analysis of their waste, we attempt to achieve a richer picture of the life on the ground via the confrontation of narratives and observations as well as material instantiations of consumption.
Welcome to the assembly world
The Pilsen region is a magnet. It is situated in a strategic position between economically strong Bavaria and central Bohemia with the capital of Prague. The connection between these two regions can be traced back at least to the Bronze Age (Jiráň, 2008: 73–74). Today, both foreign and Czech companies build upon this heritage and take advantage of the high demand for – especially – automotive parts in Bavaria and the industrial history of the Pilsen region associated with the development of the Škoda Works since the mid-19th century. Therefore, investors in the Pilsen region rely on the long-term trajectory of a working class located close to the German border. The state supports the links to foreign investors via what Drahokoupil (2009: 150–174) calls ‘investment-promotion machines’, which mobilize various actors to attract selected foreign investors and support their interests at various spatial scales. This strategy results, however, in negative environmental, economic and social consequences (Franc and Nezhyba, 2007: 6; Pavlínek, 2014). Various industrial and logistical companies have been growing in the region like mushrooms and their voracious appetite for labour has not been satisfied yet. This has resulted in the emergence of various job agencies and entrepreneurs who recognized the potential of services related to workers who have to be hired, accommodated and managed. Because the local supply of workers dried up quickly, the agencies had to spread their networks not only to other parts of the Czech Republic but also to Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Vietnam and Mongolia. A problem of the contemporary situation of the workers in the Czech Republic is not unemployment, as in other anthropological studies from CEE (e.g. Pine, 2003; Rakowski, 2016), but the opposite. There are not enough people. The influx of migrant workers co-created various dormitories located mostly in unattractive parts of urban areas or villages situated in the vicinity of factories growing along the highway leading from Pilsen to Regensburg.
Leading regional and national politicians praise the benefits of economic development. This public discourse, however, says very little about life on the ground where migrant workers, coming primarily from various parts of CEE, just try to get by. Workers in general represent a group that entered the minds of entrepreneurs in the form of abstract means to generate profit (Kideckel, 2008: 63). Migrant workers represent the most extreme example because they lack any kind of local support. Torn from their families and communities, the workers settle in dormitories run by entrepreneurs who recognized the potential of real estate located in less attractive localities to generate profit. Although the dorms offer a safe haven for the workers, they separate them from the rest of the society. Since the migrant workers from the dorms are imagined as strange, dirty and potentially dangerous primitives, they are not welcome outside the dorms. The underlying question of the general public might be as follows: ‘What kind of people would live in the dorms these days?’ There is a sense of condescension among the local inhabitants in west Bohemia that occurs in everyday discussions, jokes, media messages and irritable reactions in the shops or public transportation where the habitus of the migrant workers reveals their otherness. Staying in the dorms is a natural reaction to feeling unwelcome, which refers not only to migrant workers but also persons threatened with homelessness (Váně and Kalvas, 2015: 14). But staying there does not make their inhabitants happy: as Jiřina, a 50-year-old Czech worker, laments about the limited opportunities in her dorm: There is no place I can go here. One can only sleep, read, cook, and watch TV. But thank God for this at least. I used to live in the dorms in Pilsen before and it was hell … loud, dirty … oh.
Jiřina ended up on the street with her boyfriend as they were unable to repay their debts. They spent some time being homeless before they found a job in a factory and associated accommodation in a dorm. She is Czech but spent several years in Spain working illegally. She has adult children but they are not proud of their problematic mother. Therefore, their interaction is limited. Jiřina takes care of her boyfriend and attempts to control his drinking. She is rather atypical in her dorm because of her interest in books. She loves reading long historical novels and biographies of interesting personalities. Despite reading more and drinking less than her male peers, who represent the vast majority of inhabitants in her dorm, she feels the sense of mutuality as a form of defence against the outer world. For her, inhabitants who have spent at least a few months in her dorm constitute ‘one big family’. As in other families, members share things and food as well as eating and drinking together.
Sharing is a critical feature of human societies that enables ‘access to what is valued on the basis of shared demands’ (Widlok, 2016: xvii). Jiřina’s reference to family corresponds with relatedness as one of the three basic prerequisites – along with conversation and bodily presence – of sharing (Widlok, 2013: 19). Relatedness, however, is not a self evident and stable quality of human relations. It can be negotiated and new members can be included in sharing networks of related persons via performative utterances when they become brothers, cousins, or simply family (Stack, 1983: 30). These tactics represent migrant workers’ adaptation to unfavourable living conditions. Through the verbalization of relatedness and emphasis on sharing, they do not primarily aim at managing their resources efficiently but rather create or reinforce who they are in conditions where their relatives are often far away and an image of a hard-working individual trying to earn money is not enough to satisfy their lives.
The migrant workers face potential exploitation at different levels. They are subject to predatory tactics by job agencies that search for cheap labour to ‘rent it’ to the fast-growing, primarily automotive, industry that struggles with the low rate of unemployment in the region (Kaiserová, 2008; Lupták Burzová, in press). Pilsen region has the lowest rate of unemployment in the country, which dropped below 4 percent in 2016 according to the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (Moravec, 2016) and the Czech Republic recently yielded the lowest level of unemployment in the entire EU (Eurostat, 2018). Migrant workers’ social networks and knowledge of formal rules are too limited (Bernard and Vašát, 2015) to enable them to decode and reject disadvantageous contracts and practices. They become hard-working machines capable of coping with up to 300 hours of work per month. Working 16 hours without rest and repeating it two or three times per week is not unusual. Miloš, a 55-year-old Polish worker proudly describes his record of working 70 hours without rest. Miloš came from Silesia where he had three adult sons and often talked about the need to help them financially. He had extensive experience with various manual jobs in Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany. At the time of our research, he worked in an automotive factory in the section with furnaces. His working position was physically demanding but his peers as well as the operator of the dorm valued him as a great worker. Although it is hard to confirm the validity of Miloš’s extreme statement about working so many hours without rest, working overtime is a common element of the informal economy as multiple workers and dorm operators confirm. Working extra hours frequently appears in workers’ narratives as a virtue. The ability to work multiple consecutive shifts is presented as an opportunity to earn money and demonstrate personal determination and endurance. It hurts the body but builds a hierarchy of virtue among the workers.
People are attracted to work for industrial companies and live in the dorms far from their homes for various reasons. Some of them lost their jobs or were not satisfied with their jobs in other regions and came to west Bohemia because of the high demand for labour. Others fell into the debt trap and have to repay their obligations. Interestingly, there are also cases where their relatives – primarily their adult children – are in debt and workers try to help them. Bank loans, usury and subsequent inability to repay the loans followed by seizures have become a significant issue (Pavlíková and Rozbořil, 2014). The NGO People in Need (2013), which runs a programme of debt counselling, reported that there were about 34,000 non-banking loan providers just in the Czech Republic in 2013. Some migrant workers are reminiscent of nomads who break connections with their relatives and move from one working opportunity to another, regardless of location or type of work. They just follow offers given to them by private job agencies that specialize in searching and hiring out labour to growing companies that face an insufficient supply of workers.
All this produces a paradox. On the one hand, the workers’ wages may rise to 800 euros per month 2 and some companies even offer free food and drink at work, extra allowances for transportation, accommodation, or a bonus for reliable attendance. On the other hand, workers are exposed to various kinds of stress both at work and in the dorms. Insensitive treatment at work includes various spatiotemporal prohibitions concerning action, emphasis on flexibility, disciplining bodily processes and imposition of artificial rhythms (Delanová, 2015: 105–107; Lupták Burzová, in press). Dorms reinforce the stress via rules limiting mobility, lack of privacy, spatial limits, or hygienic issues. For example, in one of the dorms where we conducted our research, which we call Dorm B, there was a problem with the capacity of the heating system to produce hot water. It was common to wait 40 minutes or longer in the shower for warm water. Tired workers arriving from work did not always have enough patience to wait in line and went straight to their rooms frustrated by being unable to have a shower. Multiple sources of such stresses contribute to workers’ perception of themselves as a category of humans that is mistreated but has little chance to change it because nobody really pays attention to their troubles. One can either accept the living conditions as they are or leave.
Things and words
Understanding migrant workers requires emphasis not only on their position in relations of production (e.g. Burawoy, 1985; Marx, 1990[1867]) but also workers’ consumption practices. Consumption is a relevant sphere for the investigation of personal becoming because it is immersed in social relations (Miller, 1998: 4) and provides space for the differentiation between self and collectivity (Verdery, 1996: 29). We applied two lines of methods that should account for potential bias in dealing with sensitive topics such as alcohol consumption. There is a substantial body of literature in psychology, sociology and health research where people’s reports of their own attitudes and behaviour involve biases, especially social desirability bias in questionnaire responses and interviewing (Chillag et al., 2006; Diduk, 1993: 19; Geary et al., 2003; Paulhus, 1991). In archaeology of the contemporary, works within the frame of the Garbage Project indicated contradictions between self-reported information about consumption and material correlates of consumption (Rathje and Murphy, 2001: 66–69) and previous research in the region of our interest pointed at the same phenomenon (Brunclíková and Sosna, 2014: 81).
There are various ways to overcome the problem of response bias. Long-term ethnography is one of the solutions. Researchers take advantage of patience and the ability to get close to those who are studied. Such a specific temporality and closeness increases validity of results via immersion into a social life that may reach the intimacy described as ‘participant intoxication’ (Fiskesjö, 2010). Researchers who prefer questionnaire surveys, in contrast, develop quantitative measures of response bias to filter out the systematic distortion of the data (Paulhus, 1991). These solutions are successful to varying degrees but they are usually unable to confront what humans say or a researcher observes with the material consequences of human action embodied in things.
Our approach was based on the reliance on multiple lines of evidence. From May 2015 to December 2016, we visited workers living in two dormitories located in two small towns in west Bohemia. We were conducting observations and informal interviews in the dorms and their neighbourhood with repeated visits that might fall under the category of yo-yo fieldwork (Wulff, 2007: 139–145). In addition, we collected garbage during two summer seasons. We arranged the pick-up in collaboration with the company responsible for garbage disposal and the operators of the two dorms. We arranged a total of eight pick-ups covering the disposal of garbage over the total period of 47 days (Dorm A) and 42 days (Dorm B), respectively. The containers with garbage were transported to the landfill, where we created a research area for sorting and recording the data about individual garbage items following the procedures specified in Sosna et al. (2013).
The two dorms are both located in two small towns. Dorm A is a former restaurant, which was enlarged and rebuilt to accommodate ‘the collectives of workers’ as a web advertisement says. It is located on the periphery of the town. There were 25 inhabitants both in 2015 and 2016 who came from Bulgaria (8 in 2015, 10 in 2016), Czech Republic (6, 6), Slovakia (5, 3), Poland (4, 3), and Ukraine (2, 3). Gender ratio was shifted towards men (18 men and 7 women, both in 2015 and 2016). In terms of age, most inhabitants fell in the range of 40–50 years (13 in 2015, 12 in 2016), 50–60 years (8, 10) and 30–40 years (4, 3). The vast majority of the inhabitants worked for a nearby company producing interior parts for cars and a few worked for a company producing furniture.
Dorm B is located in the centre of the town but in an inconvenient location between the noisy railway station and the main road that intersects the town. It was originally used by Sokol – a traditional organization supporting physical, moral and intellectual development of the nation – but was sold and rebuilt to accommodate workers for nearby industrial companies. There were 18 and 19 inhabitants in 2015 and 2016, respectively, who came from the Czech Republic (8 in 2015, 8 in 2016), Slovakia (7, 4), Hungary (2, 4), and Romania (1, 3). Gender ratio was highly masculine (16 men and 2 women in 2015, 18 men and 1 woman in 2016). In terms of age, most inhabitants fell in the range of 30–40 years (4 in 2015, 7 in 2016), 20–30 years (2, 4), 50–60 years (8, 4), 60< years (1, 3), and 40–50 years (3, 1). The inhabitants worked in two factories producing metal sheets and automotive parts, respectively, or a company that processes shale from a former coal mine. There was one retired person who lived there because his pension was low and he did not have another place to live.
To estimate alcohol consumption, we used classic indices developed in retrospective disciplines. We calculated the Minimum Number of Items 3 (MNI) and the Number of Identified Specimens (NISP) (Klein and Cruz-Uribe, 1984: 24–29). In this study, the term item denotes a commodity item and specimen denotes a commodity item or its part. Although the commodity phase represents only a part in the life of things (Appadurai, 1986: 16), we put emphasis on this phase because it gave discarded things a source of meaning which was inscribed in the things themselves and could be traced via garbological analysis. 4 This does not mean that commodities were not transformed from their commodity phase when, for example, empty bottles became ash trays for cigarette butts but this dynamic transformation of things was not the primary focus of this article.
Let’s drink through it
Miloš, Fero, Kuba and Oleg sit on shabby wooden chairs around the table in a small shed adjacent to Dorm A, which is reserved for smoking. They are sipping Braník beer from the bottles and watching the changing patterns of puffs from their cigarettes. Kuba breaks the silence to complain about his back that hurts from lifting heavy loads at work. Fero joins the discussion, describing his sore knees that hurt because of many years spent in a rolling-mill and a coal mine in the east. Oleg and Miloš are silent. They have learned not to complain. It does not change anything. Their position in the system is a given. Fortunately, grandpa (dědo), the operator of the dorm, has bought a fresh case of 20 beer bottles. What a relief. The boys have enough booze to relax and forget that the next shift will start in the early morning.
This is a common situation in the dorms. Drinking is a common strategy for passing spare time. Table 1 shows the overview of items and specimens related to alcohol consumption in the two dorms. The most striking pattern is the total amount of alcohol consumed. Despite the difference in beer consumption between Dorms A and B, the total amount of alcohol consumed is substantial. During the period of six weeks, 18 persons in Dorm B consumed at least 23 bottles (12 litres) of spirits and at least 254 bottles (152 litres) of beer. In Dorm A, during the period of almost seven weeks 25 persons consumed at least 34 bottles (8 litres) of spirits and at least 761 bottles (398 litres) of beer. It is important to note that this amount does not account for the alcohol consumed in pubs or bars, and not everyone in the dorms drinks alcohol. During our fieldwork, we learned about three inhabitants of the dorms who claimed that they did not drink alcohol at all. Also, we cannot expect that 100 percent of bottles, cans, corks, etc. ended up in the containers for waste because they could have been discarded outside the dorms. In addition, the younger generation of workers occasionally visit local pubs or bars to escape the pressing boredom of the dorms. All these factors suggest that our garbological data would represent the minimum value for the total estimate of alcohol consumption.
Minimum Number of Items (MNI) and Number of Identified Specimens (NISP) for alcoholic beverages found in garbage from two dormitories.
Pubs and bars, however, are ambiguous places. They represent an escape from the dorms and a pleasant relaxation but they can be a source of danger as well. Workers have problematic experiences with local people who look down on them and even search for opportunities to get into a fight. Martin, a 31-year-old worker, describes one of his troubles with local men in the bar across the street as follows: A 72-year-old guy was sitting there. He had a hairpiece or something like that. I was sitting on the bar chatting and there was almost nobody around. And he started pointing at my hair asking whether I washed my hair. He told me to go to visit a hairdresser. Yeah, he was a smartass … And wanted to know who was doing what and where and similar crap. I told him ‘Do you need a lamp? It is like an interrogation here. If I cut my hair I would look like all other idiots around here. I do not need that. I am not an idiot and do not need to look like one.’ But he kept harassing me and complaining about my hair. I could not stand him any more so I told my buddy. ‘Hey, Peter, I must go’ … And Peter came later and told me: ‘Man, these people here, they are completely dumb.’
This is only one of several stories describing the hostility of local people. Martin’s untidy appearance combined with the fact of being a non-local person in a small town provoked antagonism. After repeated troubles, Martin decided to carry a pair of scissors in his pocket to be able to defend himself in case of unexpected conflicts.
Based on our experience with life in the dorms, workers normally come from work, have a shower and then sit down together, chat, smoke and drink beer. It is not unusual that some of them empty four bottles or cans of beer (0.5 litre each) during a two-hour discussion with friends. Miloš, who has been living in Dorm A for 8 years, is famous for his ability to drink and mix beer with vodka. Indeed, he developed his own special drink called 18 (osemnácka). The number refers to the classic Czech system of degrees that describes beer’s strength. Miloš takes a bottle of Braník light beer and mixes it with a shot of cheap vodka. In this manner, he upgrades the regular 10° Braník to 18°. Others tend to drink mostly beer during the week and consume spirits at the weekends.
Beer is by far the most popular alcohol in the dorms. It is the source of Czech national pride and its price is low in comparison to other countries. There is a long tradition of keeping the price of beer low, so it is the cheapest beverage that one can get in a pub or restaurant. This situation has been changing under the influence of EU regulations over the last few years. Czech workers understand beer as a natural first choice alcoholic beverage for relaxation and debates with friends. Workers from other countries such as Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria or Ukraine usually adapt to this environment to fit in with others and take advantage of cheap beer. Beer provides an everyday opportunity to relax with one’s peers and nationality does not substantially affect this kind of drinking. Beer becomes a general international vehicle of relaxation for small groups of males who return from work and use drinking as an opportunity to talk about work, complain about health problems, the greed of the job agencies, and new work opportunities, which would enable them to earn more money. Women rarely drink beer with men. When they come and sit with men, they tend to use smoking to reinforce mutuality because men smoke during drinking.
It is striking that, in our sample of more than 1000 beers, there are only two specimens representing foreign beers: a bottle of Zlatý bažant from Slovakia and a bottle of Львівське 1715 from Ukraine. Even if we take into account one specimen of квас Артезiя, which is low-alcoholic kvas rather than beer, the vast majority of beer consumed in the dorms is local beer. This underlines the logic of consuming cheap and easily accessible kinds of beer.
Spirits are popular as well (see Table 1). Vodka and traditional Central European rum are the most common kinds of spirits consumed. The whole range of spirits sold under labels such as Božkov, Tuzemák, or Tuzemský are variants of Central European rum that had to be reclassified because of EU regulations. The brands consumed, with exception of the Ukrainian vodka Prime World Class, represent cheap brands. Spirits are consumed primarily on Friday nights and Slovaks tend to be the most active drinkers in both dorms. The shots of these spirits are drunk collectively. In contrast to beer drinking where each person drinks from his or her own bottle, which may mean a different brand, spirits are shared. Similarly to Stewart’s (2005: 169) observation among gypsy men, it is necessary to drink the same kind of spirit. Spirits are the most powerful vehicles of mutuality because of their strength and communal consumption. Offering a shot facilitates the incorporation of newcomers to the existing set of relations among persons in a changing dormitory environment and confirms ties among those who live there longer.
Drinking and thrift
In his research in Panama and Columbia, Gudeman (2012: 11) demonstrated that thrift may be the most pervasive principle in the house economy, which contrasted with the dominant assumption in economics that maximizing profit was the main driver for human action. Thrift represents a pervasive feature among the migrant workers in the Pilsen region and can be detected in their categorization, everyday practices and speech concerning consumption. The workers frequently conceptualize their expenses for food, accommodation and transport per day. Most of them carefully prevent crossing the limit of their daily expenses for food. They search for special deals in the grocery stores and purchase cheap brands of food. Also, when they decide to cook in the dorms, they do not cook alone but pool resources and shift responsibility for cooking. Moreover, their approach to cooking follows the logic of thrift. For example, Fero, a 57-year-old worker, describes vividly his superb ‘blind goulash’ (slepý guláš), which uses cheap sausage (špekáček) and potatoes to substitute expensive beef. Fero is a Slovak who was raised in the mountains of West Slovakia and used to work in a coal mine in North Moravia and later in a factory producing metal sheets. Since the mid 1990s, when his factory went bankrupt, he has been taking advantage of various manual jobs in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. He is valued by others for his ability to cook tasty meals that do not require expensive ingredients.
As shown in Table 1, Braník light beer and Gambrinus 10° beer are the two most frequent kinds of beer consumed. While Gambrinus dominates in Dorm B, Braník is paramount in Dorm A. Although there are taste preferences between beer drinkers in the dorms, both kinds of beer fall among the cheap and easily available brands of beer. There is a difference, however, in the logistics of consumption. In Dorm A, the operator of the dorm supplies the inhabitants with the beer in glass bottles. Every week, he buys a few cases of Braník beer and gives bottles to the workers while registering their consumption on a sheet of paper. Each month when the operator receives workers’ salaries from the job agency, he subtracts the beer consumed during the previous month and announces the remaining balance to the workers. The operator serves as a banker and seller of commodities as well. The workers may ask the operator to give them their money any time they need. They do not need to worry about money and especially getting into debt because someone else is taking care of their ‘account’, prevents them from impetuous spending or loss, and supplies them with beer. The operator likes the fact that he is in charge, subtracts the monthly rent for accommodation easily, and controls beer consumption in the dorms while making extra profit from the beer consumed because he charges the drinkers extra money for the delivery. The workers appreciate that beer is easily accessible and the fact that it comes in glass bottles, which are considered superior to cans or plastic bottles. This is traditional folk knowledge that glass bottles are the best containers for beer. Given the variability of beer types consumed in Dorm A, it is clear that Braník supplied by the operator is not the only source of beer. The workers visit stores in the village on their own or ask the operator – although they have to pay him – to drive them to the hypermarkets in the city located about 20 km away.
In Dorm B, however, the operator does not offer the same services to the inhabitants. They have an advantage over the inhabitants of Dorm A because Dorm B is located in the centre of a small town with a wider range of shopping opportunities. Indeed, cheap supermarkets Lidl and Penny Market as well as two small local grocery stores are located within 10 minutes’ walking distance. The workers prefer cheap Gambrinus in glass bottles but the dominance of beer in glass bottles is much weaker in comparison to Dorm A. There is a large proportion of beer in cans and plastic bottles in the garbage. Since they carry the shopping bags from the stores on their own, glass bottles are less attractive not only because of their weight but also because the bottles require a deposit and therefore have to be carried to the store for return. This fact makes beer in cans and plastic bottles more attractive because there is no deposit, their weight is lower and such liquid containers can be disposed of easily.
Workers do not consider alcohol consumption as a contradiction to their thriftiness. Alcohol is not perceived as something extra but an essential part of their life, which makes their work in the factories and life in the dorms bearable. As Kideckel (2008: 201) observed among the Romanian miners, growing poverty led to the selection of cheaper brands and a prevalence of domestic drinking to prevent extra expenses in bars, but the amount of alcohol consumption remained constant. In our case, the nature of drinking follows a similar logic. The selection of cheap brands and drinking primarily in the dorms follows the logic of thrift but the very act of drinking remains an unquestioned basis for the life in the dorms. When viewed from the outside, alcohol consumption itself may seem like an unnecessary expense that slows down the workers in reaching the goals they dream about. For example, Miloš tries to save money for a new car for his son, who destroyed his Volkswagen Sharan in a car accident. Miloš dreams about his triumphant return home with the gift for his son and tries to keep in touch with his family in Poland despite living the last 8 years in the Czech Republic.
Drinking his special beers with vodka every day and partying during Friday nights does not come to his mind as an obstacle to his goal because alcohol does not fall into the category of unnecessary expenses.
A perception of everyday consumption of alcohol as a natural part of life has deep roots in an industrial environment. In the early stages of industrialization, alcohol, especially spirits, was perceived as a stimulant (Berlanstein, 1992: 110; Holek, 2011: 98). Employers tolerated alcohol consumption among the workers at work because of the belief that alcohol helped exhausted men to regenerate and work harder. Workers exposed to high temperatures and performing hard physical work even considered alcohol as a critical prerequisite for their work. With increasing mechanization, alcohol became an obstacle to productivity in the factories (Berlanstein, 1992: 114) and workers had to ‘quench their thirst’ out of work. During the first half of the 20th century in Bohemia, relief was normally sought in the pubs where workers drank, sang and played cards (Holubec, 2009: 168). But, even in the pubs, drinking was slowly declining as a reflection of the improvement in the workers’ living conditions (p. 179). The contemporary situation seems to resurrect the early approach to drinking. It does not happen at work and pubs are not primary arenas for drinking but the social act of drinking with peers remains a natural part of migrant workers’ lives.
Alcohol drinking among the migrant workers is a practice associated with multiple meanings. The workers often refer to their hard and repetitive work, exhaustion and health problems, lack of opportunities to engage in meaningful activities outside the dorms, and the hostile attitudes of the local inhabitants in their towns. Various complaints about the factory managers, job agencies, dorm operators and workers’ lack of power to change the order of things represent frequent features of discussions during drinking. In this sense, drinking is a kind of escape from the misery of everyday life. De León (2015: 165) described similar effects of beer drinking among the migrants who repeatedly failed to cross the border from Mexico to the US. Drinking allowed them to forget about the misery of life and temporarily escape the regularity of their failures. Drinking is also a defence against the precarious nature of life in the dorms where one never knows who will be one’s neighbour tomorrow, whether the representative of a job agency brings money as promised, or whether one will be able to take a shower. Building and cementing social relations via drinking, as various authors describe (Fiskesjö, 2010: 119; Gefou-Madianou, 2002: 13; Kideckel, 2008: 200; Stewart, 2005: 169), neutralizes uncertainty and omnipresent change in the dorms.
The fact that drinking is not conceptualized by the migrant workers as wasteful activity but rather a natural part of life suggests that it refers to something essential: becoming a person. It was demonstrated in other studies (Diduk, 1993: 18; Kideckel, 2008: 201) that drinking remains an important part of social practices even in situations where resources are limited. In our case, the workers are exposed to pressure because of their lack of flexibility to deal with various changes both at work and in the dorms where they are supposed to become individuals with their work tasks, responsibilities, individual wage, taste preferences as consumers and a specific place to sleep in the dorms. Nonetheless, there is a different trajectory to become a person and this trajectory requires to socially embed the person. It is done via relating to their kin, who are often far away and the relation is established through phone calls, emails, sending remittances and rare physical visits. Since family members are predominantly physically absent, social embedding requires an alternative strategy. Drinking as well as eating, and smoking in the dorms tends to be a communal form of consumption that challenges the individualized and privatized nature of personhood. Drinking alcohol and smoking are probably closer to each other than to eating because they both represent activities without a clear physiological need and are therefore special (cf. Manning, 2012: 3). While consumption can be viewed as a sphere where the transformation to the individualized personhood takes place (Dunn, 2004: 127), our case indicates that consumption may serve the opposite purpose. Drinking among the migrant workers creates new forms of relatedness where a person acts upon the world by acting upon others. Sharing spirits, cigarettes, eating and drinking together and doing small favours to each other not only creates ties but changes the way the world is experienced. Moreover, these practices are reinforced by performative utterances (see Austin, 1962) that not only describe inhabitants of the dorm as kin but makes them kin because they do things that kin normally do. All these processes create personhood, which cannot be reduced to either a purely individual or purely collective form (cf. Dunn, 2004: 126). The social lives of migrant workers rather unfold in the intersection of these opposing tendencies as a response to the work and life conditions in contemporary CEE.
Conclusion
Consumption patterns may serve as a vehicle of differentiation between different categories of humans. Alcohol drinking can be utilized rhetorically to blame the migrant workers for being less human and deserving the life they live. Mainstream journalists, leading politicians and the public do not recognize, however, that drinking represents something more fundamental. It is a social practice that generates multiple meanings, creates social relations and the worker as a person who experiences the world in a specific way. Under the neoliberal pressure on individuality and flexibility, drinking provides an arena for a different kind of personhood that is collective and socially embedded. It does not mean that the workers are either pure individuals or socially embedded beings. They rather mobilize both tendencies. When negotiating their salaries or during a transition to a new job, the workers accept the individualistic notion of a person who monitors information and makes decisions. Dormitories, however, provide a potential for becoming a different person: the one who acts and perceives because of the relationship to others. This kind of personhood is created, among other factors, via drinking with the peers.
Other meanings of drinking refer to the escape from the misery of everyday life. A dissatisfaction with working and living conditions, lack of opportunities to pursue interests during leisure time, fatigue and painful bodies make alcohol drinking one of a few pleasant social activities that one can engage with in the dorms. It provides space for verbalizing complaints about inequality, lack of justice and limited capacity to challenge the structural conditions. In this sense, drinking offers a way to make the living and working conditions bearable and to adapt to the paradox of value creation. While the migrant workers significantly contribute to the current unprecedented economic boom in the Czech Republic, their contribution is not acknowledged. In contrast, they face ignorance or even condescension from the inhabitants of the country. Drinking helps to make sense of one’s life via relations to others who share the same destiny.
Workers frequently express their dreams about earning a lot of money through hard work and leaving the dorms. There is a sense of pride that they can handle immense working hours. Workers like to tell stories about working multiple shifts without intermission or reaching the magic threshold of 300 hours per month. This is reminiscent of the socialist ethos that valued extreme intensity of work and ‘over-fulfilment’ of working plans. The legendary example is Alexei Stakhanov’s 14-fold over-fulfilment of his productive quota per year in 1974 (Ssorin-Chaikov, 2006: 361). Today, working overtime becomes part of informal economic practices that do not appear in the official records of the companies. The workers swear that working hard is their own choice which helps them to earn a lot of money in a short time. But they do not reflect on the factors and conditions that enabled this kind of relationship in the first place. Employers, job agencies, dorm operators, executives and other actors benefit from workers’ willingness to work extra hours to earn money that disappears quickly as they cover their debt obligations, send money to relatives and drink through their pain and exhaustion.
While finishing this article, we learned that the Czech Ministry of Industry and Trade, similar to several other ministries of European countries, approached Tesla, Inc. to negotiate its investments in north Bohemia. One may just contemplate the hypothetical social impacts of Gigafactory 2 in regions such as Bohemia. Besides voices admiring the breathtaking size, technological advancement and economic efficiency, there is little discussion about the people who would work there. It seems that the world of dorms described here is not over yet. In contrast, we might see the expansion of the dormitory landscape in years to come.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are indebted to the workers who enabled us to learn about their lives and Jana Kliková and Mirka Nováčková for their help during garbological research. David Henig, Petra Lupták Burzová, Jana Kliková, and two anonymous reviewers provided useful comments on the manuscript and Stanislav Holubec directed our attention to new literature. Jörn Schuster and people from Sage’s Production department helped with language corrections. This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation under grant GA14-03314S.
