Authors

Sara Bernard¹;  ¹ University of Glasgow, UK

Discussion

Although female guestworkers accounted for 34 percent of the total number of Yugoslav workers employed in Western Europe, we know remarkably little about them. As one in four Yugoslavs working in industry was employed abroad as a guestworker, this is a remarkable omission for the study of Yugoslavia’s working class. While promoting the temporary employment of its workers in the capitalist West, the Yugoslav communist leadership simultaneously advocated women’s emancipation which included employment outside the home as a key factor. Policies to support women’s employment abroad or upon return to Yugoslavia, though, were absent. Numerous analyses produced on the investments of returnees in their local communities and on the impact of the guestworker return migration on development do not mention either gender or female workers. Similarly, contemporary sociological studies denounced the exploitation of Yugoslav guestworkers in capitalist societies, and the poor condition of women’s lives abroad was the object of scrutiny. But the concerns leading this scholarship were family stability and motherhood and not discrimination of women in the workplace. Relying on political records on gender policies, sociological studies and surveys conducted among female guestworkers, this paper sheds light on the ways in which women’s emigration and return migration, employment patterns and trajectories conformed to, but also negotiated and challenged, set boundaries and expectations about their r