Abstract
The Rimamurány–Salgótarján Iron Works Co. in Salgótarján started to run up from 1871. Thepeople who lived in the workers’ colony of the Steelworks in Salgótarján differentiated themselvesfrom the rest of the local residents not only spatially but also in their appearance, as a result oftheir higher standard of living. At the begining of the 20th century the major streets of the colony(Acélgyári Street) had macadam or stoned surface and were lit with public street lightning. Theduty of the socalled Dwelling Master was to guarantee neat, clean, tidy streets within the colony.Steelworkers had more opportunity to visit the shops and barbershop than those men who livedwithin the downtown. This difference was partly due to their higher income and partly due tothe fact that the services of the comany’s shop and the barber at the colony were much cheaperthan those of other local barbers since it was ordered so by factory management. Workers’houses were up to the standards of the time, they did not pay rent or just a very low price andworkers had a possibility to build their own garden houses on the land of the company. All thisfundamentally changed in the second half of the 1940s owing to post-war lack of raw materialand Socialist ’modernization’ and uniformization. The period of communist dictatorship afterWorld War II, nationalization of the works and Socialist ’modernization’ created trauma at thecolony.
Highlights
Studying industrial labour had been an ideologically loaded and censored field of enquiry before 1989 and, subsequently, it was in a marginal position after the changeover, the history of labour and workers’ life has become a well-researched field in Hungary and Europe
In the early 1980s there began an academic discourse on the history of industrial labour that adopted the methodology applied internationally, such as urban anthropology, microhistory and oral history
Present day Salgótarján is a town with countyrisights in Nógrád county, north Hungary
Summary
Studying industrial labour had been an ideologically loaded and censored field of enquiry before 1989 and, subsequently, it was in a marginal position after the changeover, the history of labour and workers’ life has become a well-researched field in Hungary and Europe. In 1908 the company built a ’colony of invalids’ for ageing workers in a location called Bikás in Zólyom County, using the premises of a former workers’ colony of the abandoned factory there. Dullien wrote that Rima created these grocery shops in order to allow workers to buy good quality and clothing at low price at the colony (Dullien 1928 quoted in Nagy 2012).
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