“We’re all here for the money”: solidarity and divisions in a worker-owned company

Abstract

ITAS, a Croatian machine tool company, is arguably the best-known example of worker ownership in all the countries of the former Yugoslavia. In the context of rising commodification of everyday life, I trace how blue-collar workers in ITAS discussed their salaries. I reveal divisions among them, despite great similarities in their predicament as a group and as individuals. Workers used the generational division as the main emic concept to make sense of the relationships on the shop floor. I offer a reflection on their perception of belonging to different generations with different interests. I show how talking about “old workers” and “young workers” was tied to a host of other social factors, such as attitudes towards labor, historical experience of dispossession, and relationship to space and mobility, which did not neatly map onto the generational division. Everyday discussions on the shop floor correctly described differential inclusion of workers of different generations into the labor market, which broadly reflected transnational forces at work in the global market for metalworking. However, constant focus on divisions in everyday discussions prevented workers in ITAS from engaging in political work that could harmonize their interests across generational and other lines.