Negotiating Variegated Stabilities: Working Conditions of Supermarket Employees in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina

From the Dispossession of Industrial Workers to Formal Supermarket Jobs

The history of Tuzla offers a unique perspective for analysing working conditions. A town with a tradition of salt mining dating back to the 16th century (tuz means salt in Ottoman and modern Turkish), it became increasingly industrialised under Austro-Hungarian rule from the late 19th century onward. The socialist period fostered economic growth, making Tuzla one of Yugoslavia’s most important industrial centres (Klapić 2013). This industrial expansion led to a history of international labour migration (Klapić 2013, 30–1) and, as I was told by my interlocutors, the development of a strong worker identity. This is reflected in the peaceful coexistence of Tuzla’s multi-ethnic citizens – a rarity in today’s ethnically divided Bosnia and Herzegovina – on the one hand, and in the fact that, while ethnonationalist parties are dominant in the rest of the country, Tuzla remains politically aligned with the social democrats, on the other (Kurtović 2020a; Armakolas 2011).

Today, the pride in Tuzla’s Yugoslav and recent history of labour and industrialisation is palpable in everyday conversations, with many locals displaying pictures of the former Yugoslav president Tito in their cars or shops. In this context, it is not surprising that the wave of protests that shook BiH in 2014 began in Tuzla, only to quickly spread across the country. Dispossessed workers took to the streets – those who had lost their jobs due to illegal privatisations during the 1990s, which eventually led to factory closures. Fighting to save their factories or secure pension payments, the workers demanded social justice, a notion that had all but disappeared amid Bosnia and Herzegovina’s ethnonationalist politics. These political mobilisations and the workers’ struggles to preserve their companies that followed have already been analysed in several studies (for example, Kurtović 2015; Arsenijević 2014).

What these studies failed to note, however, is the transformation of trade in Tuzla and the rising influence of the Bingo retail company, which emerged from the failing economy of the 1990s and profoundly changed the town’s economic landscape. With the end of Yugoslavia and the 1992–1995 war, much of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s industry was halted, destroyed, or divided among ethnonationalist elites who severed ties with economic actors from the other ethnic groups. In 1994, for example, the country’s GDP dropped to 25 % of its prewar level, and industrial production fell to 10 % (Bougarel 1996, 2–3; 5 % according to Lai 2020, 51). During the war, trade was often the only means of survival, and numerous informal markets flourished. After the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed in 1995, other forms of institutionalised, though informal trade thrived, of which the huge Arizona market in the district of Brčko is the biggest and most well-known example (Jašarević 2007). In Tuzla, private grocery stores (piljare) opened, and the municipal market functioned well, as did informal street vending. The early 2000s were also a period of significant transformation in Bosnia’s retail sector.

While other postsocialist countries came to be dominated by foreign retail chains such as Tesco and Aldi, Bingo, a domestic company, managed to become the largest retail chain in BiH. It is an unusual example of economic success in a country often portrayed as reliant on foreign investment and credit. The first Bingo store was opened in 1993, during the war, by Senad Džambić, a local businessman with an unclear background. Official accounts of his previous business activities in Yugoslavia describe him as a beekeeper and the owner of a café offering games of chance, from which the name Bingo originates. However, numerous rumours have circulated about Džambić. While for some he was “pushed forward” (poguran) by the Bosniak political elite, underlining his entanglement with ethnonationalist politics, for others he represents a politically uninvolved entrepreneur and patron who brought economic success and stability to the city (see Čergić 2022).

Irrespective of these varying accounts, what is clear is that Džambić acquired former Yugoslav grocery stores and access to a large part of the infrastructure of the former Production and Trade Combine (Proizvodno Trgovinski Kombinat, PTK) that had produced and sold the lion’s share of the consumer goods in the Tuzla region. Bingo gradually expanded across the country, and in 2014 the company purchased Interex – the only Western brand of super- and hypermarkets in BiH. The peculiar story of how Interex, a retail chain belonging to the French Intermarché, came to Bosnia reflects both the rapid transformation of the retail trade sector and the arbitrariness of the decisions made within it. The company’s arrival in Bosnia in 1999 is tied to Jean-François Le Roch, the son of Intermarché’s founder (who established the company in 1969). After six years in the United States managing Intermarché branches, Le Roch returned to France in 1992. In 1994, he volunteered with the French army as a reserve officer in Sarajevo for the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), the first UN peacekeeping mission during the Yugoslav Wars. The force was created in February 1992; its mandate ended in March 1995. Le Roch, with his expertise in food logistics, stayed for two years, thus serving beyond his first tour of duty. In 1999, he partnered with Intermarché to launch the Interex supermarkets, of which, as of 2014, a total of 26 existed throughout Bosnia, including the one in Tuzla.^[7]

Here, as elsewhere, Bingo significantly transformed working conditions in the retail trade. At the time of Bingo’s rise, there were numerous small grocery stores in the city, typically located at the entrance of residential buildings, allowing residents to quickly pick up some purchases before heading home. These stores were known for their strong ties to the neighbourhood but also for the very precarious working conditions faced by the largely female vendors, as some women I spoke to during my research recalled. Most of the time, those who worked in these grocery stores were not officially registered, had to work overtime, rarely had days off, and received very low wages, paid informally. There was no talk of pensions or social security payments. All this changed with the arrival of Bingo. For those seeking employment in Tuzla during the 1990s and early 2000s, Bingo quickly became synonymous with stable employment, regular pay, social security, and pension benefits. This is why the first generation of Bingo employees, mostly women in their mid-fifties who now hold higher positions within the company, remain grateful and loyal to Džambić, praising him and his business activities and supporting the idea that low salaries are an acceptable price to pay for economic success.

One example of a Bingo career path is that of Marija, now a manager, who began working for Bingo a few years after the first store opened in BiH:

I’ve been working for Bingo for 21 years. I started in December ’98. I began right at the very beginning, in retail […]. When I started working in the main office, there were only eight of us, including the owner and the director. And now, I don’t even know how many of us there are. Bingo started in ’93, and I began in ’98. Back then, the stores were classic “counter-style” shops. I started in the first self-service shop (samoposluga), the very first one. That first shop was three minutes away from here [where the interview was held], and the building still exists, though it’s abandoned and empty now. Honestly, I think we should put up a monument there. Across from it, we have another store, also one of the first, opposite the old main office building. That store is about 100 square metres, with two cash registers at each of the exits. But it was a big deal back then. I did everything at the time, we all did everything related to retail, including paperwork, goods management, stocking and displaying items, sales, purchasing, and procurement. We all did everything. Now, it’s a whole system.^[8]

Marija describes the spirit of the late 1990s, when a small group, led by Bingo’s owner, began building the company. At the time, they opened small stores with new products and modern cash registers. In an earlier conversation, Marija had told me that people seeking jobs used to “knock on Džambić’s door” (a sentiment echoed by other older employees), and it did not take long for them to be hired. Additionally, Marija emphasised that Džambić never employed people based on ethnic background. Instead, anyone who wanted to could get a job with the company. What emerges from the interview is an admiration for Džambić and his achievements, with Bingo growing from a single store to the largest retailer in the country. Marija even suggested that a monument should be dedicated to the first store. This admiration was echoed in other conversations, reinforcing the image of Bingo as a stable company that guaranteed long-term employment and provided stability in an environment marked by economic destruction and the dispossession of workers during the 1990s and 2000s.

Formal Employment with Precarious Working Conditions

Writing about work in retail in Bosnia and Herzegovina requires a broader reflection on the recent transformation of labour in this sector, and labour precarisation more generally. The introduction of a liberal market economy resulted in significant changes in the retail trade. In the West, the neoliberalisation of labour conditions and the decline in purchasing power, were accompanied by a rise of discount stores (Benquet 2013). Retail is mostly considered a sector for women and/or younger people, often pursuing part-time work. Many regard work in retail as transitory (Benquet 2013; Guiamet 2014) and thus “low-status because it is low-skilled, therefore low-paid, and being all of these things, it tends not to make a desirable career” (Bozkurt and Grugulis 2011, 9).

Studying the working conditions in French hypermarkets, Benquet identifies three forms of precariousness which together create a constellation she calls “precarious stability” (stabilité précaire). Contrary to what one would assume, more than 92 % of the employees in the store where she conducted her research had a permanent contract. However, this did not prevent them from experiencing precarity, which she describes as threefold: economic, organisational, and “projectional” (projectionnelle) (Benquet 2011, 26–7). According to Benquet, the low salaries in the sector make it difficult for employees to plan for the future or to save money for unexpected events. The salaries they receive enable them to “survive” from month to month, covering rent and food. However, any unexpected event they might face represents a financial risk.

The second type of precarity, “organisational”, refers to the fact that almost half of the employees in the sector work part time and that work schedules frequently change, thus making it impossible to plan and lead a stable daily life. These two forms of precarity combined create an existence that is focused solely on work, whether employees are at the store itself or at home, leaving them little time for themselves. Benquet describes how cashiers report using their free time for housework or chores they have not managed to do during the week, for example (Benquet 2011, 38).

The third form of precarity, which Benquet calls “projectional”, describes the sense of insecurity experienced, and the fact that the time spent at work “does not diminish the risks of precarity in the future”. There is no recognition of objective abilities in the work of the cashier. Instead, time spent at the cash desk is considered a “parenthesis that does not convert itself into qualifications” (Benquet 2011, 40).

These forms of precarity are universally experienced by retail trade employees. In BiH, however, the complex political situation creates further opportunities for exploitation. The country’s two entities – the Federation of BiH and the Republika Srpska – and numerous cantons within the Federation have different legislative frameworks when it comes to workers’ protection. In the Federation, a new labour law came into effect in 2016, which further “liberalised” labour relations. Hadžić, Hasić, and Čavalić argue that this law continues to leave ample room for employers to exploit their employees.^[9] For example, it allows temporary contracts, which make up 80–90 % of newly signed contracts, to last for up to three years. Only after this period does an employee transition to permanent employment. Furthermore, a 60-day gap between two temporary contracts at the same company is permitted, allowing the employer to terminate employment for two months and then rehire the employee under another temporary contract. In some cases, however, employees continue working informally during this interim period only to be officially reemployed when it ends. Another issue is the management of official working hours, as employers are supposed to monitor overtime, but this is rarely done. This latter problem is particularly prevalent in the service and retail sectors.

A union representative once told me that, unlike in other cities, in Tuzla, Bingo prevents unions from entering its stores. According to her, this is due to the large number of stores and the management’s fear that allowing union representatives to enter would swiftly lead to a significant mobilisation of employees. As a result, Bingo employees lack basic labour protection or access to information. These conditions are all the more surprising when one considers Tuzla’s history as a major industrial centre in the Yugoslav period. The present situation evolved as a result of the significant socio-economic transformations that took place during the 1990s. Bingo then took over with many local people being hired by the company, including those who had lost their jobs due to privatisations and company closures.

With the company’s growth and countrywide expansion, working conditions changed, as most employees could no longer rely on personal relationships with the owner and upper management. The days of “knocking on doors” to speak with Bingo’s owner were over. Senad Džambić had become quite unreachable, with employees now being hired by regional managers. Given that the 2016 labour law clearly favours employers, this led to increased flexibility at the workplace that seldom took the employees’ needs into account.

In practice, such flexibility meant that women who got pregnant could find themselves with no maternity leave entitlement if they were employed on short-term contracts. Similarly, employees with health issues who needed longer-term sick leave would not have the same job security if their contracts ended in the interim. At times, the granting of long-term contracts seemed arbitrary: some employees worked for years under short-term contracts, while others were granted long-term contracts after only a short period. Overtime was not paid, and employees depended on transport and lunch allowances (topli obrok, a warm meal) to supplement their wages. These allowances were only paid on the days the employees worked and represented a significant portion of their salaries. If they took annual leave, they had to deduct the lunch allowance for those days.

Despite these working conditions, however, formal employment at companies such as Bingo was still widely considered desirable. While in other countries, such as Myanmar or Brazil, self-employment is now seen as a way of avoiding exploitative work relations (Hornig 2022; Millar 2018), I have not observed such mechanisms in Bosnia and Herzegovina. After years of dispossession and economic instability in a postconflict and fragile state setting, most employees sought formal employment opportunities that included some form of social security as well as pension payments. Indeed, the postsocialist and postconflict instability and precarious working conditions were used by the management as a justification for the low salaries. In their eyes, the employees should be grateful to have a (formal) job.

Expectation of Gratitude

During my fieldwork, then, I found Bingo employees to be significantly underpaid. The management was well aware that salary was a key factor in determining whether an employee would stay at Bingo. However, few attempts were made to raise wages. Instead, I encountered a work environment, in which the management regularly presented justifications for the low salaries, thereby creating a narrative that employees should be “grateful” to have a job.

The PR manager of the company also justified the low salaries. During our first interview, I was sitting in her glass-walled office listening to her explain the various marketing strategies she had developed in recent years. Suddenly she turned the conversation toward the “internal” image of Bingo, as if she knew that I was going to be interested in how she thought employees perceived the company. She evoked the negative images people had of Bingo as an employer, while reflecting upon how the company could improve its bad reputation among its employees. She suggested sending them personalised birthday cards, then paused, and started to explain the low salaries. Her explanation turned into a justification:

The retail sector has low salaries. You can’t compare them with the salaries of state officials, nor can they reach several thousand marks a month. These are three-figure salaries, that’s how they will stay, and this doesn’t only apply to Bingo. […] Employees in retail cannot have the same salaries as the rest of the world [kao ostali svijet], just as cleaning ladies cannot have the same salaries as public officials: they are not in the same category.^[10]

Thus the PR manager did not differentiate between industrial and service labour, but rather compared the value of service work with the work of state officials. She referred to education and social status as playing an important role in the value attached to labour. Her statement confirms the view that paying higher salaries to supermarket employees is not a realistic option. Labour in retail is cheap, and she obviously saw no reason for this to change.

Something else that has further strengthened this narrative are the postsocialist and postwar transformations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Managers talked openly about the low salaries paid by Bingo. However, after acknowledging the situation, they added: “At least they have pensions and social security, and their salaries are paid regularly!” (emphasis added). Sometimes the employees themselves would make the same observations, comparing their current situation with previous employment, when they were not even officially registered. The “at least” in the above quote conveys the notion that something that is in fact a basic worker’s right is considered a privilege here. Although there are high levels of unemployment in many postsocialist contexts, in the case of BiH, I read this rhetoric as relating specifically to the postwar period. In Yugoslavia, unemployment had been a common problem (Woodward 1995), but most people who actually had a job could rely on receiving regular salaries. Now, as the Tuzlaci, the citizens of Tuzla, often sarcastically remark, they were expected to be grateful to have a job at all (biti zahvalan za posao).

After the end of the war and the destruction of the majority of industry, as well as the division of resources among ethnonationalist parties (Kurtović 2015), jobs became extremely scarce in BiH. Where they did exist, they were mostly informal and undocumented, with no regular salaries, especially in the retail trade. Before starting at Bingo, many employees had worked in small grocery stores for extremely low wages, with no official employment status and no social security.

Merdina, for example, was one of the office workers at the Bingo store where I conducted my research. She started her working life as an informal employee of a small grocery store. During our conversation, she emphasised the security aspects for Bingo’s employees: “At Bingo everything is regulated by law. […] When it comes to the workers, each and every worker is treated in accordance with the law (zakonski je svaki radnik bio ispoštovan). When it comes to salaries […] these have been the same since the beginning, and they won’t change.” She stressed how, at Bingo, “from the very first day” nobody is employed without formal registration:

For example, now we are taking on two new workers. They have already received a job offer but haven’t started working yet because they have not handed in all their documents. They will only start working on the day they get social security number. That’s the reality in Bosnia now: everything is as it should be. People are slightly dissatisfied with the salaries, but I don’t think they have a reason to be. Everything is in compliance with the law (ispoštovani) in all other aspects.^[11]

Merdina, like many employees in better positions, used the same rhetoric as the PR manager to justify the low salaries, especially when comparing the current situation with the past. This past serves as a constant reminder of how much worse things could be and represents a form of narrative hegemony over life: exploitation is so widespread that demanding more stability is considered “ungrateful”. Many employees have the feeling that they are supposed to be thankful for whatever they get. Whether such rhetoric will continue to function is another matter. In fact, an increasing number have decided to leave their jobs and move to an EU country in search of better working and living conditions (Kurtović 2020b; Rajković 2023).

Observing the everyday work routines in the Bingo supermarket in Tuzla allowed me to understand the variability and nuances of good or bad working conditions. In general, many employees experienced some form of instability, despite the official management discourse. The first generation of Bingo employees, who started in the early 2000s, had benefited from personal relationships within what was still a small company, including the security such relationships provided. Some older employees remained in contact with the owner and/or upper management at headquarters and were able to access company loans or choose the store they wanted to work at. For the younger, recently employed workers, these options were not longer available.

In any case, for employees to find ways of creating some stability within this ecosystem of workplace instabilities often involved negotiating individually with the store managers, thus requiring an understanding of the internal politics of their supermarket. In the following section, I will illustrate how the employees I spoke with and observed during my fieldwork leveraged their knowledge of informal advantages and their relationships with management to secure some stability; how they negotiated “variegated stabilities”.

Learning the Store’s Politics and Negotiating Variegated Stabilities

At the start of this article, I described how employees joked about which store would provide them with which advantages, depending on the goodwill of the manager. This private joke illustrates how employees shared knowledge about a store’s implicit politics. Depending on which store an employee worked in, they might, for example, be reemployed after working as a temporary care worker in Germany, or they might be granted some employment security while on maternity leave. As Merdina, the aforementioned administrator, explained, such matters were especially important for pregnant employees without stable contracts:

It is a bit problematic for those who get pregnant and don’t have a stable contract. The contract ends, and they would have to go on sick leave or maternity leave. Instead, they stop working – I think there were two employees, I’m not sure – but when they finished everything [giving birth and caring for the child for a given period] and felt they could come back to work, we hired them again. It was no problem, they just came back to work.^[12]

The rehiring of women after they have given birth was standard practice and was not questioned by the employees. What was important for them to know, as Merdina conveyed, was that they would be employed again. However, knowledge of the store’s policies alone was not enough to ensure stability. Instead, employees often had to negotiate with the store manager in the hope of obtaining some “variegated stabilities”. Nedžad’s story clearly illustrates this.

Before starting work at the Bingo warehouse, Nedžad, a father of two in his forties, had experienced a number of problems in his work life. In his last job at a regional supermarket chain, his daughter had a minor accident and had to go to the hospital. It was then that he realised his company had no health insurance scheme, or worse still, had not been paying social security for six-and-a-half years, a discovery he described as traumatising. Soon after the incident, someone at Bingo recommended him and he got a job at the warehouse. He started on a 12-month contract. During that year, he himself had to undergo surgery. While social security was no longer a problem, before he underwent the surgery, he checked with the šefica that he would not lose his job after his contract ended and that he would be able to come back after his sick leave. He was on sick leave for over 80 days, and when he returned, the šefica arranged for him to only be assigned tasks that were not physically demanding. Having social security was essential for Nedžad and one of the main reasons he stayed at Bingo. However, the fact that he felt he needed to make sure he would not lose his job before undergoing a necessary surgery shows that there is a constant need to fight for stability in the workplace, especially with short-term contracts. But the issue extends further, as Nedžad needed to make personal arrangements with the manager, knowing too well that he could not rely on the statutory rights and protections.^[13]

Situations like this were a regular part of employees’ everyday lives at the Bingo store. They relied on the šefica’s word that they would have job security and better working conditions, thus countering forms of what Benquet (2013) framed as “projectional precarity”. The employees understood that due to the lack of union organisation, the labour law, short-term contracts, and the simple fact that they were expendable, they had to maintain a good relationship with the šefica. It is not surprising that, instead of referring to the law, the workers spoke about improving their working conditions solely through the šefica’s goodwill. This form of precarity is, as Peacock (2016) suggests, a relationship of dependence. As with the directors of the Max Planck institutes that Peacock studied, in the Bingo supermarket, the šefica holds significant decision-making power over the (working) lives of her employees. They are dependent on her goodwill. But she also understands that it is precisely through nurturing these relationships that she can maintain the motivated, and also stable, workforce needed for the company to compete on the market.

When Maida, a cashier, explained that she had been given fewer working hours because she had three children at home, one of whom was a toddler, she told me: “The šefica organised a good work schedule for me.”^[14] The workers see these variegated stabilities almost as a “gift” granted by management. Sometimes, they are given freely, as in one instance where the šefica told older employees to “go on sick leave” whenever they felt tired. They had expressed concerns about their uncertain retirement prospects – which were due in part to the unstable social situation, but also to the lack of pension payments as a consequence of previous failed privatisations (see Kurtović 2020a).

At the same time, employees often have clear expectations of the šefica and a clear idea of what makes a good manager, that is someone who does not only look out for themselves (gledati samo sebe) but who “stands up for the workers” (stajati iza radnika), as my interlocutors Daria and Ilma put it when I met them for coffee.^[15] This clearly mirrors the expectations Yugoslav workers once had of factory managers; in socialist times, the factory was a symbol of stability, a social space, and the manager was expected to care for the workers (Bonfiglioli 2020; Petrović 2020; Musić 2021; Kurtović 2020a; also Thelen 2005). In Bingo, this idea has remained embedded in everyday work life – it has survived both postsocialist transformation and the ruptures caused by the war. It also seems to have transgenerational qualities.

Alongside the important role of the store manager, who most employees saw as having the power to improve their situation, the employees themselves had developed various forms of support through friendships and solidarity that went beyond the workplace. Instead of a “retraditionalisation of social relations”, shifting them into the domain of kinship relations, as Thelen (2005, 7) found to exist in East Germany, Bingo employees formed and maintained strong relationships with each other, as a way of securing mutual support. In fact, helping each other in this way was often what enabled them to endure the tedious everyday routine at the store, and it also guaranteed them various forms of social support.

Caring for Each Other: Fostering Mutuality in the Workplace

The meagre salaries – a recurring reason for complaint – and the strenuous working days did not prevent Bingo employees from spending a significant amount of their free time at the supermarket. They would regularly gather at the Bingo café, adjacent to the supermarket, before the shift change, chatting until it was time to get ready for work. Colleagues joined spontaneously, exchanging news about family and work while joking with the waiters. Employees’ birthdays were celebrated at the same restaurant, with waiters pushing tables together and reserving them for the “party”. On warm summer evenings, the women would sit behind the warehouse, smoking and chatting until their husbands came to pick them up. The stark contrast between their working conditions and the cheerful social interactions made me realise that, for them, the workplace held much more significance than I had initially assumed.

In this last part of the article, I will describe how the employees at the Bingo hypermarket in Tuzla fostered strong relationships between one another and how these relationships created a mutuality (Schlecker 2013) that helped them withstand everyday predicaments. Support at the supermarket could take various forms: for example, employees attempted to organise financial assistance for cashiers who had mistakenly given out too much change and were required to reimburse the company from their own salaries; or to arrange a funeral for a colleague’s family member. In most situations, support was expressed in small ways, through subtle signs of care and thoughtfulness, as I illustrate in the following.

One afternoon, I was sitting in the break room with several employees. While Nura was making us laugh by recounting how she had felt a strong craving for sweets the night before and had thus “had to” steal her daughter’s chocolates, Minerva came in with a pair of jeans in her hands: “They only cost 8.50 [marks],” she said, holding them up so that Nura could take a closer look. “I’ll leave them, in case someone wants them.” “Yes, leave them,” Nura replied. “I’ll try them on later.” The pair of jeans had just arrived from Germany along with a load of new clothes from the central warehouse. This was “factory overstock”, that is clothes that could not be sold in the EU (mostly Germany) and so were exported to non-EU countries where they were sold at a very low price. Indeed, the jeans did look fashionable, and they were conspicuously cheap.^[16]

This small event was part of the employees’ everyday practices of picking “good” and “cheap” clothes for themselves first, before sending the rest in trolleys to the shop’s respective departments. Here, Adisa and Fahira would fold the clothes beautifully, only to watch them be unfolded and thrown onto piles by customers. The scene described above conveyed the concern the employees felt for each other, and how they put each other’s needs first – as soon as she saw the trousers, and the low price, Minerva thought of her co-worker. Bingo employees were the first to gain access to the cheapest clothes, which were also of relatively good quality, and they profited from this informal advantage of working at the store.

This example ties in with the anthropological literature on social support beyond welfare state structures and money transactions (Schlecker 2013; Schlecker and Fleischer 2013). As Schlecker argues, support takes many different forms and is sometimes not linked to the exchange of goods and money. In his research, he focuses on the aforementioned notion of “mutuality”, where support is “the everyday business of living in a world that one necessarily shares with others, that is, support as a background operation. […] Mutuality foregrounds a common bond of mutual reliance that ties together people, where support is an existential sharing” (Schlecker 2013, 1).

At Bingo, when employees met for coffee outside work or gathered in the staff room – which also served as a kind of “safe space” – they frequently shared their problems and concerns, offering each other advice. These conversations often extended beyond immediate workplace issues. Employees discussed traumatic events from the war, the experience of being a refugee, and personal hardships such as illness and loss. In fact, sickness and death were recurring topics in these exchanges. In what Schlecker (2013, 6) identifies as “subjectivities of suffering”, support is described as “ongoing, something maintained as relatedness, sharing feelings, rather than preventing, stopping, or patching up problems”. The shared struggles also fostered workplace solidarity, as employees supported each other by making work tasks easier whenever possible. At the same time, these close relationships allowed the workers to experience moments of joy. Thus, the contemporary supermarket resembles the Yugoslav canned-fish factories, which Kosmos and Petrović (2025, 192) describe as “communities with complex networks of relations, where camaraderie existed alongside internal differentiations and conflicts”. Yet, while these bonds are a source of empowerment for today’s supermarket employees, they also reflect a reliance on atomised forms of support, which ultimately highlight the workers’ exclusion from organised political engagement.

Conclusion

Several things have changed since my research in 2019. In BiH, much like the rest of the world, the pandemic put supermarket employees into the foreground, increasing their visibility and transforming them into “essential” workers. In BiH, in as early as 2019, the Union for Trade and Service Workers (Sindikat radnika trgovine i uslužnih djelatnosti, STBiH) had already organised protests calling for stores to remain closed on Sundays and public holidays. On 17 November 2023, stores in the Federation of BiH stopped opening on Sundays.^[17]

In February 2025, the Social Democratic Party (Socijaldemokratska partija, SDP) of the city of Zenica posted a video of Bakir Izetbegović, the president of the Bosniak nationalist Party of Democratic Action (Stranka Demokratske Akcije, SDA), at a press conference, announcing: “We support the rights of the workers to have a day off each week, whether that’s Sunday or another day; it can be arranged for every worker to have one day off per week.”^[18] The comments underneath this short video conveyed a sarcastic collective response to such calculated dismissiveness: if public officials had to work on weekends, the SDA would never portray a single day off as a privilege. This example illustrates how the patronising notion of rights being granted as a “reward” to employees continues to prevail – rights that are standard and taken for granted in other countries, including neighbouring Balkan states. In short, employees in BiH are still expected to be grateful simply for having a job at all.

In this article, I have described working conditions at a supermarket in Tuzla and analysed how, in the absence of a stable, protective legal framework and given the extremely low wages, supermarket employees have developed a strategy that I call the “negotiation of variegated stabilities”. The stabilities employees can achieve are arbitrary and relational, depending on the goodwill of the store’s manager, the worker’s relationship with the management, and therefore also on the specific store in which they work. Such relationships are often temporary, benefiting individuals with specific needs in a given moment. Complementary to this, to support each other in their (daily) struggles, employees foster strong relationships of solidarity between one another through “mutuality”.

These dynamics are the result of the economic neoliberalisation that restructured labour laws and contributed to the exploitation of employees in the retail trade (and other sectors). Yet, as this article illustrates, to understand the economic landscape of contemporary BiH, the continuities with socialist practices and imaginaries in today’s private companies must also be considered. Like the socialist factory workers that Rajković describes in the Zastava automobile factory in Kragujevac, Serbia, where the advantages of the workplace included redistribution mechanisms instead of relying on the welfare state, Bingo employees today engage in specific, non-institutionalised practices that “emplace” the workplace as an “encompassing haven, a source of life as well as of stress” through their relations with management and colleagues (Rajković 2021, 166). The degree of employees’ identification with their company is not to be underestimated, even if, more than anything, it reflects a desire for stability and continuity in their work and everyday life. Looking at the workplace through the eyes of the supermarket employees provides a complex picture of how stability is navigated in times of precarity, and, at the same time, of noteworthy continuities from the socialist Yugoslav shop floor that seem to have transcended generations, reaching even those who never experienced Yugoslavia first hand.