‘I’m Both a Worker and a Shareholder.’ Workers’ Narratives and Property Transformations in Postsocialist Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia

A Word on Methodology

In this study, we have relied on oral history interviews as our main sources, which we have combined with archival materials such as factory newspapers and enterprise documents. The focus on these sources has allowed us to investigate workers’ perspectives on change and has revealed how workers construct their sense of past experiences vis-à-vis their assessment of their current situation.^[12]We view our material as a repository of both history and memory. In each factory, we have collected roughly thirty semi-structured interviews, mostly with white- and blue-collar workers but also with current and former managers. Most of the interviewees were between 40 and 70 years old, and thus experienced firsthand within the same workplace late socialist self-management, the collapse of Yugoslavia, and the privatisation reforms in its wake. Some of these respondents were members of workers’ councils or unions at some point in their working lives; very few had been members of the Communist Party. Some were veterans of the conflict in Bosnia (1992-1995) and Croatia (1991-1995). Most of them struggled as a consequence of privatisation reforms; most are now unemployed and endure a low standard of living. All these factors inform their narratives.^[13]

Self-Management and Social Ownership in Late Socialist Yugoslavia

The predominant form of property relation in socialist Yugoslavia was neither state-owned nor private, but social. Self-management was introduced in factories after 1950. After the conflict with the Soviet Union in 1948, the principle was re-modelled and re-enforced to distance the Yugoslav practice from the Soviet model of a state-planned economy and state ownership. With self-management as the principal form of organisation within society, workers were elected as the central actors for decision-making on the shop floor. Self-management’s main architect, Edvard Kardelj, clarified that factories should be organised according to egalitarian relations, where ‘no one can, on the basis of [social] ownership […] acquire a superior position in relation to other workers’.^[14] Workers were thus nominally in charge of the distribution and administration of resources in the factories.

Furthermore, social ownership was defined not as a system of relationships between people and things, but as relationships between people.^[15] As such, companies across Yugoslavia were not formally owned by anyone but by society at large; self-management would ensure the ‘right of every citizen to freely dispose of the fruits of their own labour’.^[16] From 1963, when self-management was officially included in the constitution, social ownership was based on the idea that ownership would be nobody’s and everybody’s, with management given over to workers’ and citizens’ collectives.

Although according to self-management theory there would be equality in decision-making between workers and managers, employees often criticised workers’ councils for their lack of effectiveness and representativeness. Sociological studies had already revealed in the 1960s that the workforce’s elected representatives in the workers’ councils, envisioned as the most powerful entity of self-management, had essentially less influence on decision-making than managers.^[17] The liberal reforms of the 1960s opened up a wider gap between management and workers with regard to decision-making and to wage differences. The reforms leading towards the Act of Associated Labour (Zakon o udruženom radu) in 1976, aimed at empowering mechanisms of workers’ management, could not reverse these tendencies. The influence of workers’ councils and workers’ decision-making experienced even further decline during the 1980s. As Mrkšić has emphasised, managers used their political power to influence decisions in the factory.^[18] In the workers’ councils, workers, mostly preoccupied with questions of the distribution of housing and wages, found it increasingly difficult to fully put their management and ownership rights into practice.^[19] During council meetings active participation was largely confined to the representatives of management and (external) experts, especially when it came time to consider technical development or investments.

Workers’ Narratives of Self-Management and Social Ownership

Workers’ recollections of the experience of self-management within Energoinvest and Jugoremedija reveal their ambivalence towards socialist selfmanagement. In particular, these workers did not soft-pedal their views of the functioning of the workers’ councils and the extent to which there had actually been genuinely democratic decision-making. For example, while the elected members of the workers’ councils referred positively to self-management in their factories, other workers were mostly disappointed.^[20] As Darko, a blue-collar worker from Jugoremedija, reflected:

‘The social property and the idea that workers would be managing their factories, an idea upon which our former political leaders had sworn, that was a total lie. The authority in all companies during socialism had the general manager, the public and political servants, and at the bottom single bosses or workers organised in the trade union. But the trade union stood behind the general manager’.^[21]

Workers from Energoinvest factories across Bosnia were similarly critical of selfmanagement. They admitted that their decision-making power was limited in terms of both the nature and hierarchy of decisions. Šaban, a factory worker in an Energoinvest foundry in Tuzla, commented:

‘That system too had its defects. We would discuss for three hours in the workers’ council, then we would receive a call from the top and we would be told what decision to take. It would come from the [party] committee. The decision would be taken already, and that would be it.'^[22]

For the workers interviewed, the overbearing presence of the League of Communists in Yugoslavia hindered the functioning of workers’ self-management. However, as the following testimony highlights, this view was accompanied by positive remarks about workers’ relations with their managers, in spite of their party’s influence. Mladen, an engineer in Energoinvest IRIS (an engineering and IT company) in Sarajevo, was a representative on his workers’ council. He recalled:

‘We dealt with salaries, with workers’ rights, business trips or all sorts, not with new investments. It worked fairly well, and that was on our local level. There was a certain hierarchy and everything was decided in advance by the central board of directors, and by our first director Marko, and, well, it was certain that if Marko decided something it would be that way. But of course, he never did anything wrong … ok, he was a member of that Communist Party, very devoted I must say, but well we didn’t feel it … and we enjoyed it’.^[23]

This last comment shows the varying dimensions of social relations in the factory. In this case, Mladen feels comfortable criticising workers’ self-management as ineffectual, and even ironically remarks on the power of his director. However, he adjusts his criticism by noting how this did not particularly affect his experience in the workplace, which was more strongly shaped by a sense of trust towards the management. Trust and mutual respect, recurrent themes amongst our interviewees, shaped their views of workplace relations.^[24] These themes’ prevalence was partly due to the economic prosperity enjoyed by both companies, which meant that work stoppages and strikes—common in Yugoslavia—were infrequent even during the economic crisis of the late 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Employees attributed the success of their company to the management’s expertise. Ana, a blue-collar worker at Jugoremedija, said:

‘This group of people that were our managers … Financially they had a bit of knowledge of what pharmaceuticals [the pharmaceutical industry and the branch] meant. For you, as a worker, it was not important. Everything worked and you had the feeling that your whole life would be like that’.^[25]

When reflecting on their experience of the socialist past, workers rarely idealised the workplace as an idyllic space where they exerted full control; rather, they referred to the strictness of rules and the working ethos during the time of self-management. For example, for the pharmaceutical company Jugoremedija, hygienic standards were one of the most important sets of rules enforced by the management. Talking about the general manager, Ivana, a blue-collar worker, commented:

‘He never sat in his office, he was just walking around. The whole day. With a white rag, he went over the windowsill and called the cleaning lady to ask why there is dust. Everything had to be in line. But he cherished work and workers’.^[26]

Ivana here, like Mladen above, points to the workers’ ambivalent relationship towards management. On the one hand, they admired the general managed’s commitment to the factory and trusted his decision-making.^[27] On the other hand, workers viewed the general manager’s display of power on the shop floor as a strategy to enforce discipline. In this context, it was the interplay of authority, closeness, and trust that created a certain kind of affection towards the workplace. Interviewed workers generally see hierarchies not in a negative light but as a helpful means to ensure success in their company. Contesting the boundaries of the formal and informal order inside the factory while accepting or tolerating the managers’ authority allowed one to make a social space ‘one’s own’ through an active involvement in shaping it.^[28]

When reflecting upon the self-managed workplace, the workers show an awareness of the socialist system’s many contradictions.^[29] They acknowledge that the self-managed workplace was also characterised by internal conflicts, though these were often downplayed by the workers themselves. For example, Jovana, a blue-collar worker at Jugoremedija, stated: ‘On the shop floor there were different kinds of people. I think it was not a terrible fight, some want this, and some want that. I was like at home. […] And after a while you are laughing. We were a family’.^[30]

For Jovana, these social interactions, not exclusively positive, made her compare the everyday life of the factory with that of a family. The vast majority of interviewed Energoinvest workers reported feelings of affection towards, and a deep familial connection with, their workplace and their colleagues.^[31] Edis, a factory worker in the transmission-lines factory Energoinvest TDS in Sarajevo, commented: ‘We all felt like it was our second home. We all felt like that, because we lived off that and we took care of it’.^[32]

Here, taking care of one’s workplace was not just a matter of dedication towards the premises where one worked; it was also an investment in its development. In fact, throughout the self-management years, part of the annual revenue was re-invested in the company’s growth. As such, workers were aware that part of what would otherwise have been paid to them in salary was contributing to the company’s advancement. Crucially, this increased their sense of attachment to their workplaces, and the feeling of entitlement to its ownership.

This strong bond, combined with the ideological and at times paternalistic public discourse of social ownership, shaped the relationship between workers and their workplaces. As has emerged from our analysis, this ‘feeling of ownership’ was only minimally constructed through the management of the workers as prescribed by the Yugoslav ideology; rather, it was triggered through (occasionally conflicting) social relations inside the factory, as well as through the manifold welfare rights and services that the companies and the trade union provided (housing, holidays, health care).^[33] Also, the reinvestment of part of the company’s revenue into the development of one’s factory, rather than being spent on individual salaries, shaped workers’ ‘feeling of ownership'. To sum up, workers grounded their sense of attachment towards their workplace in two crucial areas: interpersonal relations with colleagues and management, and the financial investment that closely tied them to their factories.^[34]

The Law on Property Transformation in Bosnia and Serbia

With the first law on privatisation, the ‘Law on Social Capital’ (Zakon o Prometu i Raspolaganju Društvenim Kapitalom) implemented in 1989, social property could be transformed into private, group, or mixed property.^[44] Speaking before the Federal Chamber, Ante Marković proposed that ‘workers may decide to put up social capital for sale, and it can be purchased by all domestic, foreign, legal, and physical persons’.^[45] Workers and the management could buy shares in their factories and thus become co-owners.

However, after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the laws of property transformation differed in the successor states and were implemented at different moments. In Bosnia, the Markovic laws were enforced between 1989 and 1991. In this period, Energoinvest underwent a property transformation that turned the company into an entity based on internal shareholding. Yet workers collectively could purchase only 49% of the company's overall capital. The reason, according to the company:

‘Selling the majority of capital to workers will appear as a quasi-self-management and […] foreign investors […] would not want to either invest or buy part of a company in which the majority of the ownership is in the hands of the workers. […] We think that capital intensive companies in Energoinvest are a less risky place for investment’.^[46]

At this moment, the percentage of internally privatised capital in each factory or company within Energoinvest varied greatly. The law, in fact, allowed workers to buy shares and pay for them later, as long as they did so within ten years of the beginning of the process. Factories like Energoinvest Automatika in Sarajevo saw their workers buying roughly 40% of these shares, while in other factories the percentage of privatised shares was between 2% and 5%.^[47] However, one should not conclude that workers lacked interest in internal privatisation because of the relatively small percentage of shares that they purchased.^[48] Rather, the reason for the small percentage is that the process did not have the time to unfold properly: it was prematurely halted by the outbreak of the civil war in 1992.

In Serbia, the laws on privatisation underwent several changes during the 1990s. Jugoremedija was one of the rare examples in Serbia of a company that implemented nearly every model of privatisation.^[49] The pharmaceutical factory started its property transformation in 1993, as decided by the workers’ assembly. Due to hyperinflation, this process was halted and the value of the company was re-evaluated in 1994, following an amendment of the 1991 law. Through 2001, shortly before a new law was implemented, the company was almost completely socially owned. Just 0.31% of its overall capital was in the hands of shareholders. Then, in January 2001, Jugoremedija underwent privatisation under the 1997 Law of Ownership Transformation (Zakon o svojinskoj transformaciji). This allowed current workers, pensioners and former workers to obtain shares free of charge, depending on how long they had worked in the factory; public employees or other ‘outsiders’ were also able to become small shareholders. In the end, around 28% of Jugoremedija’s overall value was owned by workers and pensioners, with an additional 30% in the hands of external small shareholders; the rest of the social property was nationalised. Some eighteen months later, under the new privatisation law of 2001, Jugoremedija continued its privatisation. Through auction, the state-owned shares (42% of the company's value) were sold to the Macedonian company Jaka 80.^[50]

Workers’ Understanding of the First Property Transformation

In their narratives, workers from Energoinvest and Jugoremedija often remark how they had grown disillusioned with the model of self-management. From their perspective, a privatisation that granted them shareholding rights seemed to be in their favour. For example, workers at Energoinvest had felt widespread disappointment towards the self-management mechanisms, which caused them to question the existing system and to favour the model of property transformation introduced in the Markovic era. Edin, a white-collar worker from Energoinvest TDS, observed:

‘I think that [self-management] was more an illusion than reality. The decisions were always taken somewhere else, and the plans prepared elsewhere. And now this [Marković] privatisation was the exit from that illusion. Because then you would have your share in all that, and that is the feeling of ownership’.^[51]

For blue-collar workers, the first property transition—closely connected to the dissolution of the workers’ council and thus with the restriction of their self-management rights-was predominantly welcomed. Zoran Rakic, the last president of Jugoremedija’s workers’ council, said:

‘It is a fact that the abolishment of the workers’ council was accepted by everybody. Everybody voted because it was too much and nearly nobody was against it. Everybody could not wait for this to happen’.^[52]

In both cases, the dissatisfaction towards self-management merged with the beneficial prospect of becoming co-owners of a company or factory, cherished by workers as the source of their income and status.

Moreover, as noted, a common policy in self-managed companies was to re-invest part of their annual surplus in the development of the factory rather than to use it to increase workers’ individual salaries or give them bonuses. The term ‘profit’, however, was controversial and, considered to be too close in its connotations with capitalism, was avoided. This terminological choice was important—as interviewees often remarked—because it constituted another fundamental basis for a ‘feeling of ownership’ towards their company, which led them to appropriate and accept the ideology of the Markovic government’s ‘gradual’ privatisation. Workers had expressed the desire to become shareholders in accordance with the Markovic laws because of their previous investment in their own factories. Asim, a factory worker for Energoinvest TDS —one of the most profitable factories specialising in electric pylons and transformers—explained his support for the shareholding transformation proposed by the Marković government as follows:

‘That [the Marković privatisation] was ok, because it was a contribution for the workers. Because these factories were made by us, I have made this factory personally, it was built while I was working here. We allocated a part of our salaries for the construction of these factories, for their development. And so it was normal that I should have some participation in it, and that is why I bought those shares. We wanted to be co-owners. Those shares were mine, so if the factory decided to sell them I would be a shareholder and I would get a percentage of that’.^[53]

In this context, allocating part of one’s salary towards factory shareholding was a crucial element of the first privatisation reforms, creating consensus amongst workers and fostering a ‘feeling of ownership’ towards their workplace.

In the case of Energoinvest, workers were allowed to purchase shares in their own factory, enabling the connection between a feeling of attachment to one's workplace and personal financial benefit. Relevant here is the socio-economic situation of the time, marked by a significant economic crisis and a drop in living standards. As Dževad, an engineer in a profitable Energoinvest factory, remarked:

‘People thought that they will receive some benefits in a certain way, that they will be owners, and that they would be richer. It was not really important whether a director or the state would be in a management position; they rather thought that through their ownership they would be a bit richer’.^[54]

Some of Jugoremedija’s workers, too, expected some financial gain from the sale and acquisition of shares:

‘They thought that a new time is coming and that democracy is coming which would ensure that everybody got shares and be owners and get their cash dividends’.^[55]

At the same time, workers for Jugoremedija noted that what made them assent to the property reforms of 1993 and 2001 was trust in the company’s management and in their expertise.^[56] Workers acknowledged that they had not been fully aware of the implications of the privatisation reforms in the 1990s. Ivan, a representative of the trade union, noted that the workers’ union had explained what the property transition meant, but the reality was hard to clarify:

’It was hard for people to pass from one system to another. People understood this factory as theirs. Through this privatisation law they got some percentage of the shares and they were happy. But it was hard to explain what the privatisation meant’.^[57]

In the case of Jugoremedija, some workers stressed that this lack of awareness was a consequence of the hardships they had experienced during the 1990s.^[58]Others welcomed the property transformation, since it would entitle them to receive a proportion of the company’s profits. Like their colleagues in Bosnia, they also understood the reforms of the 1990s to be a consolidation of their ownership rights.

The implementation of the first major property reforms in Bosnia in the early 1990s and in Serbia throughout the 1990s inclined workers to see in them an opportunity to make the ‘feeling of ownership’ they had developed towards their workplaces seem more tangible. This sense of opportunity was also due to the comparatively strong performance in the global market by both companies in Serbia and in Bosnia, even during the early 1990s. Thus workers saw additional profit to be made through shareholding. The mounting dissatisfaction with the mechanisms of self-management, the consolidated trust in the general management as a whole, and the prospects of financial reward were all factors which, combined, fostered workers’ support for privatisation reforms. These aspects informed the reforms legally through the mechanism of internal shareholding, paralleled by a partial decrease of workers’ management rights. These changes were hardly seen as some ‘step backwards in Yugoslavia’, ‘sugarcoating the pill’ of the workers’ loss of management rights—as critics of late socialist market reforms have argued.^[59] Rather, workers saw in them the opportunity for monetising their rights to social property by becoming collective shareholders.

Energoinvest. The Legacy of the Marković Reforms in Bosnia’s Postwar Setting

For Energoinvest, the first privatisation reforms were halted after the outbreak of war in 1992. However, in November 1994, with the conflict ongoing, a full nationalisation of all ‘social property’ in Bosnia was announced. This meant a de facto transfer of most of Bosnia’s companies to the state and its direct control.^[60]With this first transformation we find workers’ ‘feeling of ownership’ towards their own factories began to change under the pressures of a new historical contingency. In fact, many of those who had expressed interest in acquiring or who had purchased their factory shares during the Marković reforms discovered only upon return from the war’s frontlines that their factories had been nationalised and, in many cases, that the records of previously purchased shares were lost. This relatively sudden and unexpected development created much animosity and a widespread sense of betrayal amongst workers, who felt deceived by the very state they had been called upon to defend. As bitterly stated by Azem, a blue-collar worker in Energoinvest TDS and a veteran of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Armija Republike Bosne i Hercegovine):

‘We all had those shares [from the Marković time], but they simply disappeared, they were moved from social to state ownership, they were all nationalised. While we were working, fighting, they have transferred it into state ownership, and then they were able to sell the factories’.^[61]

Privatisation resumed in 1998, though under very different circumstances. A new model of rapid mass privatisation was implemented through the distribution of certificates or vouchers to the wider population, corresponding to a set percentage of overall state capital. A common policy across the postsocialist states of the eastern bloc, voucher privatisation had often resulted in controversial capital transfers from private citizens to investment funds.^[62] However, in the case of Bosnia, the same property that was now up for privatisation, as workers later came to know, would not be assigned specifically to them as former employees. An individual could claim rights to it as a citizen and, additionally, as a veteran. Since the Bosnian state had little available liquidity, it opted to pay soldiers’ salaries in vouchers. While it had been common in Yugoslavia to grant special privileges to former partisans, social property was not directly one such privilege. In postwar Bosnia, the distribution of property rights was conducted at the entity level (Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Republika Srpska) and responded to specific national ideologies.^[63]

Subsequently, workers’ entitlement to former ‘social property’ depended on their participation in the war; even then, it was not strictly linked to their specific workplace but only corresponded to a share of overall state capital.^[64]Many small shareholders did not really understand that the value of certificates did not directly correspond to shares in their own companies. Concern mounted that certificates would quickly be devalued, as many sold them on the black market.^[65] This practice occurred across Bosnia, as the impoverished population had no means other than selling vouchers to provide for their basic needs. In many cases, war profiteers bought vouchers and certificates from the most vulnerable and used them to buy state-owned property and assets for a very small fee.^[66] Thus the certificates’ value substantially decreased: apparently more than 99% of them were traded at 3% of their nominal value. At the end of 1999, the majority of certificates in the Federation had been used to purchase flats, with the rest being sold on the black market.^[67] Given the great sociopolitical and economic instability, certificates not only lost value very quickly due to dubious selling mechanisms but were also stripped of the meaning they had once had for workers. As Edin, a white-collar Energoinvest worker, remarked: ‘You know, one thing is if you pay for something in your own factory, you paid for it, so you take care for it more… but if you get something for free [like certificates] … well then you do not care that much, it is different’.^[68]

Because of the situation, workers and their representatives began to feel resentment, precisely because they had expected that they would be compensated following a model of internal shareholding à la Marković, i. e. with certificates that would guarantee them shareholding rights in their own company. Although in theory the new privatisation laws were supposed to guarantee the recognition of shares purchased between 1990 and 1991 (under the Marković model), it became evident that the representatives of the new management actually had little interest in recognising workers’ shareholding. The impossibility of recuperating the shares bought in 1990-1991, in addition to workers’ feelings of betrayal in the wake of the full nationalisation of their companies, contributed to a loss of trust in the new privatisation reforms. In turn, although postwar economic reforms in Bosnia envisaged a form of voucher distribution amongst veterans and citizens, these reforms did not foresee their involvement as shareholders.

Another consequence of nationalisation was the direct nomination of new management by the Ministry of Industry. Workers for Energoinvest felt that the government-appointed management had less expertise and as a whole lacked interest in the company’s growth or reconstruction after the conflict. Muarem, a blue-collar worker at Energoinvest’s Livnica in Tuzla, explained:

‘Since this new privatisation started, we felt unequal. Someone new comes to power [in the factory] and sends you to a disciplinary commission only because you are defending workers’ rights. And the criteria for which new directors are appointed is which party they belong to, not whether they will start production’.^[69]

Although three and a half years of conflict had irreversibly changed companies, workplaces, and the socio-economic landscape overall, workers did not forget that a property transformation had been initiated before the war. The Marković privatisation model of internal employee buyouts had been particularly appealing to workers in late socialist workplaces, as they welcomed a ‘transition’ to a capitalist market economy that would guarantee them a financial benefit. Thus, upon consultation with their members, unions started proposing a privatisation model that very much echoed what had been initiated in early 1990 and 1991. In one of his first postwar speeches in 1997, the president of the Bosnian Council of Independent Unions (Savez Samostalnih Sindikata Bosne i Hercegovine), Sulejman Hrle, remarked:

‘Workers are not against privatisation in principle, but they fear that war profiteers, local powers and directors will profit from illegal privatisation. […] We have proposed a model of privatisation according to which workers would become co-owners of the majority of the capital as shareholders, the workers’ model of privatisation’.^[70]

Hence, the union repeatedly remarked that workers and especially demobilised soldiers were ‘exceptionally interested in the privatisation of companies […] which they have built as workers during their whole working life’.^[71] The way that workers and their unions advocated for a privatisation of companies through shareholding denotes that workers believed in a sort of collective privatisation, which would favour them as the main company stakeholders. In this way, workers supported a form of privatisation which would mostly appeal to their ‘belief’ or ‘moral’ system, one in which workers would maintain a prominent role in society through control over their companies. This was a generation of workers who had come to criticise socialist self-management, and yet their value system was imbued with ideas of social justice. Workers grounded many of their hopes and assumptions about ‘transition’ on the combination of their belief in social justice—through workers’ partidpation—and expectations drawn from ‘market modernisation’. Though the war constituted a significant chasm between two distinct systems, the legacy of the Marković reforms was still present in workers’ understanding of workplace and property transformations. However, although workers had tried to respond to the situation through numerous strikes, they felt disempowered by a society increasingly dominated by a nationalist party logic. Reflecting on what was happening, a member of the Council of Independent Unions described this transformation as a misinformation-laden deception that was hurting workers:

‘This kind of privatisation through shares was presented to us and at a first glance we identified it as the Marković privatisation. […] That was what we had kept from Tito’s system of self-management, that workers can buy their companies and become owners. However, when the war finished and they told us that we once again would get the shares and be owners, it turned out that even my mother-inlaw, who never worked anywhere, could become the owner of the firm, because they gave her certificates!’^[72]

Thus workers had maintained ownership expectations over companies that they still perceived as theirs, even though most of the (former) social property, including flats, machinery, and factories, had been nationalised. These expectations endured because they still felt the legacy of the Marković reforms—and, in part, the legacy of Tito’s Yugoslavia as well. The postwar reform project seeking the rapid privatisation of formerly socially owned companies clashed with workers’ expectations of shareholding and with their attachment to the legacy of late-socialist reforms. However, the new privatisation framework did not succeed in creating cohesive support for economic reforms amongst the workforce, not only because workers feared redundancy and unemployment but because it did not address their support for another kind of privatisation—through shareholding—which had more closely involved them.

Jugoremedija’s workers began to transform their ‘feeling of ownership’ due to the experience of privatisation and the fear of losing their jobs. After the factory was privatised under the new law in 2002, a fraction of the workers who were also shareholders in the company identified themselves as its co-owners. This ‘feeling of ownership’ was strongly connected to the fight against ‘corrupt’ privatisation and became a tool for the workers during their struggles; later it would be an active assertion in decision-making processes.

This feeling derived from the uncertainty brought on by the privatisation process. The Slovenian company Lek was supposed to buy 42% of the state-owned shares of Jugoremedija, while 58% of the ownership would initially remain in the hands of former workers, present workers, and small external shareholders. Workers expected that the privatisation by Lek would not significantly change anything; shareholding at that time was just a minor question. Ina, a production worker, recalled:

‘I did not know at that time anything about shareholding. I did not find it interesting. Everything was fine for me and I expected that it would go on like this with the cooperation with Lek and its purchase. And I did not think about what would happen afterwards’.^[73]

It thus came as a shock to the management and workers when a relatively unknown company, Jaka 80 from Macedonia, ended up buying the state-owned shares at auction in September 2002. The workers suspected the new owner and general manager of Jaka 80, Jovica ‘Nini’ Stefanović, of being a war profiteer who enriched himself by smuggling tobacco and exploiting his close affiliations with various state officials. One week after the auction, the ‘old’ management of Jugoremedija called for the small shareholders to collectively sell their shares to a brokerage house. The price of the shares would be three times higher than the initial price. This proposal was later abandoned because convincing around 4,400 shareholders to sell their shares was deemed unrealistic. Not all shareholders were situated in Zrenjanin; they were scattered across Serbia and the former Yugoslavia, making it difficult to organise such a buyout, and it seemed impossible to collectively sell more than 50% of the company’s shares. Even though these first attempts to unite the community of small shareholders failed, some of the workers realised that they could play an active role in determining the fate of the factory and could confront the company’s new management: ‘Just then we understood that we are a part of it’, commented Dušica, a former shop floor worker.^[74]

With the establishment of the new management, workers grew even more sceptical due to changing social relations at the firm. The new management’s ‘hostile’ attitude, the changing mode of production, and the pressure on workers’ rights made workers increasingly suspicious of company policies:

‘Nini was a bit excluding and he behaved in a hostile way in the beginning. Just through this he caused some kind of antipathy. That was the moment when we started to ask around and we understood quite fast what shares are, and then we elected our representatives’.^[75]

Workers also reported that the new management favoured higher profits over the quality of the raw materials used in production. Quality standards, once pedantically enforced by the former general managers, now dropped, and this change affected the pride workers took in the things they produced. Ivan stated:

‘First, the raw material that arrived was of low quality. […] In some raw material from India they found a dead pigeon. […] In former Yugoslavia, the products of Jugoremedija were high quality. It came as a shock that we are now producing at such low quality’.^[76]

The first open conflict between workers and the new management occurred when the former were forced to terminate their memberships in the trade union of the Council of Trade Unions (Savez Sindikata Srbije), and the trade union itself came under pressure to change the collective agreement. In December 2003, the new owner was suspected of having illegally recapitalised the factory and increasing his portion of the company’s shares to 62%. Workers felt betrayed: by buying the factory and unlawfully increasing his percentage of the shares, the new owner seemed to be engaged in money laundering. An occupation of the factory followed, as well as lawsuits and demonstrations which lasted for over four years; more than 150 workers were laid off. It was the mistrust in the new management, the influence of local and international activists, and widespread confidence in the strike’s leader, Zdravko Deurić, which shaped the protests as a fight to reclaim the factory for the workers.^[77] Deuric, also the chairman of the shareholder community, emphasised that the protests and workplace actions were not solely for better working conditions but for the good of ‘their’ factory as a whole: ‘Here we talk about the struggle between owners of Jugoremedija, but not about the conflict between owner and workers. And […] it is clear that we fight for our rights—as workers and as owners’.^[78] In addition, the fight for the factory was connected to the fear of losing jobs. Because the administration of the factory had already been moved to Niš, workers were afraid that the company would be entirely resettled. Talking about their protests, Uroš said: ‘They [other workers in Zrenjanin] never really realised that we are not fighting for our salary. […] I’m fighting for my job and for my right to live through the property of the factory and that it will survive’.^[79] Even though the protests mounted by Jugoremedija’s workers were part of a wider strike wave caused by the consequences of the postsocialist transformation and privatisation in the early 2000s, the fight for property was rather unique to Serbia.^[80] It was seen as the only possibility of rescuing the factory from the bankruptcy and unemployment that other factories in Serbia had experienced.

According to a 2005 decision of the Higher Commercial Court in Belgrade, the privatisation contract with Jaka 80 was annulled, so that the 42% of the shares were nationalised again.^[81] A few months later, Stefanović’s recapitalisation, which had made him the majority owner, was also declared unlawful.^[82]The ‘feeling of ownership’ was transformed into an understanding of a way of managing the factory—not as it had been experienced under Yugoslav workers’ self-management, but rather as envisioned by the laws of the 1990s. As Zdravko Deurić stressed at the meeting of worker-shareholders: ‘We fought for Jugoremedija, where we are going to respect the rights of its owners. Together with the other owners we will decide about our fate and we will share the profit we are going to achieve’.^[83]

At the first shareholders’ meeting, the people elected to the management board were mostly Jugoremedija workers. Also, the new general manager was a former Jugoremedija worker. For some shareholders (mostly pensioners and external, small shareholders), the financial aspect of the shares became even more relevant. Uroš remembered:

‘When we came back to Jugoremedija in 2007 as workers then I had the problem that shareholders were calling me and asking when we are going to sell the shares. […] They wanted to cash in their share, because they already promised their children to buy something for them and everybody was counting on that’.^[84]

Certain ways of thinking about ownership, productivity, and incentives, which echoed the ideas cultivated in the late 1980s, re-emerged: having shares in a factory will make workers work even harder for its success. Hence, it was not only a matter of fighting for ones’ factory, managing it, or being in charge of one’s own fate; the opportunity to benefit financially from it was also connected to the ‘feeling of ownership’.