Theoretical Point of Departure

The specific circumstances of this temporary semi-migration created a partial opportunity for the workers to escape from the pressures of both production and reproduction, despite remaining within state socialism and under control of both the Polish and Czechoslovak authorities. The term “socialist escapes,” coined by Cathleen M. Giustino, Catherine J. Plum, and Alexander Vari, could apply to the Polish women that to some extent also “escaped socialism without leaving it.” My findings challenge the volume authors’ approach, however, for they perceive “people's attempts to acquire their own agency in the field of culture, leisure, and entertainment.” The case I studied brings one beyond a strict division of “work” and “leisure” in studies of “socialist escapes.”Footnote ⁹

With my findings on Polish workers’ “escape,” I wish to contribute to the thesis of Mark Pittaway, who discovered to what extent Hungarian factory management and top party leaders in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist period were dependent on the willingness of experienced, skilled workers in heavy industry to support the regime.Footnote ¹⁰ In contrast to them, the low-skilled textile female workers were perceived by Pittaway as precisely the most vulnerable and exploitable “peripheral” labor force in state socialism.Footnote ¹¹ Similarly, Michael Burawoy underlined the role of skilled and experienced workers in state socialism, who were able to improvise in frequent cases of supply constraints. While in such cases the core workers were rewarded for their cooperation, surveillance and control was intensified over the peripheral ones.Footnote ¹²

To return to the subject of Polish female workers in Czechoslovakia, as young and single unskilled women temporarily working in a foreign country made them particularly “peripheral” and exploitable. Nevertheless, I argue that exactly this otherwise vulnerable group was empowered and endowed with a new agency. It became possible precisely because the cooperation took place between two states of the eastern bloc. Although the economic and political changes in the 1970s brought the states more into a “competing” position, long-term economic planning and Moscow's dictating of political concerns obligated both states to maintain cooperation. Hence the window of opportunities for the Polish workers was opened.

This brings me to the work of Alena Alamgir, who has written extensively on the case of Vietnamese “guest” workers in Czechoslovakia.Footnote ¹³ She elaborated on the agency of the Vietnamese state as a sending country in advocating on behalf of workers, as opposed to the prevailing presumptions in literature that “Vietnam…colluded with the host governments to facilitate the exploitation of migrant workers by conducting surveillance and curtailing their rights.”Footnote ¹⁴ Recently, she has gone further in extending her thesis to other foreign workers in Czechoslovakia, namely Cubans and Poles.Footnote ¹⁵ She unfolded the argument of “advocacy” and a protective role of their home countries in the context of all three migrant groups. I aim to enrich her findings with two aspects.

First, the Polish workers were not only under the “caring hand” of their homeland but also Czechoslovaks’ significantly relaxed surveillance of this group. Secondly, what protected the workers was not only, as Alamgir put it, the adherence to the “state care” and “socialist internationalism” of both countries in contradiction to “commodification” and economic exploitation. As I show in the present article, increased care by Polish authorities, as well as turning a blind eye to disciplinary transgressions by Czechoslovaks, was profoundly driven by the strictly utilitarian (and yes, economic) concerns of the cooperating states.

To illuminate the real nature of state care in the cases I studied, I wish to revisit the concept of “socialist paternalism” by Katherine Verdery, in which subjects “were presumed to be grateful recipients—like small children in a family—of benefits their rulers decided upon for them.”Footnote ¹⁶ In her view—evidently less benign—the “care” serves primarily the interest of state, not society. Emphasis is put on people's dependence and submission.Footnote ¹⁷ Verdery's approach very much helps to understand the fact that the “care” provided by states was not always idyllically in harmony with the aims and desires of the workers. Moreover, it explains why the Polish workers so eagerly attempted to sneak out of home country's “care.”

From Win-Win to Lose-Lose

Before I describe how this easily exploitable labor force was empowered, and how it used the new agency to escape the “double burden,” it is crucial to show where the “shortage of the labor force” that could be “abused” by the Polish women originated. Although “guest labor” was not a new phenomenon in Czechoslovakia, the postwar situation caused an increased demand for it. Industrial infrastructure was not as damaged as in other central and east European states. However, the industrial workforce was disrupted by the expulsion and expatriation of ethnic Germans, especially in the border regions. For historical reasons, a vast part of Czechoslovak industry was concentrated in these areas. Demand increased in the 1960s, when the last wave of citizens of German ethnicity emigrated and internal Slovak migration to the Czech lands was exhausted due to its own industrialization in that part of the republic. Other reasons leading to the demand for labor were inherent to the socialist economic system, especially the economic plans and permanent shortages related to them. As Katherine Verdery put it, “managers hoarded labor, just like any other raw material, because they never knew how many workers they would need…and since all other managers were doing the same, labor was scarce.”Footnote ¹⁸ Moreover, as Burawoy noticed, the reason for the hoarding was not only to secure the enterprise in expectation of worse times, but also to actively strive for more advantageous plan targets, that is, to “increase their power vis-á-vis central planners through expansion [italics in original]. The bigger they are and the more important their product, the greater their bargaining strength.”Footnote ¹⁹

The problem of labor shortage occurred especially in those sectors in which harder industrial work was demanded. These sectors were often substantial for the legitimacy of the communist regime (housing and road construction, textiles, food production, the coal and steel industry) and/or offered badly needed hard currency. At the same time, the principle of full employment failed to create any pressure on the workforce to make people take these jobs.Footnote ²⁰ According to the Czech economic historian Zdislav Šulc, it was precisely jobs “at production lines, operating textile machines” that were unpopular among the labor force due to being “standardized,” that is, their fulfilment was easily measurable.Footnote ²¹ Unlike in administration or maintenance services, where the performance of the employee was “negotiable” with management, “standardized” jobs were in the focus of the authorities and their plan targets were thus often increased.Footnote ²²

In the 1960s, the entire eastern bloc underwent a labor shortage crisis. Since post-Stalinist leaders generally abandoned sheer coercion in labor force distribution, they tried to find material incentives within the existing economic infrastructure to motivate workers for the needed jobs. Hence the parallel efforts to increase wage flexibility through decentralization and the self-responsibility of enterprises throughout the bloc. As Burawoy pointed out, however, only “in Hungary did they have some staying power.”Footnote ²³

After the onset of labor migration from Poland in the 1960s, when Polish border regions were relieved from the presence of unemployed women and the CSSR received a needed labor force, the contours of the “win-win” project changed dramatically by the turn of the decade. The new administration of Edward Gierek, who came to power as a “savior” of Poland after the so-called “December riots” of 1970, uncovered a new source of wealth: western loans. Of course, he was not the only eastern bloc leader who made use of détente as well as the US dollar glut on international financial markets to turn to the west for help, but he was surely the most extravagant one.Footnote ²⁴ Without restructuring the Polish economic and political system, and due to rising interest rates on the world financial market, Poland quickly proved unable to pay the money back and thus sank into the spiral of new credits taken on to pay old debts.Footnote ²⁵

Gierek's “Grande Bouffe” from 1971 to roughly 1974 had a serious effect on Polish-Czechoslovak cooperation in the labor force.Footnote ²⁶ Heated investment in industry created 2.2 million new jobs, including for women.Footnote ²⁷ Increased nominal wages with frozen prices on food led to a significant rise in real wages. The average annual percentage increase in real wages in 1971–1975 in the eastern bloc was highest in Poland (7.2%), compare to 3.5% in Czechoslovakia.Footnote ²⁸ Although it probably did not make the wages in the textile industry the same in both countries, the wage gap diminished as a result.Footnote ²⁹

Besides the newly-created employment, the size of the workforce in Poland was also partly influenced by rising demographic concerns of the Polish government. The emphasis on production gradually shifted to reproduction. Pro-natality policies—mainly an extension of maternity leave—followed.Footnote ³⁰ In addition, Czechoslovakia had been doing the same since the 1960s, accelerating in the 1970s. Childcare allowances, extended unpaid and paid maternity leave, low-interest loans for young families, and one-off benefits for a newly-born child were some of the policies pursued. Hence, both states created attractive alternatives at the expense of female employment. Archival materials prove that these fertility-boosting policies had a direct impact on Czechoslovak textile plants where the Polish workers were employed. The flax-processing company Texlen Trutnov, with almost 6,000 employees (70% female), indicated in its analyses of job-turnover rates from 1976 that the “government's pro-natality measures [adopted in 1971] increased the turnover rate in the enterprise by about one per cent.”Footnote ³¹

The two states successfully cooperated on labor force issues into the late 1960s. The new Gierek administration intensified the negotiations. In the light of rapid economic changes, however, Poland increased its demands. Polish leaders realized that the already well-known shortages in the male labor force might also concern women. At the same time, to pay off its loans, Poland focused on export capacities. One of the most successful export items was labor. Hence, Poland demanded “recruitment compensation” to cover the costs to Polish authorities for recruitment and “care” for Polish workers sent abroad.Footnote ³² The full recruitment compensation, including retroactive measures for those already working in the CSSR was to be paid only when the “stock” of Poles employed in Czechoslovakia exceeded 25,200. Since this never happened due to the rapid changes in the Polish labor market, Warsaw was paid only for newly recruited workers who came after the 1972 Agreement was signed. Hence, Poland was not fully satisfied with the new agreement. But the Czechoslovaks were not satisfied, either: their Central Planning Committee had been especially critical of the negligible economic profit from the cooperation already beginning in the late 1960s, due to the high price of Polish workers.Footnote ³³

It is therefore natural to ask why this model of cooperation continued when it was no longer convenient for any of the parties, which had become closer to each other in terms of the economy and labor. On the macro-level, there is a political and economic answer, tightly linked to the state-socialist regime. In terms of the economy, the international context needs to be considered: the new leaderships in both Poland (after 1970) and Czechoslovakia (after 1969) were obviously prone to a “reset” in bilateral relations after Polish participation in the invasion of August 1968. No one wanted an open conflict on such a minor issue.Footnote ³⁴ This political and economic shift completely reconfigured the nature of this cooperation. Whereas the Czechoslovak side officially termed the cooperation as help to a “friendly nation” regarding unemployment and the training of youth, it was now the Poles who—facing the economic uselessness of the program—claimed that “the employment of our workers in the CSSR and the GDR on the basis of the current governmental agreements is as a matter of fact an expression of help to these countries and it does not bring us any real profit.”Footnote ³⁵

The economic reasons for the continuation of the program were not so straightforward. Information derived from archival sources suggests that the negotiation was to a large extent misinformed by the Polish prognosis of the available labor force.Footnote ³⁶ The cumbersome bureaucratic system of economic planning operating mostly in five-year periods was not able to flexibly reevaluate its prognosis vis-à-vis the rapid investment driven by foreign credits. Only after the 1972 Agreement was signed was it proven that Poland was also running out of available female labor.

At the enterprise level, the detrimental effects of economic planning were even more salient. Since production targets reliant on foreign labor were all set by the plan, managers made every effort to receive enough (or rather more) workers. In addition, the experience with the guest labor program played a significant role. Over the past decade, foreign labor had kept alive production lines that would have otherwise been modernized or terminated. Moreover, the longer the foreign labor maintained this ineffective production, the more the management became dependent on it.Footnote ³⁷ An account from 1976 of the above-mentioned company Texlen Trutnov could serve as an example of how the “deformation” of the labor market was finally understood on the company level. On one hand, the employment of Polish workers boosted production, but on the other it increased the labor problems after the Poles return home. Because the Poles were much easier to obtain than local workers, “the recruitment, apprenticeship and further training of the local workforce as well as tutoring the key personnel had been totally neglected” for too long of a time.Footnote ³⁸ These factors, enhanced also by expensive investment in accommodation facilities for the foreign workers, led most company managers to further advocate for more Polish workers.

Empowerment through Exit

The changing circumstances of labor force cooperation in the 1970s caused a significant abnormality in the approach of both states towards the contracted workers. In the activities of the Polish state in the 1970s, practical interests in keeping the much-needed source of both production and reproduction at home surfaced behind the caring and controlling efforts of the state. As a consequence, Czechoslovakia intensified their efforts to keep foreign labor within their companies at any cost. Hence, there was an opportunity for Polish women to break out of “socialist paternalism.”

Negligible economic profit—as perceived by both sides—naturally diminished the role of sanctions. Although the 1972 Agreement stipulated a strict list of duties and obligations of both sides as well as the exact numbers of workers (in yearly protocols) that were to be sent to Czechoslovakia, the sanctions in cases where duties were not met (nonfulfillment of these numbers) were undefined. Thus, the “caring activities” of the Polish state became a useful form of leverage in the effort to keep this scarce labor force at home. This concerned, especially, frequent controls of the work space and accommodation conditions. Whenever Polish inspectors found the housing conditions in a factory inappropriate, they delayed the “delivery” of the workers or refused to send them at all until the shortcomings were fixed.Footnote ³⁹

Another theme where care—entangled with control—served practical economic and demographic purposes was morality. Polish authorities were active in watching and punishing any “bad behavior” on the part of the workers. The officially-proclaimed aim was to protect “the good name of the Polish nation” abroad. Whenever disobedience was identified by the Polish authorities, the Czechoslovak authorities were asked to dismiss the “sinner” so that she was sent back to Poland.Footnote ⁴⁰ As a consequence, Polish companies received the needed worker back.

The Polish women increased their “value” even further by choosing to stay abroad for good. The easiest way to do this was a mixed marriage. Mixed marriages were not a new phenomenon. Between 1962 and 1969, some 500 marriages between Polish textile workers and Czech men were contracted.Footnote ⁴¹ But only in the next decade this did become a topic of primary concern for the Polish authorities. As a matter of fact, the criticized moral transgressions were often perceived in the context of mixed marriages. Sexual relations, and especially pregnancy, were interpreted as a way to push a Czech man into marriage.Footnote ⁴² The first tangible measure to counteract the emigration of workers through mixed marriage was a requirement to concentrate workers in groups of no less than fifty. The idea behind this was to minimize contact with Czechs so that the scattered small groups of Poles in many side-plants would be brought together. The same idea inspired efforts to restrain employment outside the border regions just a few years after this option was allowed. Working in inland factories far away from the Polish environment meant being housed there (non-commuting), and, according to the Polish authorities, raised the probability of mixed marriage with Czech men.Footnote ⁴³ It is hard to estimate whether these measures had any success since the number of mixed marriages continued to rise. In the 1970s, the number was roughly ten times higher than the previous decade.Footnote ⁴⁴ Indeed, the decision to marry cannot be simply assessed as a move of calculated bargaining leverage, but the women surely knew that it was also a way to escape the reach of the Polish authorities. In one instance, Polish clerks visited the company Stap to solve a conflict between Polish worker Maria K. and a Polish “group leader” at the plant. The solution was made to dismiss Maria K. for disciplinary reasons and return her to Poland. She stayed in the CSSR and continued working there, however, because she married her Czech boyfriend promptly after the conflict. The report describing the situations reads: “On the margin we should add that K. would not have married J. [her Czech boyfriend] had there not been such a decision [her dismissal] made.” Footnote ⁴⁵

These efforts of the Polish authorities to bring their workers home (or not to send them at all) thus revealed a sort of “reverse” dependency.Footnote ⁴⁶ In Verdery's “family” metaphor of “socialist paternalism,” one important fact is “a substantial reorganization of gender roles within its nuclear families, increasing the degree of gender equality in them” because the labor-intensive state-socialist economy necessarily required “the labor power of everyone regardless of sex.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Although Verdery originally meant in her text the growing gender equality among subordinates, in the case of Polish workers in Czechoslovakia, the scarcity of labor influenced—and to some extend equalized—the relations between the “father” state and the “daughter” worker.Footnote ⁴⁸

The position of Czechoslovakia made the task of maintaining this program harder for the Polish authorities, and might have played a crucial role in their decision to reduce the program in the late 1970s. Company managers and ministerial officials cooperated in the care of the Poles but subverted their control. They were highly motivated to do the former so as to avoid any pretext for losing the foreign labor or being refused its “delivery” by the Polish side. In a way, Poland played the role of a “real” trade union, because the official Revolutionary Trade Union Movement (ROH) in the CSSR was just another part of the same state body as was the employer. After 1975, Polish authorities were no longer obliged to supply a new work force, so the Czechoslovaks were totally dependent on their free will in that regard. The company management faced a delicate situation whenever a conflict between a Polish worker and Polish authorities took place. In case of any “transgressions” by the workers (before the Polish authorities got involved), companies striving to live up to their production plans showed them undue tolerance, since they wanted to keep the Polish working women at any cost. Of course, it is not described as such in the company archives, since tolerating absenteeism as the most frequent “breach of discipline” (often related to excessive alcohol consumption and other factors) was against both Czechoslovak law and the 1972 Agreement. On the contrary, statistics reveal that “disciplinary reasons” were still a relatively frequent cause for the dismissal of Polish workers by the companies.Footnote ⁴⁹ But this might have been just the tip of the iceberg.Footnote ⁵⁰ One can get an overview of the broad scale of tolerance from the already-mentioned de facto ban on the dismissal of Polish workers at a number of factories. As was stipulated in July 1973 in the East Bohemian Papermills in the town of Lanškroun: “A radical solution to reduce the undesirable absences cannot be well implemented because to dismiss some of the workers for this disobedience would cause further decrease in the number of workers without any hope of receiving new ones [from Poland].”Footnote ⁵¹ Since this trend subverted the will of the social-paternalist Polish state to execute its disciplining power over its workers, it was received with great caution.Footnote ⁵²

Moreover, if the workers felt unsatisfied with the decision of either party, they could appeal to the other.Footnote ⁵³ Furthermore, as a “final step” to solve dissatisfaction with working conditions in Czechoslovakia the option (for most workers) existed of “exit.” The workers had nothing to lose. The same applied–although, naturally, in much lower numbers–to deliberate exit from Poland via mixed marriage, i.e. permanent emigration.Footnote ⁵⁴ Even if none of these options was utilized, the “threat” served as a form of leverage that radically increased bargaining power and empowered the workers vis-a-vis the cooperating states.

Escaping Production

The extension of “leisure time” while at a job was surely most frequent means that Polish women workers used their agency to escape the “production burden.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Of course, this was not officially granted, but it was tolerated. More precisely, it was frequently denounced and criticized but often without any consequences. It took the form of unauthorized sick days, prolonged weekends and vacations, and making unscheduled pauses.

In addition to these disciplinary transgressions, I came across instances when a sort of a special regime was granted to workers who proved to be particularly efficient and important for the company management, despite the fact that these workers did not belong to the most skilled groups—so called “majster” workers—the backbone of the plant staff. This was the case of Franciszka W., whose advantage stemmed primarily from her work experience and fast learning of Czech.Footnote ⁵⁶ Unlike most of her colleagues, she decided to stay at the job for a standard period and even to prolong her term twice, so that she worked at the costume jewelry company Preciosa Turnov for eight years in total. Hence, she learned the techniques well, her work productivity rose, and she even became a sort of unofficial yet useful mediator and interpreter between new Polish workers and the company management. This all resulted in her special relationship with the plant managers, who rewarded her with extra holidays and various kinds of excuses from production work.

Besides direct (unauthorized) absences, Polish workers also excessively used “indirect” (officially excused) ways to escape work. As revealed in archives, abusing sick leave was a permanent problem, including the widely used medical checks by doctors in Poland.Footnote ⁵⁷ Czechoslovak companies were unable to confirm the validity of such medical certificates, often written on various non-standard forms or just scraps of paper.Footnote ⁵⁸ Moreover, they could not control whether the worker stayed at home and was properly cured. Hence, it is more than obvious that sick leave served in many cases to prolong regular visits (weekends, holidays) of the workers to Poland.Footnote ⁵⁹

Generating broader leisure time within the terms of employment, however, was not the only way to eschew the burden of production. Presumably, one form of escape could transform into another, as a rule, more profitable economic activity that took place during (in such cases overlapping with the avoidance of “production” activity) or after the shift. This concerned purchasing products that were in short supply in Poland, such as shoes, clothing (especially for children), or alcohol and meat products. Hence, the role of the workers shifted—and maybe prevailed as a decisive motivation to come to the CSSR—from that of “producer” to “consumer.” The possibility to buy scarce goods abroad served as an incentive to come already in the 1960s, but workers could at that time spend only a limited sum while in the CSSR. In 1973, the obligation of workers to transfer part of their salary in zloty to Polish bank accounts was waved. The Poles could thus spend their full wages in the CSSR and bring to Poland items (in strictly specified quantities) for themselves and their family members. Clerks in Veba Broumov analyzed the situation of Polish workers in 1973 as follows: “Many young girls are coming to us these days but only with a desire to shop here as much as possible. It happens that once the Polish worker buys everything she planned, she loses interest in work in the CSSR.”Footnote ⁶⁰ At the same time, whenever something important was missing in Czech shops around the factory or whenever unexpected difficulties occurred at border checkpoints, the willingness to work in the CSSR decreased. For instance, another plant in the Veba Broumov Company referred about sixteen Polish female workers who did not return from their vacation in Poland. When a company clerk went to Poland to personally look for them, they told him that they would not come back to Czechoslovakia because of “a limited opportunity to buy and transfer the goods they sought (namely peanuts).”Footnote ⁶¹

Indeed, much higher economic profit could be achieved when the limits for transferred goods per each worker (seven kilograms of meat and thirty of other food per month) were illegally broken. Trafficking, smuggling, and illegal money exchange on the Czechoslovak-Polish border dated to the interwar era, and the Polish workers were smoothly integrated within this tradition from the inception of the program.Footnote ⁶² In the 1970s and 1980s, however, Polish workers in particular were given a special opportunity in this regard. Although the most active group in these terms consisted of “fake” Polish tourists, smuggling and reselling goods by workers also rose to an unprecedented scale.Footnote ⁶³ This problem was acknowledged by both cooperating countries, form the “top” level to the individual enterprises.Footnote ⁶⁴ For instance, in the company Seba Tanvald, one of the Polish women was deported to Poland because she was convicted by a court for “trafficking in textiles.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The already mentioned Franciszka was luckier. She told me that after some years in Czechoslovakia, she was so experienced in the trafficking business that she could pay her colleagues in the plant (either directly or by providing them with her trafficking “services”) to fulfill the production quotas for her. Thus, she gained additional free time in exchange for revenues from trafficking. “I dealt with everything,” Franciszka recalled, “I started with baby wear and ended up with… gold!”Footnote ⁶⁶

…and Reproduction

Finally, analogous to the time spend outside “production” work, another “bonus” was the time spent without family. Unlike with the previous topic, this included the whole period of stay in the CSSR, including during shifts, after shifts, and during (unauthorized) absences on Czechoslovak territory. In the 1970s, with the above-described economic changes, different groups of women had to be recruited. To satisfy growing Czechoslovak demand for labor, Polish authorities turned to remote regions in the Polish east. Young girls from small rural settlements were surely motivated not only by higher wages (often exaggerated and in fact less impressive) but also by the desire to get away from the patriarchal control of their conservative environment, which pushed them into a maternal role as soon as possible.Footnote ⁶⁷ As one of my respondents recalls: “As far as I know, I would say that mostly, the main motive [for the workers to arrive] was adventure… to go somewhere, to learn something, maybe even stay. For sure, some of them, because they were girls from the countryside, they surely wanted to flee, simply anywhere, although no one knew where we were going till the very last moment.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Time spent outside of the usual social control mattered.

No less important in this regard was the way time on the other side of the border was spent. As with economic activities without production previously described, so with sexual activities without reproduction. Although it is hard to capture this theme in statistical terms, all of my respondents were quite open in saying that many of the young Polish workers had Czech boyfriends, either from or outside of the plant. This leads me to the sensitive topic of the allegedly excessive promiscuity and unrestrained sexual relationships of the young Polish women. Irena, another of my respondents from Wałbrzych, recalled how painful it was for her when she and her colleagues were called “sluts” by bystanders in her hometown whenever everyday buses with the workers came back from the other side of the border.Footnote ⁶⁹ My respondents admitted that these things did take place, however, especially among workers employed for a shorter period of time. In the 1970s, those particularly active in one-night sexual relationships were young but married women who used the opportunity to get out of their family routine.Footnote ⁷⁰ As Franciszka put it, “these girls were already quite experienced, they were not shy, and they wanted to take a rest from their kids and husbands.” Hence, the “escape from families” concerned not only the parental family of origin, or postponing motherhood, but also escape from families of procreation.

Archival materials are evasive on this matter unless it went beyond the usual scale. Such a case can be observed, for instance, at the Zora chocolate plant, located in the town of Olomouc. According to a report by the Polish Embassy in Prague, various disciplinary transgressions against “good manners” took place there, especially alcoholism, absences, and prostitution “with Arabs and Austrians.” Furthermore, Polish workers organized floor shows and balls and demanded the free entry of men into their dormitory.Footnote ⁷¹ The Polish repressive authorities were called into action here. The main “troublemaker” among the workers was eventually dismissed from the job, as the Polish authorities steadily insisted. Other reports reveal not only “non-reproductive” sexual behavior among the Polish workers, but echo deeper concerns about the very core of the “reproduction base”: the woman's body. A moral panic surfaced from an internal report of a top-level inspection (the director of a ministerial department in Warsaw) at one of the Czechoslovak plants in 1971. The director was “ashamed by the mess caused by Polish women in their new boardinghouse,” but he was even more alarmed by the fact that the women “are in relationships with Gypsies, blacks and other random men” without being punished by the Czechoslovak authorities. He suggested “firing immediately” these “demoralized” women since they “disqualify” the whole group.Footnote ⁷²

The intensive contact of the Polish women with Russian soldiers from the 1968 invasion must have been a delicate issue for the authorities. It is difficult to condemn relationships with “Soviet heroes” who saved the CSSR from “contra-revolution.” Franciszka explained: “Our first group of Polish workers arrived in the town of Turnov just half a year after the occupation and Soviet soldiers had already set up a big military base in the town. The local Czechs hated the Russians…but they did not like the Poles either because our army joined the invasion in the borderlands where we worked. So, it was natural that the Polish girls went every day to the Russian barracks to drink booze and party….The Russians were not strangers to us. We had been occupied by them since 1945!”Footnote ⁷³

The Czechoslovak authorities monitored the “moral delinquency” related to sexuality as well. They were primarily concerned with the economic effects of the absenteeism that was openly linked to contacts with Czech (or other) partners.Footnote ⁷⁴ However, accounts from the factory level where local staff cooperated closely with Polish women seem to be more balanced and apprehensive. A report about the company Seba Tanvald describes a newly arrived group of 153 workers from the easternmost Polish region of Białystok with a sort of tenderness: “Most girls from that region are decent maidens but the fact that they have been away from home for the very first time sometimes gives them a feeling of having too much freedom.”Footnote ⁷⁵ A “new method” of reducing absenteeism was developed by the company Rico Kocléřov. In every case of unauthorized absence by a Polish worker, the company did not react with ineffective financial sanctions any longer but sent a personal letter directly to the parents of the worker instead.Footnote ⁷⁶ And this method—according to company reports—did work. The management in Rico company tacitly proved that they understood why many of the women really came and how important the escape from “family control” (of both real a family and a metaphoric one: the socialist state) was.

When the director Josef Findejs eventually decided to punish the worker Krystyna K., who had disappeared without permission for four days from the plant and “visited wine shops and restaurants with odd company (s různou společností),” he reduced her number of vacation days. Two days after the meeting with the director she quit completely, however, and left for Poland without explanation.Footnote ⁷⁷ Her “partner in crime,” Genowefa K., expressed her apologies and willingness to stay at the company. Thus, Mr. Findejs only “strongly warned her and gave her a new chance at the same time” without any sanction.Footnote ⁷⁸ The “socialist paternalism” with its disciplining power is somewhat weak-fisted in this case. What created such an opportunity for the Polish female “guest” workers to gain their own agency was a combination of a genuine state effort to care—the crucial legitimizing ground for late state-socialism—with the aftermath of economic and political abnormalities inherent in the regime of the two “cooperating” (competing?) states. Rigid central planning with no capacity to react efficiently to macro-economic and labor market change determined the state of affairs, accompanied with a self-consuming labor force economy on the one hand and the political imperatives of druzhba (friendship) orchestrated by Moscow on the other.

The surveillance of peripheral (non-privileged) workers, described by Burawoy, did not vanish. Yet, the continuation of labor force cooperation despite the urgent shortage of workers that appeared unexpectedly on both sides of the border suddenly made the Polish women an active and empowered subject of everyday bargaining at the shop-floor level rather than just the passive object of intergovernmental agreements.Footnote ⁷⁹

Also, Mark Pittaway's findings about the crucial role of local skilled—and chiefly older male—workers in state-socialist regimes remained intact. The masculinized “respectability” both within and beyond the workplace is unchallenged.Footnote ⁸⁰ But his assessment of unskilled, female and “freshmen” labor is placed in question by the case of the Polish women workers in Czechoslovakia. Although their characteristics would make them rather vulnerable and destined to exploitation, the outcomes of my research reveal a somewhat different picture.

With regard to Alena Alamgir's conclusions, certainly the closest to my own findings, I have to reject her “Manichean” distinction between “socialist internationalism” and market “commodification,” as well as her somewhat idealized image of the “caring” socialist state. My case study revealed a great deal of “conflict,” not only between the “cooperating” countries but also between the ideology (or, maybe, fear of Moscow's response) and the economic needs of slowly collapsing late-socialist states, and also between the states and their citizens. The latter point is most obvious when comparing the states’ effort to bring women into their production and reproduction roles with the reaction to that effort by the Polish female workers in the CSSR.

Interestingly enough, what allowed the women to escape from the double burden was not escaping their gender roles. Somewhat contrary to Verdery's concept of “socialist paternalism,” they stayed in this role but “played” it in a redefined version. To exercise their gender identity as not-only-mother or not-yet-mother was often the reason why they came to Czechoslovakia and/or what inspired their activities there. Moreover, their genuinely gendered role of potential wives of Czech men was an attractive instrument by which to elude their Polish “masters.”

How was their “abuse of work force shortage” perceived in the Polish women's environment? Given both the caring and coercive nature of state socialism, no one should wonder that the documents are extremely gender-biased, and heavily burdened by paternalist normative viewpoints. The role of older men (management, state, or party officials) is to correct the naïve and “naughty” girls, and bring them back to the correct path. (The reverse side of the same coin might have been their naming as “sluts” by neighbors in their home towns.) Except for some lower-management factory accounts, no rationality was found or even being looked for behind these “transgressions,” not to mention the totally ignored role of Czech men in the partnerships. Returning to the example from Velveta Varnsdorf, the word “to abuse” (hřeší), “to sin” in literal translation, is very much characteristic for the overall attitude towards the Polish women.

What has been completely neglected is the fact that the behavior of the workers might have been a reaction to the day-to-day shortcomings of state socialism. Women were pushed to work directly or indirectly but in lower-paid jobs.Footnote ⁸¹ Moreover, having a job often did not secure being able to afford basic goods—to say nothing of luxuries—as it was simply not available on the market. Hence, securing goods in short supply or doing more profitable economic activities instead of production work seems quite rational. A similar approach applies to the “reproduction burden” as well. Not only was this “burden” never fully respected as a value that would liberate women from their working obligations, or at least from caring for a household (including “full service” to a husband), but the woman's body was instrumentalized as a subject of a state's “wise” biopolitics with an exclusive focus on maternity. Hence, it is again amply rational that women used any opportunity to exit (at least temporarily) their role in society—tightly restricted by male design—as well as to express a non-reproductive dimension of their sexuality.