Gender-equal or gender-blind? Rethinking Yugoslavia’s labour migration policy by Mato Bošnjak

Yugoslavia’s post‑war labour migration has long been recognised as a defining feature of the country’s development, but its gendered dimensions remain insufficiently examined. This blog post asks whether the Yugoslav state’s management of labour migration stood in striking contrast to its domestic policies of gender equality and women’s emancipation. It reflects on whether women in Yugoslavia experienced their most equal treatment within the institutionalised management of labour migration to the West.

Labour migration as a marker of Yugoslavia’s distinctiveness

During the post‑war decades, Yugoslavia became one of the major labour‑sending countries in Europe. The scale of this movement made women from Yugoslavia one of the largest groups of female labour migrants in Western industrialised countries. Like most female labour migrants, they were predominantly young, poorly educated, and inexperienced workers.[1] This development was shaped by two mutually reinforcing factors: women’s widespread exclusion from opportunity structures within Yugoslavia, and the state’s labour migration policy, which supported the employment abroad of unqualified labour surpluses from the country’s underdeveloped areas. In other words, the Yugoslav state envisioned labour migration as a state‑supported outlet for individuals marginalised within the educational system and labour market and excluded from broader social mobility within Yugoslavia.

Although Yugoslavia shared the socialist commitment to labour and workers as the foundation of country’s development, it early abandoned the promise of full employment and increasingly aligned itself with Western market principles.[2] By the 1960s, this shift extended to border‑regime and migration policies. As official unemployment rose sharply and persistently, outward labour migration expanded steadily, continuing a much longer historical pattern of mobility from the territories that constituted socialist Yugoslavia. When Yugoslavia formally legalised labour migration in 1963 and introduced a comprehensive system of regulation, the decision was not abrupt. Yet it was momentous. It made Yugoslavia the only European socialist state to openly support, engineer, and manage the migration of its workers to the capitalist West. It did not stop there, but it also extended state oversight to migrants’ social and cultural lives abroad, their remittances, and the organisation of their return.

In my article Between Unemployment and Migration, I demonstrated that the inclusion of female workers in Yugoslavia’s labour migration management was inevitable because their socio‑economic characteristics aligned with all categories prescribed for employment abroad by the Yugoslav state. Accordingly, Yugoslav authorities incorporated female workers into regulated labour migration as an integral component of the state’s strategic approach to alleviating unemployment in the country.

During the research for the article, a provocative question occurred to me: could it be that women experienced their most equal treatment not within Yugoslavia’s workplaces, educational system, or political institutions, but within the state’s management of labour migration? Might the proclaimed socialist principle of gender equality have found one of its most consistent expressions in the bureaucratic organisation of women’s employment abroad and the regulation of their working and social rights, rather than in the domestic labour market?

Between emancipation and exclusion

Despite its growing market orientation, Yugoslavia continued to publicly promote women’s equality and emancipation. It encouraged and institutionally facilitated women’s access to education, political participation, and social life, and these policies undeniably brought significant advances. Women experienced notable social mobility and entered both the educational system and the labour market in far greater numbers than before.

Yet this promising emancipatory trajectory soon collided with the realities of Yugoslavia’s slow economic development and uneven modernisation. Once post‑war labour shortages disappeared and economic crises unfolded, women’s integration into the labour market stalled. Occupational segregation deepened, and women became concentrated in feminised professions and lower levels of economic and political hierarchies.[3] This development was fuelled both by shortcomings in Yugoslav gender policies and by the persistence of conventional social norms.

Archival traces of exclusion and inclusion

It was my engagement with the extensive archival materials preserved in Yugoslav archives that gave rise to the questions explored in this blog post. In my research, I examined materials preserved by Yugoslav political and employment authorities and by sociopolitical organisations. The archival materials produced by sociopolitical organisations include reports and discussion papers on issues affecting Yugoslavia’s working population, alongside proposals for addressing these issues through legislation and policy. Recent scholarship on labour history in socialist Yugoslavia has illuminated several dimensions of social inequality, including the discrimination faced by women, and emphasised Yugoslavia’s fostering of an open dialogue and embracement of critique and self-critique as beneficial for the country’s development.[4] Yet despite my familiarity with this research, I was struck by the sheer scope of the archival documentation and its explicit, evidence‑based accounts of women’s widespread and systemic exclusion from labour market and opportunity structures across the country. I was equally struck by the persistence of these problems across reports produced by different actors over many years and decades, revealing patterns that suggest a limited or entirely absent engagement by Yugoslav authorities, both political and administrative, in addressing them.

Reports and discussion papers openly acknowledged women’s systematic and increasing discrimination in recruitment and dismissal practices, marginalisation within political and economic hierarchies, sociopolitical associations, and broader opportunity structures. They also documented the enduring strength of conventional gender norms, which conditioned girls’ widespread exclusion from primary education in rural areas and from secondary education more broadly, alongside the channelling of female youth into narrowly defined occupational trajectories socially labelled as ‘female‑appropriate’. Equally revealing are accounts of women’s dual burden of paid work and household duties, which in rural Yugoslavia frequently amounted to a triple burden as employed women not only worked full time but also carried the overwhelming responsibility household agricultural work and the care of livestock.

Combined with their broad exclusion from the labour market and the entrenched conventional understandings of social order, these conditions left women positioned at the very margins of the country’s social, economic, and political hierarchies. Since access to gainful employment meant broader access to welfare system, and higher positions within economic and political hierarchies secured additional social benefits, such as access to social housing and public leisure facilities, women were systematically excluded from equal access to multiple forms of state’s social protection.

In contrast, the archival sources that illuminate the management of labour migration present a markedly different picture. Produced by Yugoslav political and employment authorities and migration commissions responsible for regulating labour migration, these materials depict an administrative sphere in which women and men were treated equally. The processing and allocation of Western requests for Yugoslav workers, together with the organisation of departures, portrays a system in which female labour was valued, mobilised, and categorised alongside male labour without visible differentiation. Women participated in all the regulated channels available to men: in collective departures arranged through bilateral agreements between Yugoslavia and Western states, in recruitment procedures coordinated jointly by Yugoslav and Western employment authorities, and in women’s individually initiated applications for employment abroad processed by Yugoslav employment offices. As with their male counterparts, Yugoslav female labour migrants were channelled predominantly to the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria, with France, Sweden, and Switzerland constituting significant destinations in terms of overall volume and regularised recruitment.[5]

As the sources portray the system, women were guaranteed the same rights and protections provided by both the Yugoslav state and the host states. They were explicitly entitled to the same working rights as citizens of their host states, to living conditions and wages deemed appropriate, and to the overall fair treatment by employers and receiving‑state authorities. When available, they received pre‑departure training, state‑guaranteed and free‑of‑charge transport to destination countries, and integration courses upon their arrival in the destination country. Women were therefore not an afterthought or a side effect of the Yugoslav state’s management of labour migration, but an integral part of a system designed to protect its emigrating citizens, assert state sovereignty over them, and safeguard Yugoslavia’s interests.

Was migration management a success story of gender equality?

This contrast between women’s widespread domestic exclusion and their inclusion into regulated labour migration under equal terms raises a compelling question: was the management of labour migration the only successful manifestation of gender equality in socialist Yugoslavia? The history of Yugoslavia’s labour‑migration management therefore invites us to reconsider the relationship between state ideology, administrative practice, and gender equality. While domestic formal and informal structures continued to constrain women’s equal access to society’s resources, opportunities, and institutional arrangements, the bureaucratic processes governing labour migration treated women and men with a degree of equality rarely observed elsewhere in Yugoslav society. Exploring this contradiction not only enriches our understanding of Yugoslavia’s labour‑migration governance but also offers a broader reflection on the ways in which states can simultaneously uphold gender equality in one policy arena while contributing to the systemic reproduction of gender inequalities in others.

 

Mato Bošnjak is a PhD candidate in history and history didactics at Malmö University (Sweden). His thesis explores socialist Yugoslavia’s agenda for controlling, shaping, and utilising labour migration during 1960s and 1970s and the institutional and organisational frameworks it devised for achieving those objectives. His scholarly interests encompass labour and migration history and the surrounding institutional and organisational contexts. You can read Mato’s full article for Social History here.

 

References

[1] I. Baučić, ’Osnovna strukturna obilježja jugoslavenskih radnika u inozemstvu.’ Acta Geographica Croatica, 12,1 (1973), 35–88, 53–61.

[2] S. L. Woodward, Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945–1990 (Princeton University Press, 1995), 172–177.

[3] M. Bošnjak, ‘Hope and despair: female workers’ professional status in Yugoslav industry’, Economic and Industrial Democracy, (2025), 1–24, 11, 13–14.

[4] R. Archer and G. Musić, ‘Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia’, Labor History, 58, 1 (2017), 44–66; C. Bonfiglioli, ‘Discussing women’s double and triple burden in socialist Yugoslavia: women working in the garment industry’, in M. Siefert (ed.), Labor in State Socialist Europe, 1945–1989: Contributions to a Global History of Work (Central European University Press, 2020), 195–216.

[5] Baučić, op. cit., 44–45