Welcome to a migration seminar titled Building Migration Industry: Socialist Yugoslavia’s agenda for labour migrants’ pre-departure training.

Speaker

Mato Bošnjak, PhD student in history and historydidactics, Department of Society, Culture and Identity,
Malmö University

Abstract

In recent decades labour migrants’ pre-departure training flourish in developing countries in Southeast Asia where a cohesion of states’ and private interests has shaped the region in one of the world's capitals of industrialised labour migration. In these countries, pre-departure training is implemented mainly by private labour recruitment agencies which established themselves as an unavoidable link in migration chains between labour sending and receiving countries. This study explores the Yugoslav state’s effort to solely implement pre-departure training of workers recruited for jobs in Western industrialised countries during late 1960s and early 1970s. The study draws on primary archival sources produced by Yugoslavia’s highest-ranking governing bodies and key stakeholders in labour migration. It elucidates the Yugoslav government’s objectives and attitudes and its attempts to establish pre-departure training as a regular platform for sending workers abroad and thus increase the state’s profit and control over labour migration. Thus, the study shows the Yugoslav government’s attempt to transform Yugoslavia into a prototype of ‘labour brokerage state’ – a state that plays a critical role in selecting, producing, distributing, regulating, and ensuring the quality of exported labour, as recent studies usually refer to labour sending countries in Southeast Asia. Similarly to recent studies, this study indicates the gendered nature of pre-departure training and the jobs for which they prepared migrant workers, but in contrast, this study suggests that, in the case of Yugoslavia, it was predominantly men who underwent pre-departure training for male-typical jobs in Western labour markets.

Attendance

This is a hybrid seminar, you are welcome to connect via Zoom or join us at MIM seminar room, floor 9, Niagara, Nordenskiöldsgatan 1. To attend on campus, please gather by the reception area at 13.05.
If you have any questions, send an email to mim@mau.se.

Zoom

Link will be available closer to the seminar date.

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