Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the effects of Serbian state involvement in securing employment for workers in recent privatizations. Blurring the line between labour and social question, productivity and citizenship, under-productive employment creates dispersed but unstable, levelled sense of deservingness.

Paper long abstract:

After former president Milošević was overthrown in 2000, the state reformers in Serbia mixed privatizations with measures perceived as "buying social peace", namely selective incorporation of the surplus workforce into the enlarging public sector. For the increasing number of those outside of public firms, the under-productive employment they created blurred the line between categories of labour and the "social question" (Castel, 2003), ultimately destabilizing the legitimacy of employment.

I base my case on ethnography of a labour activation programme organised for Zastava Cars' workers who were made redundant, a group notoriously seen as the biggest 'victim', but also as the most privileged by state redundancy programmes. In a twist of deservingness logic that describes employment as only simulating work, Zastava Cars' unemployed portray politicians and those 'above', employees in the state sector, as the ultimate parasites. Yet they face the same accusations from those 'below' them, for being on paid redundancy programmes is taken as being not entirely abandoned by the state.

What results is an Escherian landscape of graduality of privilege, where all actors can position themselves relatively in the language of deservingness, yet never achieve absolute validity in the lack of legitimate 'work' itself. Unable to achieve a righteous position in such context, Zastava Cars' try to approximate it: claiming that they are less of parasites than those 'above', and more state-making than them. Still, this distinction is unstable, leading them to yearn for a more disembedded job market as something that will, paradoxically, enable greater legitimacy.