The conditions of Working Women in Tito’s Yugoslavia

The position of working women in Yugoslavia Tito.

 “As a result of the counter-revolutionary policy of the Tito-Ranković clique, which usurped party and state power, an anti-communist police state, a regime of the fascist type, was established in Yugoslavia.”  (Resolution of the Information Bureau of November 29, 1949.)

In every state where the exploitation of the minority by the majority exists, the workers and peasant women are doubly oppressed: firstly, by capital, and secondly, by what Lenin would call “domestic slavery”, they are burdened with the lowest, most ungrateful, most difficult and most painful tasks: tasks related to the personal family household.

And like the capitalist state that it is, the post-war regime established by Tito and his cabal in Yugoslavia offered that reality for working women.  They were fired indiscriminately from “self-managed” capitalist enterprises; when they got a job, they were paid worse than men for the same job; the state forced them to do housework; they were left to their own devices, without any unemployment benefits, maternity benefits, etc.

The following text, written in 1953 by Ekaterina Avramova, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Bulgaria, very well describes the situation of working women under the police regime established by Tito’s butchers in Yugoslavia, and gives some facts about this regime.

Slave status of women in Yugoslavia.  [Ekaterina Avramova; 1953]

As is always the case in the capitalist world, and even more so today, in the period of the imperialists’ frenzied preparations for war, women and youth in the capitalist countries are the victims of the most ruthless exploitation.  In fascist Yugoslavia, the exploitation of women and youth is carried out with bestial strength.  All the horrors of capitalism, restored by the treacherous gang of Tito, are felt, first of all, by the working people of Yugoslavia.

After the liberation of Yugoslavia by the Soviet army, the Tito gang, trying to disguise its disgusting appearance of traitors and spies, was forced, under pressure from the masses, to pretend that it would adhere to the path firmly chosen by all the peoples of central and south eastern Europe liberated by the Soviet army – the path of the people’s democracy.  The Yugoslav Constitution of 1946 not only proclaimed the equality of women, but also contained some provisions guaranteeing such equality: equal pay for equal work, legal protection of mother and child, opening of nurseries, kindergartens and other centres for the welfare of children.

Today, not a trace remains of these rights, won with the blood of the Yugoslav workers.  The principle of equal pay for equal work has long been buried, and the Yugoslav workers are once again forced to fight for this principle.

In Yugoslavia, the false “theories” of bourgeois economists are officially put forward that, since the productivity of women workers is lower than that of men, women are paid less for the same work than men.  For example, women working at the Napredak and Albus factories in Novi Sad are paid 15 per cent less than men for the same job.  Often the pay gap is 20-30 percent.  Currently, plant managers in Yugoslavia can use their discretion and set wage rates.  Thus, the capitalist-proprietors are constantly reducing the wages and, first of all, the wages of women.

For women in rural areas, the situation is no better.  Peasant women do the hardest work in Tito’s kulak “friends”, and everywhere they are paid less than men.

The fascist regime abolished not only the right of women to equal pay, but also an elementary human right – the right to work.  Subordinating the economy to the interests of preparing for war, the Yugoslav accomplices of US imperialism are increasingly curtailing civilian production.  The decline is especially noticeable in the textile and food industries, where women are predominantly employed.  This has already led to mass unemployment among women.  At present, according to far from complete figures, there are almost 130,000 unemployed women in industry in Yugoslavia.  The total number of unemployed does not include young unemployed women, as well as those who have learned a profession but cannot find work.  There are 20,000 unemployed women in Belgrade alone.  The number of unemployed is constantly growing.  The columns of the Titoist newspapers are full of advertisements for women ready to do any job.  In one of the last months of 1952, the Mediation Bureau in Belgrade received 1,500 applications from women of various professions.

 The Yugoslav fascist rulers, who are leading the country into economic and political disaster, are trying to fire as many women as possible, and they are especially targeting expectant mothers and mothers with young children.  Tito himself, the leader of the fascist gang, admits that over 90,000 married women have been fired from enterprises in the past twelve months.  In an attempt to justify their barbaric treatment of women, the Titoists have come up with the theory that Yugoslavia, they say, has entered a “socialist” phase of development, when women can safely return to their homes and devote themselves to cooking and raising children.  This is simply a repetition of Hitler’s statement that women are good only for the kitchen, the children and the church.

State protection of mother and child is one of the necessary conditions for the true equality of women.  The Tito gang has completely abolished the social benefit for working women.  Both employed and unemployed women, despite false negotiations with women leaders of the so-called “anti-fascist women’s front”, were left to fend for themselves.  The bourgeois newspaper Politika in Serbia cynically writes: “It is difficult to argue with the need to create better conditions for the children of workers and employees than those that their parents had. We are not against the construction of child care facilities, but today, when every dinar has to be taken into account, especially  after the drought, we must be more modest.Unwilling to tell the truth, “Politics” says nothing about the fate of the dinars, squeezed out of the sweat and blood of the people of Yugoslavia.At the same time, 78.6 percent of the 1953 budget will be spent on military spending.What  talking about building child care facilities when the Titoists, spurred on by American warmongers, hasten the construction of airstrips, strategic roads and military barracks?

 The state of public health and, above all, the health of children is a harsh indictment against the bloody regime of Tito.  Tito’s gang of murderers increased the infant mortality rate to the level of the colonial countries.  Mortality among newborns in some areas of Yugoslavia reaches 50 percent.  Not surprisingly, a Titoist newspaper recently wrote that in Yugoslavia “every second grave is a child’s grave.”

 Women in Yugoslavia work, if they have a job at all, until the moment they are about to give birth.  And they give birth to children in conditions that threaten the life of mother and child.  For example, in 1952 in the Sarajevo region, only 20 births out of 2,194 were attended by a doctor or midwife.

 Recently Tito’s obscurantists carried out a “reorganization” of the healthcare system, which meant, in fact, not only the cessation of any concern for the health of the working population, but also the cessation of any responsibility on the part of the central health authorities.  According to this reorganization, all medical institutions in Yugoslavia must be … self-sufficient.  Now employees pay for all medical services.

While the governments of the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies are helping the people in every possible way to strengthen the family, the family in Tito’s Yugoslavia, on the contrary, is being destroyed.  The number of abandoned and street children is steadily growing and is approaching 400,000. This has led to an increase in juvenile delinquency.  In Skopje, for example, 75 juvenile delinquents committed 338 crimes during 1952.  These were not cases of theft, but, in the words of the New Macedonia newspaper, “deliberate and egregious crimes.”

 From these facts, Tito’s newspapers draw the conclusion: the responsibility lies solely with the parents, they are to blame for the poor upbringing of their children.

 Don’t the butchers in Belgrade know that most of the fathers died fighting for their country against the Nazi occupation?  In addition, more than 250,000 fathers and mothers, Yugoslav patriots, languish in the prisons and concentration camps of Ranković.  Many workers and peasants are marching across the country in search of work to save their families from starvation.  For all these reasons, many children are left to their own devices and the pernicious influence of American gangster films and political literature that has flooded Yugoslavia.

 The Titoists want the youth to be trained like fascist cutthroats.  That is why they are increasingly insisting that the upbringing of children should be taken out of the control of parents.  They argue that children in the family are exposed to “reactionary” and “anti-socialist” influences.  The introduction of compulsory two-year non-barracks military service for young people shows the extent of the Titoist plans for young people.  Bandit Tito claimed that 230,000 girls in the country were trained in this way.  “Just imagine,” says this US imperialist mercenary, “what it means to have 230,000 trained nurses; that’s a huge army.”

Their American masters need cannon fodder, and Tito obediently prepares it for them.  This is the real reason for Tito’s preoccupation with the “education” of children and youths.

 Without political rights, doomed to unemployment, poverty, hunger, humiliation, unbearable motherhood and the ominous threat of a new war – such is the position of women in Yugoslavia thanks to the Tito gang.

 The women of Yugoslavia, who experienced and endured countless hardships during the Second World War and the Nazi occupation, do not want a new war.  And it can be said with certainty that they do not want a war against the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies.  The lies and slander of the Titoist traitors will never be able to erase from the memory of the Yugoslav people that it was the Soviet Army that liberated them from the Nazi yoke, that the Soviet Union is the best friend of the peoples of Yugoslavia.  The women of Yugoslavia have not forgotten the songs about the great and wise Stalin, which they composed with such love during and after the war.  They know that their friends are not to be found among the oppressors and executioners in America, they are not to be found among the Athenian monarcho-fascists or the Turkish reactionaries;  their friends can be found in the camp of peace, democracy and socialism.

 Firmly confident in the victory of their just cause, the women of Yugoslavia, together with male patriots, rise with growing determination to fight against the scoundrels of Tito, who robbed and deceived the people of Yugoslavia, deprived them of all rights, reduced them to poverty and expelled them from the camp of peace, throwing misanthropes into the camp and  killers.  In Yugoslavia, tens of thousands of brave patriotic women are in the prisons and concentration camps of Ranković and are constantly subjected to brutal repression by the courts.  But this cannot break the will of the women of Yugoslavia, who want to fight and win.  More and more patriotic women are rising up to take the place of the victims of the UGB [Gos.  Security of Yugoslavia (UDBA) – approx.  editions].  The female workers in the factories are fighting with the greatest tenacity against cruel exploitation.  The peasant women, for their part, are fighting against excessive taxes and outright robbery.  More and more women are leaving the Titoist women’s organization, tired of listening to disgusting fascist demagogy.

The women of Yugoslavia have accumulated considerable experience in the struggle against the Nazi invaders.  Today they use this experience in the struggle against the fascist Tito gang, in the struggle for bread and the lives of their children, for the complete liberation of their country from the clutches of American and British warmongers and their Yugoslav mercenaries, in the struggle for national independence, for peace and socialism,  for friendship with the great Soviet Union and the people’s democracies.

 The women of Yugoslavia strive to return to the camp of peace-loving peoples, and together with the working class and all working people they will achieve this.

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