Ana Cvelfar, Živa Šketa and Marja Zakelšek are members of CEDRA (Centre for Social Research), a socialist organisation.

Introduction

CEDRA (Centre for Social Research) is a Slovenian organisation focused on organising workers at their workplace with the goal of building strong workers’ organisations that will unite in a single socialist workers’ movement. We understand organising for economic demands (improving workers’ rights and working conditions in individual companies or sectors) as a lever for workers’ politicisation. In this contribution, we will present an example of this approach: a feminist co-research in TUŠ, one of the retail companies in Slovenia. Our claim is that by entering the workplace and organising with workers to establish a union at TUŠ and through organising for better working conditions, we opened a terrain for political work with retail workers.

A brief history of CEDRA

CEDRA’s history can be linked back to the popular uprisings throughout Slovenia between 2012 and 2014 as a response to the government’s handling of the worsening economic crisis. A group of activists, students, and academics gathered around the informal group Delavsko-punkerska univerza and student party Iskra, articulated a desired alternative to the existing political establishment: democratic socialism – linking a socialist project with the strengthening of democratic procedures and gradual expansion of democracy from political to the economic sphere.

In 2014, the political party Initiative for Democratic Socialism (IDS) was established. IDS formed the new-left coalition with two other recently established and loosely social-democratic parties and some civil-society movements. In the same year, they entered parliamentary politics as United Left (ZL). Soon, different factions began to emerge within IDS and ZL, with the main dispute revolving around the question of where to direct available funding and members’ capacity: on the parallel grassroots movement, building the power of the trade unions and activist groups, or on strengthening the parliamentary party through ‘parliamentary activities and sound PR strategy [which are] at least as important as building a grassroots movement, due to the enlarged potential to directly influence legislative procedures and shape public opinion.’ The ‘parliamentary orientation’ prevailed within the party, and around two hundred founding IDS members left IDS (and the United Left) while publicly denouncing the undemocratic means with which the group focused on parliamentary politics consolidated the coalition into the Left party.¹

CEDRA was established in 2016 by a small part of those who left IDS and recognised the failure of building a working-class base as the main reason for the failure of the democratic socialist project of IDS. The initial idea behind CEDRA was thus: rather than forming a political party with a socialist program and then bringing this program to the working class in the form of the party, we should first offer help with workers’ organising in various sectors and form organic connections with workers. CEDRA drew on operaist theory, according to which political unity of the working class is not achieved automatically, and its form is never given once and for all.

During Slovenia’s transition from self-managed socialism to capitalism (from the early 1990s to 2004), the political composition of the working class was shaped by the form of the reformed trade unions, which managed to get significant concessions from the emerging national bourgeoisie. However, between 2004 and 2008 the conditions for the initial class compromise eroded significantly.² Collective bargaining at the sectoral level often seems to be limited to extending particular concessions to capital. At the company level, unions grew increasingly weak as well. Now, CEDRA views trade unions as an infrastructure we can use to enter the workplace. Only organising at the place of production allows us to recognise today’s Slovenian working class, that is, the particular ways in which capital divides and manages workers to adjust labour power to the current requirements of accumulation, and search for a political form capable of breaking with the current technical composition of the labour force through challenges and successes in organising attempts.

Why organise the retail sector?

CEDRA started to work with workers’ collectives and unions in manufacturing, education, journalism, care work, and the logistics union in seaport Luka Koper. Acting at first mainly through providing educational workshops for workers and union representatives, in that period, CEDRA helped to establish two unions in the care work sector: workers union in private dialysis centres (Sindikat zdravstvenega in socialnega varstva Nefrodial) and the union of personal assistants for people with disabilities (Sindikat osebne asistence – SOA).

After this period of simultaneous organising attempts in various sectors, the decision was made to focus primarily on the retail sector. Reproduction of the labour force is happening 1) in households (unpaid labour-force, invisible work), 2) in the private sector and 3) in the public sector. Retail companies are one of the most important components for the reproduction of the working class in the private sector, as they sell food and other basic necessities. If the price of basic necessities falls, so does the price of labour in general, as workers can maintain a “decent standard of living” on nominally lower wages.

In the retail sector, the main mechanism for ensuring cost competitiveness while retaining the same or an even higher share of surplus value is by lowering wages, increasing work intensity and introducing precarious forms of work.³ So, on the one hand, we have workers in the retail sector who live on minimum wages and have health issues because of the intensity of work. On the other hand, we have workers in different sectors whose real wages are higher if the cost of basic necessities is lower.

This contradiction becomes even more visible in the case of workers in the Slovenian export sector, which primarily exports to Germany and other countries of the capitalist core. Here, workers’ wages are nominally lower than the wages of their German colleagues, but in the Slovenian context, those are high real wages because of the low costs of reproduction, which allows the Slovenian export sector cost competitiveness abroad. We can clearly see how this creates fragmentation of the labour force. Our strategy is to organise key sectors of reproduction, starting with retail, in order to break with the segmentation of the working class and establish the conditions for political unity.

This decision to focus on the retail sector came in 2021 after an extensive analysis of the retail sector in Slovenia. The decision was based primarily on co-research interviews conducted with workers in Lidl and Aldi (operating in Slovenia under the brand name Hofer) as well as two public campaigns in which CEDRA actively participated. First was the campaign to re-hire the Lidl workers’ union president, whom Lidl fired after she successfully formed the first union in the company. The second campaign was for the complete closure of shops in Slovenia on Sundays and holidays. In this campaign, CEDRA worked with the sectoral retail union (SDTS), the Association of Free Trade Unions (ZSSS), and the Left party. After a successful campaign for Sunday closures, CEDRA gained the trust of the sectoral union which started to give CEDRA contacts of existing union members. We were given a free hand to contact them and try to strengthen unions by establishing shop-level workers committees. CEDRA also gained some modest but significant funding that allowed employment first of one and later two people to work full-time with those workers’ committees.

In 2021, CEDRA’s primary activity was to help the workers’ union in Lidl survive. To achieve this, we had to strengthen an active union membership and gain as many new members as possible to make the existing members less vulnerable to the company’s disciplinary measures. While the membership and activities of the workers’ union in Lidl were rising, we managed to establish an active group chat in which the majority of union members participated. We started the union’s Facebook page, writing posts about working conditions in Lidl with existing members, hoping relatable posts would encourage others to join the union. However, we failed to establish a collective decision-making structure inside the union, which resulted in the burden of responsibility and exposure hanging disproportionately on the shoulders of the union president. After constant disciplinary measures the company directed mainly against her, she left her job in Lidl and sought other employment, but was still serving as union president. With no existing member willing to take her place, the union became more passive, and the membership dropped.

The story was different with the union in the TUŠ, until recently a Slovenian-owned retail company. We helped establish this union in the middle of 2021 with just six active members. The union membership grew to around 500 members by the year 2024.⁴ The process of building the union from the ground up was similar to the one in Lidl: a group chat for all members, weekly meetings, and a Facebook page, with the difference that in TUŠ the collective decision-making structure came to life in the form of a workers committee, Red TUŠ (Rdeči TUŠ).

Currently, around 50 TUŠ shops nationwide have at least one representative on this working committee. This representative is responsible for collecting grievances from co-workers in the shop where they work, discussing further actions of the union from the committee with their colleagues, and then reporting their colleagues’ attitudes back to the committee. In the last two years, workers from the TUŠ workers committee started joining CEDRA and helping with organising other companies, mainly in Spar, and working more closely with other CEDRA activists, participating in co-research and preparing for the organising school. An active committee of TUŠ union also gave us the opportunity to start with the feminist co-research discussed in the next section.

Feminist co-research

The idea of a co-research project relating to women’s oppression began at the end of 2022, when the TUŠ union experienced its first widespread wave of mobilisation due to dissatisfaction with working conditions. More and more TUŠ workers started to recognise the union as a structure through which they could address their grievances and demands. In December 2022, a mobilisation towards a strike started to materialise. This also implied the first serious possibility for CEDRA to start implementing wider political issues that concern the working class as a whole, to a broad group of workers who would be on strike, not just a few of the most progressive workers in the union with whom we worked on a day-to-day basis.

At the time, CEDRA had, alongside its primary objective of organising with workers at the grassroots level, two working groups – socialist feminist and ecosocialist. Until then, the groups had operated at the level of theory and manifesto writing. With the socialist feminist working group, we were trying to work out how best to implement this perspective in a way that would be meaningful to the workers and they would consider it as their own.

We worked with the union from its very beginning: building a democratic structure, sharing knowledge, organising on the ground and working with the workers at the grassroots level with what were, at first, service-based demands. All the while we were working on the principle of co-research: informing ourselves about the situation – the technical and, therefore, the political composition of retail workers; organising through a mutual relationship of comradeship, politicisation through continuous contact, democratic forms of decision-making, situating their problems and demands within the wider relationship between labour and capital. This is the basis from which it was possible for us to have the trust and willingness of the Red TUŠ committee members and other workers from the union to meet with us and discuss their conditions of labour at the workplace and the situation in their households.

The feminist co-research questionnaire sought to apply the effects of economic mobilisations, trade union struggles, to broader political work. The aim of the co-research was to raise awareness of the issue of exploitation by capital in the context of the production process in the workplace and to link this to the question of the reproductive process in the context of women’s oppression under capitalism. Retail workers are mostly women, who are usually tasked with privately relegated reproductive labour in the households before and after their shifts, where they work as reproducers in the private sector.

We met with the committee members of Red TUŠ individually, with three long-term aims: 1. to politicise and raise awareness of the interconnectedness of capitalist production and workers’ reproduction at home; 2. to establish a Committee for Common Good inside the TUŠ union, which would deal with the questions of reproductive labour and patriarchy; 3. to familiarise the interviewees with CEDRA and invite them to become part of our organisation.

The main method of feminist co-research is the interview. We formed a questionnaire and divided it into two parts:

(1) In the first part of the interview we ask the workers about their relations at the workplace. The aim of this part of the interview is to acknowledge the difference between two concepts - collegiality and class solidarity. Collegiality is what we have called the relationship of mutual help and cooperation between workers that benefits capital. For example, workers helping each other at work and working on tasks that go beyond their obligations (to help coworkers who can’t keep up), thus speeding up their own pace or intensity of work; skipping sick days and popping pills (so as not to add a bigger workload to their coworkers); accepting transfers to distant offices (to help coworkers when there are no staff), etc. All these actions, which are perceived by workers as collegiality, allow capital to intensify work or operate at the lowest possible level of employment and increase the rate of exploitation, which in turn allows for higher profits. The aim of the first part of the interview is to come to an understanding, together with the workers, of how capital benefits from relations of collegiality. The first part, therefore, ends with a discussion of class solidarity, a form of mutual support and cooperation established by the workers during the mobilisation in the context of the trade union struggle, which - unlike collegiality - is autonomous in relation to capital. This is achieved by referring to the moment of resistance, i.e. when the workers came together to resist capital, which happened during the mobilisation and the preparations for the strike.

The structured questionnaire followed the principles of co-research: informing, politicising and organising in a dialogical conversation that puts knowledge on the side of the workers. The interviewer asks the questions which are posed in a way that leads to a specific insight. For example, in the first part of the interview, one of the questions concerns the intensity of labour:

1. iii. What drives you to work at the given level of intensity? Why don’t you slow down, make work easier for yourself? a. Is it possible to get all the work done if you worked at a slower pace? (What happens if you don’t complete all the work you were supposed to?)

The instructions in brackets are intended to guide the interviewer towards the goal of moving from an individualist understanding of one’s own position towards a materialist viewpoint. The objective is, therefore, not only to gather information about the organisation of labour but also to connect the workers’ individual experiences into a class-based perspective. With the question above (2 iii.), we want to come to the conclusion that working at a high intensity of labour is not primarily connected to a person’s character or “nature”, but the organisation of labour process that forces the workers to work at the highest possible level of intensity since that entails higher profits for the company. Our interviewee answers:

S: […] I would say it’s my own fault too, because I’m that kind of person, I’m a workaholic, I can’t help it, really, […]
C: Mhm.
S: […] there weren’t that many customers, no. But here I got into that “drill” again. I’m just like that by nature, I just can’t walk slowly. I mean, yeah, it’s in my interest to do more than what you’re asked to do. I don’t know. We are different, yes.
C: So that’s primarily why you work so hard, would you say?
S: Yeah.
C: That it basically only has to do with you? Mhm. But would you say that it’s possible to do all this work at all if you worked slower, let’s say?
S: No, it’s not possible. I don’t know, there are things, I don’t know, we have a lot of sick leaves and so, there’s really only few of us […]. I don’t know, it forces you, if you’re that kind of person, I don’t know, go crazy literally at work because you can’t do it, it’s not working. It’s not. So yeah, you get to a state of burnout, I believe that. I’ve been here for 5 months and yeah, you get [burnout], so it’s no wonder girls go, no. Because they can go, because they need to, because the body can’t bear it.
(March 2023)

(2) In the second part of the interview, we talk about relations in the household, where we discuss the work they do at home, and again, we come back to the benefits that this brings to capital. That is, we talk about the unpaid reproductive labour they do within the household, which is otherwise ideologically understood as a labour of love. In doing so, we first draw their attention to the benefits that capital derives from unpaid reproductive labour. By analogy with the first part, here we draw their attention to the way in which capital benefits from their relations within the family – from the needs and desires of their close ones. Secondly, we discuss with them possible forms of resistance and class solidarity related to the question of the socialisation of reproductive labour. That is to say, we talk to them about socialisation in general: public canteens, laundries, retirement homes, kindergartens and the problem of care in general. In short, together with the workers, we have come up with demands for collective satisfaction of needs - demands for public canteens, accessible old people’s homes, kindergartens, etc.

The example below shows Sanchez’s perspective shifting from a position of (only) interpersonal gain of her unpaid reproductive labour for her husband towards an interconnected understanding of work and household spheres, where capital benefits from externalising the costs of reproduction.

1. h. Do you think that anyone benefits from the care and household work you do at home? (With this question, we move on to the broader issue of the relationship between labour and capital; we are interested in 1) the interpretation of workers, if they have one, but at the same time 2) it is necessary to intervene in order to get to the issue of business being performed at the lowest possible expense for the workforce, which is at the expense of the free time of workers, the environment, etc., and to relate to the fact that capital 3) benefits from interconnections, care for loved ones.)

S: Yes, of course they benefit.
P: Who benefits from all of us women doing it at home? We clean, we cook, we feed the children, we take care of the children…
C: But we take it for granted that we do it …
S: [laughs]
P: My husband profits a little bit too, of course, and the men have a little bit too, definitely. Does anyone else?
S: Yes, thank you for saying that out loud.
P: But does anyone else?
S: So that this isn’t silly …
P: It won’t be silly, you just say it.
S: Everyone, no … The country … If we do it, if someone does it for us …
P: Yes.
C: Even Tuš at the end, right? To come to work the next day sorted, all that, and Tuš has nothing to do with it.
S: Of course …
P: Do you think the capitalists benefit from everyone doing it at home and then coming back another day?
S: That’s true, yes … And that I come back the next day fit, tidy, neat, polished, clean.
C: Yeah, and you have the energy to do it.
S: Yes, of course, exactly. Well done.
C: To be there [at the workplace], to exhaust yourself, to come home, to …
S: … I reset so I can come back another day.
P: You feed your child, you feed your husband, so he goes to work.
S: So that he is fed, clean. Yes, really …
C: You are also preparing the child to continue the same way one day.
S: Yes, into that [ideology]. We are super women. To think about everything that we do, crazy. When someone confronts you like that … Because you’re in it all the time, you don’t even look into it.
C: It works well if it’s like that.
S: Because it’s common sense for you and you do everything routinely.
(March 2023)

The questionnaire turned out to be a meaningful basis for raising awareness on the issues of unpaid reproductive labour and the lack of public services that are in the interest of the working class. To not keep it at the point of raising awareness, a more stable and permanent structure that would allow for continuous work and material changes seemed necessary, therefore, the Committee for Common Good was established. On the issue of organisation of the working process, we have managed to organise a slowdown in some of the shops and a symbolic statement to no longer work above the workers’ capacities at others, under the slogan “I won’t work for three workers!”.

On broader social issues that go beyond the workplace, the Committee is more or less stagnant at the moment, only being revived for, for example, the 8th of March and other symbolic political statements. CEDRA’s recent re-activation in the areas of health and care work might make it possible for the Committee to start forming material demands and connect with other unions across sectors and other progressive organisations. Our feminist co-research interviews are continuing and have proven to be a useful entry point into CEDRA. The interview is one of CEDRA’s first attempts to open a broader social (and socialist) perspective with the workers as a structured and comprehensive intervention that goes beyond short responses to current political events or spontaneous conversation add-ins.

Conclusion: Breaking with formal divisions

The feminist co-research outlined here is not the first systematic workers´ inquiry undertaken by CEDRA. For example, in 2020 and 2021 we conducted an extensive inquiry with Lidl workers that focused on the working conditions in general and workplace injuries in particular. The feminist co-research was the first project explicitly aimed at opening-up space for conversations about social and political issues that go beyond the immediate production process, addressing leisure time, reproductive labour, and public healthcare and education systems.

We are currently considering the potential of co-research to address migrant labour. In retail, we are observing a growing prevalence of precarious employment (migrant work, outsourcing, agency work and the special form of agency work for students - student jobs). Similar to the feminist co-research conducted with mostly female workers in retail, who experience the dual burden of low-paid, back-breaking labor at the workplace and reproductive labour in their own households as a result of increasing inaccessibility of public services, the political character of capitalist exploitation is particularly evident in workplaces that rely on migrant workers. This is because employers manage both the working conditions and legality of migrant workers’ stay/residence in the European union.

Just as we worked to challenge the division between productive and reproductive work with the feminist co-research, our political goal with further co-research projects is breaking with the formal divisions between permanent and temporary employment, directly employed and outsourced workers, citizens and migrants, which workplace organising often spontaneously follows, and highlight that although concrete forms of exploitation vary, the struggle is one.

The whole questionnaire can be found here on the Notes from Below website.