This article analyses the feminisation of the Yugoslav retail sector from the 1950s to the 1970s, demonstrating that this process began as a deliberate attempt by the Yugoslav trade unions to increase the retail workforce in co-operation with Yugoslav women’s organisations, interested in ensuring good working conditions and living standards for women workers. The modernisation and expansion of the retail sector in the 1960s intensified the feminisation process and, by the 1970s, women formed the majority of workers in department store chains, thereby strengthening the perception of both retail and consumption as “female” activities. Department store chains provided women workers with various welfare benefits, including direct access to consumer goods, which made a significant impact on their socio-economic status, educational levels, social mobility, and everyday life. The article also argues, however, that the growth of Yugoslav consumer society and economic liberalisation from the mid-1960s increased the workload of the retail workforce, reinforced traditional notions and bonds between femininity and consumerism, and decreased governmental support for institutions and services aimed at socialising housework and care work. The “double burden” of paid and unpaid labour particularly limited women retail workers’ employment to low-paid positions and prevented their professional advancement and socio-political engagement. The consequent gender segmentation and pay gap in the labour market by the late 1970s resulted in increasing criticism of the feminisation process. The article highlights the diverse, often ambivalent agendas in the gendered politics of labour organising in state-socialist Europe, as it shifts scholarly attention to a sector outside industrial production, to the feminised workplaces of (retail) labour in socialist Yugoslavia.
Ivana Mihaela Žimbrek (Mon,) studied this question.