The Scars of the Erasure_web

Erasure_4a 10.1.11 20:29 Page 25REGISTERED AS WORKERS, ERASED AS NON-SLOVENES25Slovenia. Some among them have direct experience of detention and deportation,so in contrast to the majority of the general population, they know exactlywhat these institutions of exclusion are.As we have shown, narrations of their experiences can contribute to theirempowerment. At the same time, these narratives offer insight into the impactof neo-liberalism, particularly on employment and social rights and on theprocesses of ethnic homogenization within a new nation-state (for more on ethnichomogenization, see Bajt in this volume).3. Worker migration to SloveniaI was dismissed when the war started [in Bosnia]. They said they didn’t need meany more, actually that I was a “južnjak” [a derogatory term literally meaningsoutherner] and that they don’t need južnjaki any more. (Activist, 45)The year 1970 can be described as a watershed year, since it marked thebeginning of the three-decade long, positive migration balance in Slovenia, whichwas increasingly becoming the key factor in the development of the industrialand construction sectors (Mežnarić 1980, Dolenc 2007, Josipovič 2006). Thedecade of the 1960s was primarily characterized by emigration from Slovenia.More than 40,000 workers, mainly highly skilled ones, left Slovenia for temporarywork abroad between 1961 and 1971 (Dolenc 2007, 79). 7 According to SilvaMežnarić’s assessment of the situation at the time (1980, 230), this outflow ofthe labor force produced upward mobility among the employed local populationand the population that at that time had completed schooling or additional trai -ning and began to fill vacant job positions. Mežnarić writes that at that time thenumber of rapid training courses, for example, on-the-job training, expanded rapidly.Unskilled and semi-skilled jobs within various industries were filled by wor -kers from other republics of the former Yugoslavia. Writing about this situation,Danilo Dolenc says that the educational structure of the immigrant populationfrom other parts of the former Yugoslavia was not much lower than that of thelocal population, which was generally low at the time. Moreover, the share ofpeople with secondary school education among the immigrant population wasproportionally even higher, primarily owing to the quality education received byYugoslav People’s Army staff and the employees of federal bodies.Immigration to Slovenia peaked between 1978 and 1980. From the early1970s, most immigrants came from Bosnia-Herzegovina (40 percent of all immigrants),unlike during the 1960s, when most immigrants came from neighboringCroatia (Dolenc 2007, 81). More than 80 percent of all immigrants settled in urban7 The economic and social reform in 1965 introduced the model of market socialism, in which centralized plannedmechanisms were replaced by market mechanisms. One consequence was shrinking employment and the emergenceof surplus labor force. This was also the period when the first post-war Baby Boom generation entered the job market.Under pressure of the rising unemployment rate and social tensions, the state authorities tried to solve the problem ofunemployment by relaxing the border regime and enabling people to seek temporary jobs abroad (Dolenc 2007, 78).