Getting By in Postsocialist Romania

This compelling ethnographic study describes how two groups of Romanian industrial workers have fared since the end of socialism. Once labour’s elite, the celebrated coal miners of the Jiu Valley and the chemical workers of the Fagaras region had many social privileges and often derived genuine satisfaction from their work. Today, they are a rarely noted casualty of post socialist transformations. Fear, distance, and alienation are the physical manifestations of stress experienced due to their precarious job status, declining health, and loss of a social safety net. Kideckel traces these issues in the context of labour, political relationships, domestic and community life, gender identities, and health. Drawing on more than three decades of fieldwork, he presents many narratives from select individuals, in their own words, providing a poignant and illuminating perspective on the everyday lives of ordinary people.

"David Kideckel challenges celebratory images of post-socialism by focusing on the often neglected working class and allowing the disenfranchised to speak for themselves. In so doing he provides a contribution to the ethnography of eastern Europe that speaks poignantly to broader discussions of work, class, and gender under neoliberalism." Gerald Creed, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York

1. Getting By in Postsocialism: Labor, Bodies, Voices; 2. How Workers Became "Others": Talking Alienation; 3. Postsocialist Labor Pains: Fear, Distance, and Narrative in the Workplace; 4. The Postsocialist Body Politic; 5. Houses of Stone or of Straw? Postsocialist Worker Communities; 6. Strangers in their Own Skin: Workers and Gender in Postsocialism; 7. The Embodied Enemy: Stress, Health, and Agency; 8. What Is to Be Done?