Social dynamics and nationhood in employment politics in the Trepça mining complex in Socialist Kosovo (1960s)

This article analyses the interconnection of socio-economic divisions and nationhood in Socialist Kosovo and Yugoslavia by shifting the scale to the local level. It presents a case-study of employment politics in the mining, metallurgy and chemical industry complex Trepça during the 1960s, which was a period of increased social dynamics in the enterprise. The article first describes the shifting cadre politics in Trepça, which aimed to increase the degree of skills and qualification of the work collective and to address the dramatic underrepresentation of Albanians in management and specialist positions. It then analyses the departure of Serb and Montenegrin cadres from the enterprise and the dispute over the proportional relevance of socio-economic and national grounds for this trend. The second half of the article situates these cadre developments against two levels of social division in the enterprise: vertical social divisions between manual production workers and specialist cadres, and horizontal divisions at the top management level. The article argues that politically relevant socio-economic divisions in the enterprise did not occur between the mass of unskilled or semiskilled production workers and management cadres, but between political and technical cadres at the management level. Vertical social divisions were depoliticised and denationalised. The outspoken national dimension of cadre politics for skilledspecialist personnel and the pluralist tendencies in the management culture of Yugoslav enterprises during the late 1960s, however, nationalised and politicised the competition between a new generation of Albanian technically schooled specialists and the predominantly Serb, politically appointed managers in function