New Workers in Old Factories: Labor, Gender, and Subjectivity in the Post-Socialist Slovenia

The paper is based on a series of in-depth interviews with young, high-skilled female workers in a Slovenian branch of the international pharmaceutical corporation. This factory was one of the leading pharmaceutical companies during Yugoslav socialism. In this paper, I aim to highlight the ways in which the new generation of high-skilled workers position themselves within a broader trajectory of particular labor history of once successful socialist enterprise and what use of that history they make in negotiating their subjectivities in radically changed geopolitical and socioeconomic circumstances.