Saturday, March 15, 2014
Calvert (Omni Shoreham)
Bulgaria, a country of incredibly low foreign debt but a GDP (PPP) that makes it the poorest in Europe, has a population that is increasingly living on credit. Pensions are low, average wages fall below 250 euro, and the people who prided themselves on surviving without loans are now living just that way. Entire families subsist on loans from high-interest credit companies, pawnshops, local moneylenders (likvari), neighborhood systems of barter, as well as informal loans from friends, family, and colleagues. This paper focuses on a team of street sweepers, working for a municipally contracted waste management company. Their salaries—often the sole source of household income—are tied to state allocations for public services (and related EU regulations). But, these workers live in poverty, most residing in semi-legal urban Romani settlements where indoor plumbing is a luxury. Living on loans, balancing debt between various formal and informal institutions, workers negotiate between the increasing cost of living, high rates of unemployment, and the instability, circularity, and seeming reversibility of financial advancement. This paper addresses the ways in which debt relations are creating, stabilizing, but at other times destroying familial, neighborhood, and collegial relations, as well as providing the catalyst for reshaping interethnic and hierarchical dynamics in the workplace. Dealing with the insecurity of European financial existence, the poorest of Bulgaria’s inhabitants are developing strategies and creating ways to survive in a country that “has no debt.”
