Post-socialist industrial landscapes: the crumbling of the textile industry in Štip and Leskovac
By Chiara Bonfiglioli
A painting of the Makedonka factory, Štip
The town of Štip is the main urban agglomeration in the Eastern part of the Republic of Macedonia, and the main textile production center in the country. As a result of the postwar industrialization drive, socialist authorities invested in the construction of textile factories. The Makedonka textile kombinat was completed in the early 1950s. Weaving plants and apparel producers that depended on this complex were gradually built in Štip and in surrounding villages.The number of workers of Makedonka went from 3500 in the mid-1960s to more than 6000 in the late 1980s. Makedonka products were mainly sold on the internal market. The other main factory for the production of ready made garments, Astibo, was founded in the 1960s. In the 1970s, Astibo became the main producer of casual apparel in Yugoslavia, with 60 shops all over the country. The factory export grew between the mid-1970s and early 1980s, when Astibo obtained the licence to produce jeans for the American brand Wrangler.
Makedonka’s former railway line
A centralised heating system and a special railway line were included in the Makedonka complex. Tons of raw material, mainly cotton, were shipped everyday to Makedonka, and tons of textiles and garments were exported every day from Štip to all the rest of Yugoslavia and abroad. The Makedonka complex also included a restaurant for the workers serving one free meal per day, discount stores, childcare facilities, and a library. The factory also provided housing for its workers and holiday facilities. From 1970 Makedonka had a camp on the shores of the Ohrid Lake, a summer resort on the mountain Plačkovica, and a hotel at lake Dojran. Workers had 21 days of annual leave and could make use of these facilities for token prices. Also, every worker in Makedonka could take one third of the next month’s wage as credit, and give that back in instalments. Štip’s other main factory, Astibo, also included a health centre, a restaurant, and a day care centre for children. The company also built houses for its workers in Štip.
Makedonka warehouse
The disintegration of the Yugoslav market in the early 1990s brought Makedonka to a deep crisis. A restructuring program was inaugurated in the early 1990s, and workers were laid off in waves. The privatisation process started in 1995, and eight different entities were created from eight different departments of the factory. These entities, however, did not recover and in 2000 a bankrupcy procedure was started by the government. Several attempts of privatisation of the whole complex failed, and the company was put into liquidation and sold piece by piece from 2001 onwards. When Makedonka went bankrupt, many costly machines were disbanded and stolen, or sold as scrap metal. In the Makedonka warehouse one can still buy meters of cloth, tools, rubber, and bolts.
Portrait of Tito in the Makedonka warehouse
Many private textile firms have been created in Štip since the post-socialist transition, employing thousands of workers, mainly women, among which are former workers of Makedonka. The standard of living of textile workers today, however, is much lower. Nostalgia for socialist times is widespread among textile workers in Štip; current working conditions are often compared to those during socialist times. Holidays, notably, have become unaffordable for most workers. At the entrance of the Makedonka warehouse, the janitors still keep Tito’s portrait in their office, while the remnants of the socialist factory are sold for a few denars.
An historical video of Tito’s visit to Makedonka in 1957 is available at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weTLsdlSQpI
Former Makedonka workers’ canteen
The only renovated area of the Makedonka complex is the former workers’ canteen, which has been turned into a private restaurant. Former Makedonka workers are embittered by the fact that they contributed to pay for the construction of factory canteens through their wages, but received nothing in return after the privatisation process. As a former worker said, the canteen “is what the workers built, we built it. It wasn’t the state who gave one denar.” Most workers feel disempowered and cheated by the privatisation process, in which they lost years of wages and social contributions. Moreover, workers are unsatisfied with current working conditions, which include long working hours and frequent overtime for an average wage of approximately 150 euros a month. The textile production is mainly based on the CMT (cut make and trim) system, in which the foreign partners provide all the material to local factories and the local workers sew and stich the garments, which are later shipped back to Western clients.
Leteks entrance, Leskovac
The town of Leskovac, in Southern Serbia, was known as “little Manchester” in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Important textile factories were present in the interwar period, and in the post-war era the city became the seat of a big textile kombinat called Leteks, with a number of subsidiary factories. Textile workshops were also opened in the villages surrounding Leskovac. Leteks produced wool and cotton textiles, which were later sent to other factories in Leskovac and elsewhere in Yugoslavia for the production of apparel garments, army uniforms and other finished products. In the late 1970s the Leteks factory had around 2700 workers, organised in three different workshops in the city. Today the former Leteks kombinat – and the whole textile district – is a de-industrialised, ruined wasteland on the outskirts of town. The watch at the entrance of the Leteks factory had stopped at five to eleven.
A photo of Leteks during socialist times
Men worked in Leteks as well, operating heavy textile machines which produced wool and cloth that was later turned into light apparel and uniforms in other textile factories in the surroundings. The quality of Leteks textiles was renowned all over Yugoslavia; former workers still talk with pride about the high quality of the textiles they used to produce. Workers would give specific names to each cloth, according to their characteristics. As a former Leteks worker recalls: “I had the honour to make a cloth which was called Ms Carter (Gospođa Carter), what a yellow color it was! Incredible. It was such a high quality cloth, it never got dirty, it was so beautiful. It was called Ms. Carter, from the wife of Jimmy Carter. It went directly into the nylon because it was such high quality”. The name of the cloth was a reflection of ongoing events: in 1978, Yugoslav President Tito paid a visit to U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Ms. Carter also appeared in the official pictures of the visit.
Ruins of Kosta Stamenković textile factory, Leskovac
After the break-up of Yugoslavia, rampant inflation started to affect industrial production, causing a considerable drop in the value of salaries since the early 1990s. Leteks, however, continued to work throughout the 1990s, including during the NATO intervention of 1999. Around 20% of the workers were dismissed in the early 1990s. In the early 2000s, approximately 50% of the workers remained, around 870 people. A programme of restructuring was inaugurated, and workers’ wages were significantly reduced, from 1000 dinars to 200 dinars. A private entrepreneur bought the factory in the early 2000s, but could not recover the production, and all the machines were gradually sold as scrap. The last workers left the factory in 2004. Bankrupcy was finally declared and the factory became once again state property. 12,000 workers became unemployed in the textile sector in Leskovac as a whole, a considerable number for a municipality of 156,260 inhabitants. The “Kosta Stamenković” building was part of the Leteks complex. It was named after a local revolutionary and partisan hero (1893-1942).
Museum of Textile, Strojkovce, Leskovac
The Museum of the Textile Industry in Strojkovce, on the outskirts of Leskovac, is located in a former old mill from 1884. The museum hosts some old spinning machines from the late nineteenth century, as well as some pictures of textile factories in interwar and postwar times. Despite the fact that the Leteks factory fell into ruin only in the early 2000s, the history of the textile industry seems to belong to a very distant past in Leskovac. Many men and women lost their jobs as a result of the collapse of the industry.
According to the representatives of the NGO “Women for Peace” (Žene za mir - http://womenforpeace.org.rs/), social problems increased as a result of unemployment in the city. Domestic violence and alcoholism became more widespread, and women became more vulnerable as a result of economic dependency. The NGO provides a SOS telephone line for female victims of domestic violence, and organises campaigns against violence and for gender equality.
Falke factory, Leskovac
Today the only active textile firms in the former textile district are a Turkish private company, which produces jeans in one of Leteks’s former workshops, and the German firm Falke, which produces high-range socks and stockings. Falke opened in early 2012 and is planning to employ 600 workers in the medium term (at the moment, around 200 are employed). The firm obtained 2.4 million euro from the Serbian government, as part of Serbia’s incentives to foreign direct investment. Falke has been built on the premises of the former socially-owned textile factory Inkol. In 2010, former workers from Inkol protested in front of Falke. Falke bought Inkol for 33.7 million dinars, but the majority of Inkol’s 500 former workers are still due 40 wages. At the end of the 1990s, the local government promised textile workers that they would receive unpaid wages once Inkol, then bankrupt, was sold, but this never happened. Inkol workers have been fighting for compensation for the last 14 years.
Updated on: 20 May 2013
