This year’s programme took place twice in Stubičke Toplice and brought together lecturers and participants from different parts of the country; some got up at the crack of dawn to travel from Osijek, Belišće or Valpovo to the Matija Gubec Hotel, the destination and accommodation for those registered on 23-24 November and 14-15 December.

The first weekend began with a workshop by sociologist, graduate economist and member of the POKAZ Centre for Theatre of the Oppressed, Marinela Nerelić. Leading the group through numerous introductory exercises, Nerelić acted primarily in this latter, dramatically defined role. The very Theatre of the Oppressed is created on the assumption of democratising the theatrical experience, so its basic features include empowering oppressed groups, encouraging dialogue, interactivity and proactivity.

However, these performance techniques in their applicability go beyond strictly genre frameworks and prove suitable in other contexts, especially if it is a matter of connecting people with essentially different life experiences and beliefs. Even if the subsequent lectures occasionally took on the form of more established forms of learning, the ’dehierarchisation’ of organisers, lecturers and participants, as well as the free interventions of the audience at each session, confirmed that this comparison exists only at the level of association, one arising from exposure to predominantly formal classroom transfers.

Although we cannot describe the school as a professorial presentation of the history of trade union organising for the purpose of expanding scientific or activist interests, even such endeavours would benefit from introducing participants to each other through long eye contact, memorising each other’s names through the word-by-word method, blind pair-leading games and other tasks performed through full use of available physical space and liberating the body through movement. With this in mind, we would not be far wrong to reduce the goal of the entire programme to connecting and empowering trade union members, commissioners and those who are yet to become one, without any ideological haste or academic pretensions.

Following the workshop, there was a lecture by psychologist, psychotherapist and BRID associate Bruna Nedoklan dedicated to domestic violence. The benefit of psychophysically oriented ’grounding’ only now became fully apparent, because opening such a topic could also take on a dimension of personal experience only if a certain trust had been created among the participants, and even the outlines of a group identity. Garnished with a few more practical exercises by Marinela Nerelić and Bruna Nedoklan, the weekend, at least on a formal level, ended with a presentation on foreign female workers in healthcare given by two BRID members: translator, English scholar and graduate anthropologist Lada Weygand and PhD in political science and public health analyst Snježana Ivčić. In a way, it anticipated the way the next module of the programme would be conducted, slipping into the sphere of discursively determined content.

Marija Ćaćić, translator and activist, who has been the organisational driving force of the school alongside Tina Tešija and Nikola Ptić since 2016, explains to me that the current version came about through a long reflection and testing of what would be of most benefit to the participants.

“Initially, that format was quite classic. At some point, we started playing with it and tried to loosen it up a bit, among other things, because we found ourselves in a different situation. We went from three to two weekends, so we had to cut things down in some way already there. The composition of our leaders and lecturers, many of whom were trade union professionals or activists involved in various Zagreb organisations, also changed, and every year we would learn something from practice and then adapt to it until we came up with something that worked.”

The guiding principle, therefore, was not to conduct some kind of theoretical and conceptual intensive, but to enable participants to digest, individualise and express what they had heard. “It is very important,” emphasises Marija Ćaćić, “to give them space, and not only during lectures or workshops, but also through sufficiently long breaks in which all of this can be further digested. It is also necessary to mention that these are completely different groups of women in every segment, from age and occupation to previous work experience, etc. We want to achieve that everyone feels accepted, that they leave with a good feeling and have slightly different perspectives when they return home. That is the best outcome. I know that some participants got involved in politics after the school, which may have been related to other things as well, but that example shows what is possible if you act openly and honestly, if we all look each other in the eye, listen to each other, don’t sneer and don’t interrupt each other, and if we are all vulnerable in some way and together in that vulnerability.”

The lectures held during the next meeting in December, therefore, regularly turned into discussions in which personal experiences intertwined with generalised observations. Marija Ćaćić guided the group through basic concepts, divisions, developmental phases and research fields of feminism, sparking a lively discussion on the family transmission of patriarchy and care work. Kinesiology expert and professional associate of the Union of Education, Media and Culture (SOMK), Iva Ivšić, with her Introduction to Trade Union Organising, presented a kind of trade union glossary and, along with questions such as what is the role of a trade union commissioner and how to animate disinterested colleagues in the sector, turned the meeting into a kind of practicum, exposing the specific problems of personal assistants as the focus group of this year’s edition of the school.

Over the years, says Ćaćić, education has been attended by people from different unions, such as sailors, cabin crew, road association, teachers, media and cultural workers, and teachers, and the priority has in the meantime become smaller unions that do not have the capacity to maintain training for their membership.

More concrete cooperation with the Regional Industrial Union has led to a stronger emphasis on the field of care, one of the RIS’s focal points. This gave rise to the idea of organising personal assistants as a group whose occupation is still most often condemned to a precarious arrangement, low wages and fixed-term contracts.

Let us recall that the new Law on Personal Assistance, passed in July last year, nominally guaranteed the equalisation and increase of salaries, but in reality it only formalised the possibility for associations to arbitrarily allocate the prescribed 11 euros gross per hour, which ultimately resulted in the renewal of disparities and lack of transparency in monetary compensation. The gathering of workers with different statuses within this profession, therefore, through horizontal discussions, opened a window into what can be, and a lecture like the one by Iva Ivšić also provided practical tools for its realisation.

The entire cycle ended with the presentation of the results of a study on sexual harassment in the workplace in Croatia, which was conducted by Petra Rodik, Dijana Šobota and Jelena Ostojić, an assistant at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, with the aim of developing recommendations for representatives of workers’ councils and unions to improve the legal system of protection and combating such cases (although Ostojić also emphasises the shortcomings of limiting oneself exclusively to penalisation). In a way, this lecture brought together all aspects of the previous ones, enabling the synthesising of the instruments of feminist and trade union struggle and an intersectional perspective in the health system as the basis for care work precisely through the lens of personal assistance.

Members of this branch are particularly exposed in terms of sexual harassment, as one participant points out in dismay, as they are expected to be both the hands and feet of users, and often stay in their living space and witness unpleasant family exchanges. The importance of the women’s trade union school lies in shedding light on a series of inequalities that pass under the radar of the general workers’ issue; the issue of workplace abuse, for example, requires special attention insofar as not even the unions themselves are immune to the disproportionate representation of the sexes in leadership positions. Moreover, it is precisely through seemingly separate issues such as the women’s issue that the reach of the entire workers’ struggle can be measured.

Radnička prava’

Click here to subscribe to ESSF newsletters in English and or French.