Youth Labor in Socialist Bulgaria – from Ideology to Labor Practices

Abstract

The research is aimed at an important part of the state policy in socialist Bulgaria – the forced engagement of young people, future intellectuals as an unpaid or lowpaid labor force in various sectors of economy. Through this compulsory employment of high school and university students in summer free months the ruling elites aim to discipline the young intelligentsia and to educate them in work habits. The main form of forced labor is the participation in youth brigades, but other alternative forms of youth labor are gradually being adopted and imposed. The text presents an ethnological study of youth seasonal labor in the sector of international tourism in the 1970s and 1980s, looking at the perspective of young intellectuals working during their summer vacations in the Youth Travel Bureau “Orbita” as part time tour guides of foreign groups. This form of temporary employment of young people is accepted as an alternative to the participation in youth brigades and is related to intellectual work. The aim is to analyze the main features of the labor culture of part time guides working at the International Youth Center “Georgi Dimitrov” near Primorsko. The officially imposed principles and norms for the work of the young collaborators are presented and their application in the working life of the guides is studied. The subjects of research are the attitudes for working with tourists, the relations in the work environment, the labor practices, the difficulties in everyday working life and the ways of overcoming them, the informal aspects of the activities. The study is based on biographical interviews with former guides between the ages of 50 and 65, conducted in 2019 and 2020. As a participant for six summer seasons in this type of work, the author also relies on the method of the reflexive anthropology. The results of the study show how the discrepancy between the expectations and intentions of the ideologues of the provided tourist services, on the one hand, and the behavior and labor practices of young people actually occurs. The examples are indicative of the changes “from below”, through everyday strategies of young people, of the initially conceived system of the international youth tourism in socialist Bulgaria.