Migrant women strike in 1970s German plants

On 13 August 1973, at the Pierburg Autoparts factory, which supplied carburetors to many West German automobile industries in Neuss (North Rhine-Westphalia), a group of Greek, Turkish, and Yugoslav women workers began a wildcat strike to demand compliance with what had been achieved in previous strikes since 1970: the abolition of the so-called Light Wage Category I. This category was created in 1955 to overcome the illegal ‘women's wage category’, declared unconstitutional by the German Federal Labour Court. Of the 3,600 workers employed at the Pierburg factory, 2,100 were migrants, with an overwhelming number of migrant women (almost half of all employees) hired under the Light Wage Category I (Bojadzijev, 2008: 163). The union and workers’ council offered no support to the strikers, considering their action ‘illegal’. After four days during which police brutally attacked female (and male) foreign workers, finally, the strikers received the solidarity of West German higher skilled coworkers. The support from the ‘privileged’ White and native working class was key to win the struggle. For migrants, ‘the gratitude for the privilege to be accepted into the paradise of the industrial wage … inevitably turns into an antagonistic awareness’ (Groppo, 1974: 170).

The early 1970s West Germany was criss-crossed by a long wave of official and unofficial strikes revealing the ‘multinational’ nature of workers’ behaviour, that had grown despite the guest workers’ programme (see Chapter 2). About 2.3 million migrant workers (of which at least 700,000 were women), were legally employed in West Germany's economy, while another 300,000–500,000 were without documents (Kosack, 1976: 371; Groppo, 1974: 169). About three quarters of all migrant workers were employed in construction and in large exporting manufacturing firms (Roth, 1974). Most of them arrived through the Gastarbeiter programme with a two-year contract, living in ‘company-supplied housing, with rent deducted from their paychecks’, where managers enforced strict rules on worker behaviour (Miller, 2013: 230). The relationship between West Germans, employed more often than not in skilled occupations, and migrant workers, recruited as low-skilled, expressed varying degrees of conflict but also of solidarity across the 1960s and 1970s (Castles and Kosack, 1973).