Contract workers

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A contract worker from Mozambique in 1984 in the Welzow lignite mine

As a contract worker foreign workers and trainees were designated, which in the GDR and other economically more developed CMEA -Staaten like Czechoslovakia and the People's Republic of Hungary , from the 1960s for a limited time and without integration goal as guest workers were recruited. However, this did not include employees of foreign companies, foreign students in the GDR, members of the Soviet armed forces and their families, refugees or foreign trainees.

Contract workers were brought in to reinforce understaffed work areas such as B. in light industry or in the consumer goods industry . The respective conditions, length of stay, rights and number of contract workers were individually negotiated with the respective government (through a so-called state contract). The duration of the residence permit varied between two and six years depending on the country of origin. However, permanent residence was not provided for in the contract or by law. Family members could not join them. After the contractual period had expired, the contract workers usually had to leave the countries and return to their home country. In the GDR, the contract workers lived in separate dormitories during their stay, mostly set up by GDR companies and clearly separated from the local population.

history

Shoemaker apprentice from Namibia at the Weißenfels shoe factory in 1985

After the founding of the GDR in 1949, 3.4 million people streamed into the Federal Republic from the Soviet occupation zone and the GDR until the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 . The emigration resulted in an acute labor shortage in the GDR. As early as 1955, the FRG concluded so-called recruitment agreements with nine different countries.

From the 1960s, the GDR recruited contract workers. There were also agreements of this kind with other socialist states of the Council for Mutual Economic Aid (Comecon), such as:

but above all in the context of the “socialist brotherly aid”

The trainees were supposed to obtain a skilled worker qualification and support the GDR economy, which was suffering from a labor shortage, until they were able to work with higher qualifications in their sending countries after their delegation ended.

The motivation was initially the training and further education of workers and later also the covering of the shortage of cheap workers for poorly paid and / or dangerous jobs. The length of stay was limited to initially two and later five years. The strict rotation system did not allow family reunification .

In the event of pregnancy, there was immediate deportation . The contract workers lived in isolated barracks or apartment blocks. Contacts with locals had to be approved and reported by the responsible authorities.

Settlement centers were the industrial agglomerations of Chemnitz , Dresden and Erfurt . Although the recruitment agreements were seen as a sign of “international friendship between peoples”, integration was not envisaged due to the temporary nature of the work. Step by step, the workers were assigned increasingly unskilled jobs. The contract workers were preferred for hard or monotonous work that was rejected by GDR citizens. If they did not meet the labor standards or if they violated the “socialist work discipline”, they were threatened with return to their home country.

Every year Poland sent 10,000 to 30,000 skilled workers to the neighboring country for construction and assembly work. The Polish skilled workers also had a limited stay, but they received financial benefits. They also lived isolated in dormitories and were also forbidden from contact with the locals. Hungarian citizens also worked for a time in the construction of chemical plants in the GDR, some married here and stayed permanently.

On June 28, 1979, the law on the granting of residence for foreigners in the German Democratic Republic came into force. The set of rules was kept very flexible and allowed a relatively large amount of scope for agreement with the respective contracting states. According to Section 4, foreigners had the same rights as natives, with the exception of the direct rights associated with citizenship. Section 6, however, allowed the issued residence permit to be restricted in terms of time and location, refused, withdrawn or declared invalid. The decision did not require any justification. The authorities continued to prevent private contacts between foreigners and locals.

In 1974, women workers from the GDR congratulated their Polish colleagues in the VEB cotton spinning mill in Karl-Marx-Stadt on the 30th anniversary of VR Poland

After the Second Intergovernmental Agreement between the GDR and Vietnam was agreed in 1980, mainly Vietnamese contract workers immigrated. The majority were women who worked in the textile industry .

In 1981, 24,000 contract workers were working in the GDR. Apart from the members of the Soviet Armed Forces (GSSD), there were around 190,000 foreigners living in the GDR at the end of 1989, which was more than one percent of the total population. About 94,000 of them were contract workers. Two thirds were of Vietnamese origin. After German unification in 1990, the federal government tried to dissolve the ongoing intergovernmental contracts on contract workers and to send them back to their original homeland. Only a few managed to secure residence status in Germany.

statistics

The immigration of contract workers began in the 1960s and increased significantly , particularly from the mid- 1980s to the late 1980s. In 1990 the contracts for further incoming contract workers were terminated. The contracts that were still running out were mostly retained, provided that the company survived the turning point economically. Most of the contract workers gradually returned to their countries of origin as the right of residence did not grant them any status. Some were granted temporary residence permits or, in the meantime, an unlimited residence permit in the Federal Republic of Germany .

Approximate numbers of contract workers in the GDR on December 31, 1989 by origin
number origin
59,000 Vietnam
15,100 Mozambique
8,300 Cuba
1,300 Angola
900 China

Total number: around 93,500 out of a total of 191,200 foreigners in the GDR.

Approximate numbers of contract workers in the GDR by year
year 1966 1967 1969 1970 1971 1974 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1984 1986 1987 1988 1989
number 3,500 14,000 14,134 12,200 14,800 18,680 16,500 18,692 20,597 26.006 24,000 29,000 61,000 52.015 87,793 93,568

Exhibitions on the history of contract workers in the GDR

In November 2008, an extensive exhibition in Berlin was dedicated to contract workers for the first time. The aim of the exhibition was to show the Germans, but also the descendants of the contract workers, how and why they came to the GDR at that time. The exhibition was entitled “Brotherland has burned down”.

"The economy of the GDR was inconceivable without them, but nobody was grateful to them."

The exhibition was sponsored by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation .

The traveling exhibition Welcome as a worker. Vietnamese contract workers in the GDR of the Brandenburg State Center for Political Education, which in 2009 together with the Integration Commissioner of the State of Brandenburg and Song Hong e. V. was conceived and realized, shows the situation of Vietnamese contract workers in the GDR using concrete examples. Excerpts from interviews with former contract workers are supplemented by documents and personal mementos. Photographs, employment contracts, excerpts from Stasi files and newspaper articles were compiled from a wide variety of sources and paint a nuanced picture of this chapter in recent history, which is still largely unknown. It can be borrowed free of charge.

Radio

See also

literature

  • Ulrich van der Heyden , Wolfgang Semmler, Ralf Strasbourg (eds.): Mozambican contract workers in the GDR economy. Background - History - Consequences , Lit, Münster 2014, ISBN 978-3-643-12627-6 .
  • Eric Allina: “New People” for Mozambique. Expectations and reality of contract work in the GDR in the 1980s , in: Arbeit - Movement - History , Issue III / 2016, pp. 65–84.
  • (DHM): Germany as a country of immigration. Migrations 1500-2005. German Historical Museum Berlin
  • Marianne Krüger-Potratz: There was no such thing as being different. Foreigners and minorities in the GDR. Waxmann, Münster 1991
  • Information Center Africa (Hg): Black and White Times. Foreigners in East Germany before and after the reunification. Experience of contract workers from Mozambique. Interviews - reports - analyzes. IZA, Bremen 1993. ISBN 3-927429-06-6
  • Eva-Maria, Lothar Elsner: Foreigner Policy and Xenophobia in the GDR 1949–1990. Series of texts on political education volume 13, Rosa Luxemburg-Verein, Leipzig 1994, ISBN 3-929994-14-3 (document part: laws, bilateral agreements, etc. pp. 53–90)
  • Katja Illgen (Ed.): Second home . Vietnamese report on their life in Germany 1980–1995 ( Thuringia yesterday & today , vol. 28), Erfurt 2007.
  • Katja Illgen: Foreign in Thuringia? Vietnamese life in Germany and Vietnam . (PDF; 2.1 MB) 2nd edition The Commissioner for Foreigners at the Thuringian Ministry of Social Affairs, Family and Health (publisher), Erfurt 2008.
  • Don't smile so much when talking . In: Berliner Zeitung , November 22, 2008; Exhibition on the history of contract workers

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b German Historical Museum
  2. ↑ Cf. Eric Allina: “New People” for Mozambique. Expectations and reality of contract work in the GDR in the 1980s , in: Arbeit - Movement - History , Issue III / 2016, pp. 65–84.
  3. ^ Marina Mai: Contract workers from Mozambique: "Modern Slavery" in the GDR . In: The daily newspaper: taz . March 3, 2019, ISSN  0931-9085 ( taz.de [accessed April 24, 2019]).
  4. ↑ a b Bade, 2002
  5. ↑ Law on the granting of residence for foreigners in the German Democratic Republic
  6. ↑ Don't smile so much when talking . In: Berliner Zeitung , November 22, 2008; Exhibition on the history of contract workers
  7. ↑ A new life in the GDR: former contract workers tell their story
  8. ^ Exhibition website