„Nur ein paar Lumpen, die Ihren Judaslohn in Alkohol umsetzen“. Streikbrecher vom Balkan in der Schweiz im frühen 20. Jahrhundert und ihre Wahrnehmung
„Just a few rogues spending their traitor’s reward on alcohol“. Strike-breakers from the Balkans in Switzerland in the early 20th century and their pe

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses the use of migrant workers from the Balkans as strike-breakers in Swiss labour conflicts in the early 20th century. It especially focuses on the 1909/10 Winterthur construction workers’ strike, the outcome of which was strongly influenced by the deployment of foreign strike-breakers. Whilst in Swiss strike discourses the bourgeois press usually stressed that most of the strikers were foreigners and that they behaved in a manner quite different from “civilised Swiss citizens”, though, the labour press countered that there was no difference between Swiss and foreign workers, discourses on Southeast European strike-breakers somehow saw a reversal of these patterns of argument. The labour movement depicted them as “first rate rabble-proletarians” from “culturally backward countries”. Employers, on the other hand, would try to hide them from public discussions. On the other side, Swiss perceptions of migrant workers from the Balkans in the early 20th century show many features which are still common in the late 20th and early 21st century. However, one crucial shift can be identified: Whilst in the years before 1914 (and again in the 1960s and 70s) Italians were the main target of Swiss xenophobia and at the very centre of the notion of “overforeignization”, people from the Balkans, although always having been perceived overwhelmingly negatively, came to be seen as a threat to Switzerland’s cultural identity only towards the end of the 2nd millennium.

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