Rovinari-ul, ISPE-ul şi dulapul electric. Documente din arhiva de familie despre conflicte de muncă din Epoca de Aur
The Rovinari power plant, The Institute of Energy Studies and Designs and the Electrical panel. Documents from the family archive about labor conflicts during the „Golden Age”

Summary/Abstract: This article embarks on an investigative endeavour to explore my family’s history, aiming to reconstruct the daily life of my ancestors, based on numerous identified primary sources in the personal archive. The attention given to microhistory in historiography in recent decades has facilitated the deconstruction of stereotypical images regarding the primacy of exceptional history, providing an opportunity to scrutinize rigorously and analytically the lives of ordinary people. The paper represents an academic and personal research effort, intended to preserve the memory of my family while also strengthening intergenerational relationships. Employing diverse research methods applied to documents preserved in the personal archive, I have sought to contextualize events and trials faced by my predecessors in the first half of the 20th century within a broader historical framework. This work will focus on the daily life of my great-great-grandparents, Franz and Christine Klepsch, as well as that of my grandparents, Ecaterina and Costache Tănase, tracing the events that fundamentally shaped their destinies: from the trauma of deportation and the impact of the two World Wars on their lives to the challenges or small joys they experienced.The article analyses a set of documents remained from the late Gabriela Murgescu (1932-2023), who worked as a design engineer at the Institute of Energy Studies and Designs (Romanian acronym ISPE) and was responsible for the automatisations at the Rovinari Power Plant, one of the biggest coal-based plants built in communist Romania. The documents from 1977-1979 highlight a case when the engineer going from Bucharest to Rovinari was refused to be reimbursed with the hotel costs in the neighboring town of Târgu-Jiu, because the regulations allowed only to be accomodated in the village where the power plant was located, even if there were no proper accomodation opportunities available, as well as the situation when Gabriela Murgescu was penalised with a 10% reduction of her monthly wage because of a delay in the transfer of an electric panel from the factory Automatica in Bucharest to the Rovinari plant. In the latter situation, the engineer contested the decision at the Scientific Board of the Institute, made a strong argument and obtained the cancellation of the penalty. These cases highlight the absurdities of many communist regulations, the tendency of the management to comply with the indications coming ”from above”, to shift responsibility and to find scape-goats for alleged mistakes, as well as the fact that sometimes individuals stood up and fought back.

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