„Mi mindig elfelejtjük, hogy még nem vagyunk gyár.” A Csepel Autógyár és munkásvilága az 1950-es években
“We Always Forget that We’re Not Yet a Factory”: The Csepel Car Manufacturing Plant and Its Workers in the 1950s

Summary/Abstract: The ordinary life of Szigetszentmiklós and its environs situated on Csepel Island underwent visible and profound social transformation at the end of the 1940s. At the end of 1949 a political decision has launched a new heavy goods vehicle factory out of the ruins of the Danubian Plane Manufacturing Plant. The first Five Year Plan, starting on 1 January 1950, assigned the development of Hungarian vehicle production as the main duty of the new plant. The study focuses on the effects of 1950s socialist human resource politics on the life of the car manufacturing plant. Kiss examines events and phenomena which illustrate the relations between the establishment and the industrial labourers of the Csepel plant. The implementation of socialist human resource politics was met with difficulties in the plant shortly after its foundation, and its deleterious consequences were felt almost immediately. The number of workers was never adjusted to the increasing productivity of the plant, which resulted in the deterioration of working conditions as well as the mass departure and speedy turnover of workers. This, in turn, brought about extensive governmental monitoring within the plant and various forms of worker’s opposition.

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