Inclusive distribution

154 Dunja had forfeited political backing, and employed her in the hope to be secure. However, within another year the director lost her position, and her successor, whom I cited above, instigated a kind of “mobbing” of “political opponents” (I, Dunja, 21.9.2009). Given their political differences, Dunja did not shy away from explaining to me the widely held (but typically concealed) professional view among the rank and file that the present Director did

“not understand the essence of social work.”¹⁵⁰

What incensed Dunja was how the CSW was now led autocratically, and nobody dared to voice concerns. Especially since the last municipal elections in 2009, the Director feared losing her position and tried to enforce an impeccable bureaucratic record to provide no occasion for her replacement. According to Dunja, the Director now controlled her workers with an “iron fist” and exhorted them to focus on “formalities.” Dunja especially criticised that the Director checked all the files and often returned them to be rewritten e.g. for sloppy handwriting. This bureaucratic tug of war was embedded in the 2008 national regulatory changes in social work procedures (MWSP 2008), which followed the globalised audit culture of “governing by numbers,” i.e. “reducing complex processes to simple numerical indicators and rankings for purposes of management and control” (Shore and Wright 2015, 22). Yet, Dunja alleged that even the supervisors from the Ministry for Work and Social Policy (MWSP) accepted that the rules and regulations were hard to accomplish. If a needy person died of hunger, Dunja quipped, that seemed unimportant to the Director, but when the review (nadzor) came, everything had to be flawless (I, Dunja, 21.9.2009).¹⁵¹

To see how the social workers navigated their inclusive politics of distribution despite growing financial and bureaucratic difficulties, I return to my case study.

155 together into Rajko’s half-abandoned paternal house in Upper Village, leaving Dejana’s children with her husband. That same year their common son Ranko was born, who received the family name of Dejana’s legal husband (Dejana shortly after divorced to marry Rajko). In 2002 Dejana was pregnant with their third child and the Milovići approached the CSW for support. After they compiled the required paperwork (a dozen documents from various institutions), their application was accepted in 2003.¹⁵²

Social worker Ana (b. 1951), one of the most senior employees of the CSW, knew the Milovići well. Born and raised in River City in a working class family, Ana had studied at the Higher Education College for Social Workers in Belgrade (I, Ana, 12.9.2013). She had been employed in the CSW since 1979, and from the onset was responsible for Upper Village and Lower Village. As Ana told me, the Milovići received monthly MOP of 10,000 dinar (€ 100) through the father Rajko. Child benefits for their four children were collected by the mother Dejana from the child benefit section at the municipal “old social,” and also amounted to approx. € 100. Dejana lived together with “old Rajko,” her stepfather (pastor), and according to Ana “they would be a case for marriage counselling” (I, Ana, 9.12.2009).¹⁵³ Their financial support by the CSW was somewhat unusual, as there were “only three to five users” of the CSW in Upper Village, “because they [village residents] all have property” (I, Ana, 9.12.2009).

Ana alluded here to a paragraph in the law on social protection of 1991, according to which half a hectare of land was the eligibility limit for social aid (MWSP 2001, Article 12). Before 1991, eligibility had been calculated less restrictively according to the market value of land, as a social worker who was employed in the CSW since 1986 remembered (I, Lena, 30.9.2013).

Thus, in 1991 land had been turned from an asset to a liability concerning eligibility to MOP, and the majority of villagers became virtually excluded from the major social aid benefit. This exclusionary innovation reflected an ambivalence of urbanites against the presumably “un-cultured” villagers that resurfaced during the wars of 1991-5 (Jansen 2005a, 109–67). From the perspective of city dwellers, the villagers had profited from their plight when the food prices were pegged to the Deutschmark (Bajić-Hajduković 2014, 68).¹⁵⁴ Urban policy makers, probably influenced by such resentments, thought that villagers had a resource in land that they could sell if they did not work it (neglecting the volatile market prices of land). Finally,

152 The Milovići had four children. The youngest son was born in 2006.

153 The marriage of the Milovići was fraught by differences which apparently led to verbal and physical abuse.

While a private marriage agency in River City had closed in the early 2000s, marriage counselling was part of the ‘professional work’ (stručan rad) of the CSW. In 2012 the sociologist of the CSW won a grant to establish a spin-off marriage counselling unit that was open 12 hours a day and half-day on Saturdays. The involved CSW employees received an overtime premium of € 50/day. The free service was rarely consulted by members of the public, and never by the Milovići.

154 One farmer told me that the early 1990s were “the last time one could live well from agriculture.”

156 international organizations like the UNHCR, with which the CSW collaborated after 1991, consistently demanded in their statutes that help be given to the landless (I, Lena, 30.9.2013).

The partial overlap of trans-national and national social policies had potentially dire effects for small proprietors in mountain villages like Upper Village who owned poor land of little value and who could not meet their needs from it for lack of (mental or physical) skills and health, machinery, finance, farmhands, or a reluctance to sell their patrimony.

Here we come to the first case of bureaucratic erring. Social workers, in the light of what they saw as a too strict property limit for eligibility to MOP, did not like to check on rural users’

landed property (I, Ana, 9.12.2009). The social workers were content, for instance, if the cadastre registered no land ownership. In the Milović case, the inheritance of several hectares of woodlands by Rajko and his sister had not been registered.¹⁵⁵ Rajko tried to keep a secret of it, and when his wife Dejana told me about it in an informal interview, he cut her short and showed me to the door (I, Dejana and Rajko, 25.10.2010). However, if the social workers had wanted to, they could easily have found out. For instance, the well-informed MZ clerk with whom they collaborated had his office next door to the Milovići. The point was that no one wanted to formalize this knowledge, as it involved costly legal proceedings and would have imperilled the inclusive distribution to the needy.

Ever more people had to rely on “the Social,” Ana explained, not through their own fault, but “because of the lay-offs” (I, Ana, 9.12.2009). The Milovići, who had been marginal workers during late socialism – she a seamstress, he a Public Greens employee – had been among the first to be fired during the post-socialist restructuring. Therefore their family was seen as a typical needy case. Furthermore, the Milovići were evaluated as especially deserving because of their children – echoing the 20^th century preoccupation with a “proper childhood” and

“proper parenting” (Thelen and Haukanes 2010, 1–2). As represented in the entry vignette, the complex notion of proper parenting included the provision of healthy food, clean and safe housing with enough room for the children, compulsory education, development of the potentials of children, and inculcation of good habits like temperance in consumption of cigarettes, alcohol, etc. Other factors were the physical safety of the children, their non-violent upbringing, the inculcation of ‘appropriate’ work habits (not stealing), neat clothing, and the possibility of travelling on holidays. Proper parenting obviously necessitated money, which the

155 The gap between de jure land ownership and de facto registration was large. The inheritance division procedures were to be initiated by the inheritors and concluded within a year. The beneficiaries bore the legal costs. One problem was that inheritance occurred upon death as a group right of the children and the spouse. The division of land, house, machinery etc. often led to quarrels among the inheritors. Legal division, therefore strained relations and purses, and was often avoided. Crucially for social workers, land without title could not be legally sold or mortgaged and thus had no official market value.

157 social workers were prepared to help parents acquire. However, the financial difficulties of needy and deserving persons like the Milovići were compounded by the fact that the MOP for an employable person (radnosposobno lice) of € 50 per month was perceived as “not enough to live on” (I, Ana, 9.12.2009). Here, Ana referenced the decline of the real value of MOP during post-socialism. After 2001 aid recipients “had to find work on the side” in order to survive – and that was of course not checked on by the CSW, she underlined (I, Ana, 9.12.2009).

This led to the second case of bureaucratic erring. According to the law on social protection, all money earned on the side ought to be deduced from the MOP payments. The professionals worked the restrictive system by summarily deducing the worth of one day of labour per month (€ 8.50 in 2009). Mothers in the first year after childbirth had no deductions (e.g. File Milovići, 2003-4, 2006-7). The minimum enforcement of income deductions was evident in the entry vignette, when Rajko was not scared to tell the psychologist about his earnings as a mushroom collector and a village undertaker.

Not checking the eligibility of the needy according to land ownership, and not policing their supplementary income represented two common methods of inclusive distribution by under-implementing exclusive social policies. Both aspects of the local “politics of distribution”

(Ferguson 2015) were born out of the professional discretion of street-level bureaucrats who

“mediate aspects of the constitutional relationship of citizens to the state” (Lipsky 1980, 4).

Under-implementing the exclusionary terms of the law (which increased further in the amendments of 2005) followed the humanist principles laid out in Article 2 of the same law (unchanged until 2011). Social need was defined as “such a condition of a citizen or a family in which societal help is essential – with the aim to master social and life’s difficulties, and the creation of conditions for the fulfilment of basic life needs, inasmuch as these cannot be fulfilled in a different manner, and on the basis of humanism and human dignity” (MWSP 2001, Article 2, my emphasis).

The relational modality of inclusive distribution, in which humanist values were translated into social work practice, allowed social workers to help the needy, reassure themselves of their own professionalism, and counter the red tape approach of the Director.

158 The director’s demands for more systemic solutions

Proud of her university degree, the Director underlined that she had 24 years of social work experience and there were “no unknown questions to her” (I, Director, 17.7.2009).¹⁵⁶ Before her appointment, she had been one of the few social workers in the medical sector. She had not been a “field worker” (terenac), though, and accordingly did not attach the same importance to it as her staff in the CSW. I once overheard a youthful social worker joyfully shout in the CSW car on her way to the users: “The field is the law!” (Teren je zakon!). This put in a nutshell how most social workers saw fieldwork – more important than paperwork, because it allowed a more nuanced feel of the social situation of impoverished people.

The Director betrayed a peculiar reading of the social fact of large-scale impoverishment, when she told me during a car ride to a social policy and strategy conference in Belgrade “those people who are workshy shouldn’t receive help” (I, Director, 16.10.2009).¹⁵⁷ On the other hand the Director had been a student of Dušan Lakićević, and she also valued Prof Ana Čekerevac and her approach to social work highly (I, Director, 6.11.2009). Indeed, the Director told me during the social policy conference in Belgrade that she thought that the local innovations promoted there – which she herself had endorsed previously – created no systemic solutions.

To her mind the idea of reforming the welfare state through local projects, municipal social policy strategies, and Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) between local state institutions led to quickly outdated solutions. Her experience was that local innovations could not make up for the lack of systemic agreement among the different working groups of the MWSP (I, Director, 16.10.2009). Yet, the Director’s ‘productionist’ view of entitlement, compounded with her politically insecure position and decreasing faith in local innovation, explained why she advocated systemic solutions and at the same time stymied her social workers’ local initiatives to expand help to the poor. To err on the side of the needy as long as the documentation was impeccable emerged in this peculiar bureaucratic power constellation as the least common professional denominator “to correct and attenuate certain negative side effects of the market economy” (Lakićević 1991, 380). Unsurprisingly in light of the difficulties in controlling local bureaucracies, recent policy changes by the central state aimed at tightening the regulations of social work. The curtailment of some professional discretion, however, only created new space for discretion.

156 The artist who connected people at the margins through ART projects (see Chapter Four) argued that the Director thought and worked according to old medical sector patterns under conditions of scarce finance, without sensibility for the aesthetic and creative needs of the poor (I, artist, 13.11.2011).

157 When the Director gave up her position in 2012 she chose to work in the section for adult protection. Later she admitted to her colleagues that she had underestimated the amount of work and the psychological stress there.

159