Debt Machine and the project Invisible Workers: Czech Roma and racial capitalism 

The 1990s in Eastern Europe were a departure point of racial capitalism. For Roma, the end of “communism” meant existentially more than an introduction of housing, labour and financial markets, reorganisation of the workforce, or fundamental change in the role of the state. Fairly quickly, they found themselves trapped in a cycle of precarity at home and at work.

Contrary to the scholarship on Roma in Eastern Europe, which emphasises experiences with unemployment and exclusion, this project paints a picture of a very disadvantaged form of neoliberal inclusion through informal, insecure and precarious working arrangements, indebtedness and containment in stigmatised living space.

Debt Machine documents the operation of oppressive mechanisms that reproduce crisis of household finances. Decades of underemployment and racist discrimination in housing, education and access to services, put Roma and other precarious workers in a situation, where any life event, such as illness, temporary loss of income or separation from a partner, translates into a risk of falling into arrears and a need to turn to credit to get by.

Predatory debt industry entraps people in spiraling cycle of unpayable debts. On one side of this trap are the creditors, employers, bailiffs and state institutions; on the other are the workers and their families. The state is neither an innocent by-stander nor a failing regulator but a predator himself. Debt to the state—resulting from unpaid health insurance, waste collection or public transport fines—is an integral part of the debt machine. Just like any other debts, debts to the state exponentially increase in time due to punitive interest and fines charged by private bailiffs to whom the state sells the claims.

Through debts state and employers simultaneously extracts profit and discipline workers who form the cheap and disciplined labour at the electronics assembly lines, construction sites, waste recycling facilities, or warehouses packaging foodstuffs for the EU market. This project exposes how employers and the state weaponised the debt machine to exploit Roma workers and discipline labor as a whole.