This article explores institutionalised labour migration from socialist Yugoslavia to Western capitalist countries, focusing on the recruitment of female labour migrants. By examining Yugoslav archival sources, it investigates the mechanisms of migration control and management developed by the Yugoslav government to discharge labour surplus to the West in accordance with state interests. The article highlights the alignment of women’s unemployment and increased social mobility with these processes; further, it demonstrates that from the onset of Yugoslavia’s liberalised labour migration policy, women were integral to the state’s efforts to employ labour surplus in Western labour markets and shape labour migrants’ demographic and socio-economic characteristics. Thus, the article expands the understanding of Yugoslav labour migration and governmental and institutional efforts to control and shape international migrations and underscores the value of archived sources in providing a comprehensive understanding of the state’s role in labour migrations. 

This article explores labour migrants’ pre-departure training in socialist Yugoslavia, commenced by the Yugoslav government to further structure and control labour emigration and aligns it with the state’s objectives and labour migration policy. Informed by the theory of institutional change, the article utilises primary archival sources produced by Yugoslavia’s key stakeholders in labour emigration. It elucidates the Yugoslav government’s and broader establishment’s attitudes towards pre-departure training, their objectives in implementing pre-departure training, and their efforts to expand and institutionalise it as a regular platform for sending workers abroad. The article argues that the Yugoslav government and broader establishment aimed to establish pre-departure training as a regular platform for sending workers abroad and thus increase the state’s profit and control over labour emigration. Furthermore, the article argues that pre-departure training remained limited in scope due to Yugoslavia’s reluctance to invest the resources necessary for its organisational development and institutionalisation. 

After consolidation following the Second World War, the Yugoslav regime began modernising thecountry and transforming means of production, which resulted in a fragile economy and increasinglabour surplus. The reforms coincided with economic development and increasing demand formigrant workers in several countries in the western hemisphere. Consequently, the migration ofYugoslav labour emerged and expanded for more than a decade. This article discusses developmentsconditioning and sustaining Yugoslav labour migration and Yugoslav workers’ labour marketperformance in industrial countries of Western Europe. This article draws on empirical literatureand theoretical understandings of labour migration merged with the perception of temporariness oflabour migrants’ relocation. The article argues that Yugoslav workers’ labour market performancein Western Europe was an outcome of interactions between driving forces of Yugoslav labourmigration, practices of its main agents, and the surrounding socioeconomic contexts.