THE French international news channel France 24 produced a short 2 minute video report entitled Immigrant workers in GDR, produced by A. Maillet and B. Boussouar. It is also available in French.
The report gets the basic facts across about the contract workers. It emphasis that the main reason behind the contract worker programme was the chronic labour shortage in the GDR, although a former Ministerium für Arbeit und Löhne official interviewed for the report, Ralf Strasburg, maintained that labour transfer programme was also motivated by a desire to train young Mozambicans.
However, Strasburg’s claim that the workers enjoyed the same “rights and responsibilities” as GDR workers is simply not true. Many contract workers encountered difficulty in securing a qualification, or indeed were trained in skills of no practical use at home. In addition, the GDR government systematically siphoned off between 40 and 60 percent of the wages of Mozambicans in lieu of the debts owed to it by the Mozambican government. This practice has led some to describe the Vertragsarbeiter system as a form of indentured servitude.
Two former Mozambican contract workers also speak in the report. Vicente Valentine ande Jose Joan both came in 1981 to Dresden. They talk about their experiences upon arriving, as well as the difficulties since the Wende. As there experience shows, foreign workers could gain a lot by working in the GDR, despite the limitations imposed on them by the authorities. For many, a period spent working in the GDR offered a unique chance for social and economic advancement.
Yet, surprisingly for a French media report, there was no mention of the Algerian contract workers, the first non-European contract workers to work in East German factories. 8,000 came from Algeria from 1974 to 1984.
Report blurb: To fill the gaps in the country’s workforce, hundreds of thousands of contract workers were brought in from countries like Mozambique, Vietnam or Cuba. In 1989 there were more than 90,000 still in East Germany. Pour combler le manque de main d’oeuvre en RDA, plusieurs centaines de milliers de ressortissants de pays socialistes ont séjourné en Allemagne de l’est dans le cadre d’une migration choisie.
