Despite the vast social scientific literature on the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, very little attention is paid to the preceding decade in the search for explanations for the conflicts that devastated the federation. This absence is puzzling in light of the substantial increase in social unrest during the 1980s, a decade of widespread unemployment and strikes bookended by Josip Broz Tito's death in 1980 and the ascendance of Milosevic to the presidency of Serbia in 1989. The research asks if, in contrast to the nationalist movements that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was considerable interethnic solidarity in the labor movement of the 1980s throughout Yugoslavia. The data for this research come from instances of labor unrest reported in major daily newspapers between 1980 and 1989, locating these articles through the index Bibliografija Jugoslavije. These data are used to build a database of labor unrest in the former Yugoslavia coded by 1) main demands of the workers involved, 2) the number of solidarity activities reported concurrent with the main action in republics other than the one where the initial action took place, and 3) for larger strikes or demonstrations, the number of republics from which delegations of workers attended the action. The study analyzes case studies in three cities chosen from the database where the labor movement was particularly strong. The central hypothesis is that labor unrest increased linearly during the period 1980-1989, and that solidarity was a normal feature of the labor actions that took place. The hypothesis examined through the case study analysis, is that solidarity was undermined by nationalist counter-mobilization aimed at fracturing the solidarity of the workers. The broader impact of this research is that, if the data support the hypothesis, it refutes the often repeated premise that civil war was inevitable due to historical interethnic tension. This premise clouds the understanding of how disadvantaged groups react to the experience of economic restructuring and how political elites exaggerate and manipulate latent ethnic differences in order to remain in power. The research will contribute to a better understanding of the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and of the relationship between labor unrest, national dissolution, and civil war. This research will also be the first attempt to build a comprehensive database of labor actions in the last years of the Yugoslav Federation and will be the first attempt to make data of this kind available to an English-speaking audience.
