ABSTRACT
This chapter grounds the case of the Roma community in Baia Mare within a historical conversation about development and growth in (semi)peripheral economies. It addresses how the increasing precarity of Roma communities is connected to the labor-management strategies implemented by the socialist government in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The analysis is based on archival documents and oral testimonies. It traces how the socialist state's increasing efforts to overcome its backwardness through resource extraction since the 1960s onward set in motion mechanisms that further exacerbated poverty within the Roma community in Baia Mare. The author discusses the reasons for the socialist state's turn to resource extraction and highlights the complicated circumstances that brought Baia Mare to the forefront of the Romanian socialist growth regime. She explains the conditions that led to a series of adjustments in labor market policy since the late 1960s, highlighting the key role of skills in reorienting labor solidarity in companies and outside mines. The chapter concludes with an overview of the processes that deepened the social and spatial marginalization of the unskilled Roma since the late 1960s and the subsequent mechanisms that further led to the racialization of unskillfulness.
