Logo of the Uhljeb.info Facebook group. | Photo: Facebook

After the Zagreb city assembly decided this week not to issue any new taxi licences in the city until July 2017, thereby blocking the advance of international taxi company Uber in Croatia, the derogatory description ‘uhljeb’ resurfaced in the country’s media.

Goran Vojkovic, a commentator for popular news website Index, described the move, which seemed to be aimed at protecting existing taxi drivers’ jobs, as “the revenge of the redundant ‘uhljeba’”.

‘Uhljeb’, which derives from the Serbian word for bread and cannot be directly translated into English, was coined in the early 2000s in Croatia.

It usually describes an employee who is appointed to a position for which they are not competent or have no professional qualifications.

Although it was first used solely for public officials such as mayors, county perfects, MPs, ministers and their advisors, employed solely by political party merit, it soon spread to be a catch-all insult for all people working in the public sector.

Its use is connected to the perception promoted by some media and politicians that Croatia’s public sector is bloated with effectively redundant timeservers – a view partly inherited from socialist Yugoslavia.

The Index website and Croatia’s two biggest daily newspapers, Jutarnji list and Vecernji list, are believed to be partly responsible for the widespread use of the word.

Vecernji list in July 2014 headlined one article “A Guide for ‘Uhljebe’: Public Tenders for Employing Family, Friends, Ministers”, while Index headlines each new employment in the public sector with the term.

On Facebook, there are five groups namely solely after the term, either seeking the accountability of politicians or calling for the downsizing and privatization of the public sector in general.

Illustration suggesting that connections are more useful than qualifications or working experience. | Photo: Facebook

Hajrudin Hromadzic, sociologist at the Zagreb Faculty for Humanities and Social Sciences, told BIRN that the term was not “created by chance, but ideologically fabricated”.

He said it was being used to describe “a form of alleged social ‘parasitism’” and to push for downsizing the public sector.

“Anyone with good intentions could ask themselves, at a basic level, how can a person who heals their wounds in hospitals or who takes care of their children be an ‘uhljeb’?” he asked.

The use of a word derived from Serbian, which “takes out the old ‘enemy’ out of the closet”, was also an attempt to taint public-sector workers with negative connotations, Hromadzic suggested.

Mislav Zitko, a research assistant at the Zagreb Faculty for Humanities and Social Sciences, said that the term could be compared to the derogatory language about welfare and the public sector used by conservative leaders in the 1980s such as US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

“This term, constructed in the Croatian public discourse, aims to connect and blend contempt and disgust for public services; a well-known brand of the Thatcher government, combined with the paranoia of the Reagan years, which was most visible in the political hunt for so-called ‘welfare queens’,” Zitko said.