Refugee female child labour at the Matsangos Tobacco Industry

The Matsangos Tobacco Industry operated in Volos from 1918 to 1972. Thousands of people of various geographic origins found employment there: native residents of Volos, first- and second-generation refugees, internal migrants, men and women of all ages. During the interwar period, its labour force was very young and work organisation was largely based on female child labour. The phenomenon of girls under the age of 13 working at factories is almost exclusively linked with this era and most, but not all, of these girls came from refugee families.

Each worker at the Matsangos Tobacco Industry had their own Personnel File, which are now kept in the company’s archives. The files include detailed information about the workers’ date of birth, origins, marital status, age when first hired, position, house address, date and reason for leaving the company. They also allow us to study the issue of child labour in the tobacco industry and examine how it became mostly associated with refugee girls during the interwar period.

Kyriaki Keranidou was born in Kaisareia (Kayseri) of Asia Minor in 1919. She made it to Volos with her family and settled in the city in 1924 along with many other exchangeable refugees according to the terms of the Lausanne Treaty. Two years later, in 1926, when she was only seven years old, she crossed the gate of a cigarette producing factory which had been established in the city a few years earlier and would eventually become one of the country’s biggest tobacco companies: the Matsangos Tobacco Industry. Kyriaki was no casual employee. Although she was periodically dismissed and rehired, she worked at the factory for a total of thirty years, until she had to permanently leave the company in 1956 for health reasons. She started work as a packer and remained one for about twenty years. During her last years at the factory she was transferred to the tobacco blend department. In 1925, Garyfalia Zafeiriou from Smyrna also started working at the Matsangos factory when she was just eight years old. Over the next decade, young girls kept crossing the gate of the factory, like nine-year-old Ioulia Kizirakou from Volos in 1931 and ten-year-old Kitsa Kizopoulou, whose family was from Ada Pazar in Asia Minor, in 1935. These are only some of the names found in the company’s records, attesting to the widespread presence of young children, mostly girls aged between 7 and 13, at the Matsangos tobacco factory during the interwar period.