Yugoslavia’s socialist system used public shaming to curb absentee workers and operated a unified financial control unit

In the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, enterprises under the self‑management model employed a public shaming practice—posting names of non‑working employees on bulletin boards—to discourage absenteeism and make dismissal harder.

The same state also ran the Služba društvenog knjigovodstva (SDK), a single institution that acted as a bank, financial controller and state auditor. All public and socially owned enterprises had to process transactions through SDK, which recorded payments, controlled cash flows and could block accounts that violated regulations, giving the government near‑real‑time insight into the economy.