Why have the histories of work and the histories of welfare been told separately, and what happens when we bring them together? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Alexandra Ghiț (GWZO Leipzig) focuses on domestic servants, social workers, and users of welfare in interwar Bucharest to argue that “histories of welfare provision are histories of work, and histories of work are histories of welfare provision.” She tells Rosamund Johnston (RECET) how welfare provision has historically been gendered, how this has changed over time, and how a locally-specific but transnationally-connected form of “austerity welfare work” was developed by unpaid and paid, formal and informal workers alike in Depression-era Bucharest.Alexandra Ghiț is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig. She is the author of Welfare Work Without Welfare: Women and Austerity in Interwar Bucharest (De Gruyter Brill, 2025). Ghiț is an editor of the 2024 volume, Through the Prism of Gender and Work: Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries (Brill, 2024), and the author of numerous articles in Aspasia, The European Review of History, and International Labor and Working Class History.