1970ies: The Guest Worker Route

The guest worker route was the Austrian transport road on which migrant workers from Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey regularly travelled in order to commute between their places of origin and employment. The guest worker route ran from Salzburg through the Enns Valley to Liezen and further in a south-easterly direction over Bruck an der Mur until the Yugoslav border in Spielfeld. In the 1970s and 1980s, the guest worker route became known mainly for its enormous volume of traffic, which placed an especially heavy burden on the neighbouring communities. With the increase of transit traffic, accidents also rose, thereby making the guest worker route the most dangerous access road in Austria. The traffic situation only improved with the expansion of the Pyhrn Motorway (Pyhrnautobahn). For many migrant workers who were employed in the Federal Republic of Germany and in other recruiting countries, these migration routes through Austria were the most important link to the “homeland”. With the opening of the “Iron Curtain” and the start of the war in Yugoslavia in 1991, the guest worker route lost importance compared to other transit routes.