Blaming Others:

Agency Among Unionised Unskilled Workers

Thesis submitted to the

Institute of Social Sciences
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts
In
Sociology

by
Erkan Saka

Boğaziçi University
2001

The thesis of Erkan Saka

is approved by

Doç. Dr. Nükhet Sirman (Committee Chairperson) ....................................................

Prof. Dr. Ferhunde Özbay ....................................................
Yrd. Doç. Dr. Hakan Yılmaz ....................................................

August 2001
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Doç. Dr. Nükhet Sirman. I would not be able to complete this thesis without her
continuous academic guidance and support, her great patience during my thesis writing and her
contributions to my personal development in general. I would also like to thank her because she
began to teach me the craft of anthropology.
I would like to thank Prof. Ferhunde Özbay who taught many courses I took in the department of
Sociology with great pleasure.
I would like to thank Yrd. Doç. Dr. Hakan Yılmaz, who gave the inspiration to prepare this
thesis.
I would like to thank all my interviewees for their kindness and readiness to help me. My special
thanks are due to Ali Rıza and Erdoğan from the field, the officials from Istanbul branch of Öz-
Çelik and factory management.
I would like to thank Prof. Aydın Uğur, the dean of Faculty of Communication at Istanbul Bilgi
University (IBUN). He accepted me to be his teaching assistant and I believe that it would be
very difficult to complete this thesis without the financial and occupational benefits of IBUN.
I would like to thank Dipesh Chakrabarty, Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin who were so kind
to reply my e-mail inquiries and told me the titles of some crucial readings.
There are so many lovely people to thank and I hope those whom I forget to mention here will
forgive me. Thanks "Malta Collective" and especially Veli Gederet, Çetin Tankoç, Gökçe
Kaçmaz, Yusuf Karabulut, Osman C. Parlakışık from the collective who are among the most
lovely people I have ever met and with whom I spent precious times.
I would like to thank Adviye Tolunay, who was my colleague at IBUN. I have never fully
appreciated her moral support and constructive critiques about me. Adviye, please forgive me.
Thanks Istanbul Branch of Özgür Üniversite and its crew. Especially Yıldız and Güliz
encouraged me to prepare a seminar in which I discussed this study with a small but focused
group and thanks Sevda who was the most interested among the people who attended the
seminar.
I would also like to thank Özge N. Serin, Aslı Telli, Almıla Özdek and Ebru Kayaalp, who
helped me in the translation of quotations and I would like to thank my dear friend Fatih Durmaz
for his financial aid.
Finally thanks Dino Mujadzevic, Bekir Cantemir, Elif Çelebi, Kenan Alpay, Dicle Koğacıoğlu,
Nazan Üstündağ, Nurullah Ardıç and my family who always encouraged me to prepare this
thesis.

I dedicate this study to my father, the great labourer and a man of mercy and emotion.

ABSTRACT

Blaming Others:
 Agency Among Unionised Unskilled Workers

The purpose of this study is to find out the sources of agency among a group of unskilled
unionised workers. I argue that the lives of workers are situated in two domains, home and work,
and family and union membership respectively become the sources of agency coupled with a
discourse of blame. The discourse of blame, which is the daily form through which a sense of
impotence among workers, is consciously used by unionised workers under the leadership of
union representatives. This serves the construction of an imaginary community of workers based
on the idea of a society in harmony and balance. The broader historical context in which my
study can be situated in Turkey’s post-1980 period. In this period, export oriented industrialism
went hand in hand with a kind of de-industrialisation and adoption of flexible production
techniques both of which undermined the power of trade unions and the discourse of the welfare
state. Thus my study can be understood as an attempt to demonstrate a moment of unionised
workers’ responses to these processes. My thesis is based on a fieldwork that took place between
September 1999 and June 2001, in a factory, which produces electronic spare parts in Sefaköy. I
also visited frequently the union centre in Aksaray. It mainly depended on in-depth interviews
and observations in the factory but I also attended a few leisure activities outside the factory and
meetings in the union centre.

KISA ÖZET

Ötekileri Sorumlu Tutmak:

Sendikalı Vasıfsız İşçilerde Fail Olmak

Bu çalışmanın amacı bir grup vasıfsız işçi arasında fail olmanın kaynaklarını araştırmaktır.
Tezimde, işçilerin hayatlarının iki alanda, yani evde ve işte kurulduğunu ve buralarda da aile ve
sendika üyeliğinin gündelik bir sorumlu tutma söylemiyle birlikte fail olmanın kaynakları haline
geldiğini iddia ediyorum. İşçiler arasında bir acizlik hissinin gündelik olarak yeniden üretildiği
sorumlu tutma söylemi sendikalı işçiler tarafından sendika temsilcilerinin liderliğinde bilinçli
olarak kullanılmaktadır. Bu da uyum ve denge içindeki bir toplum düşüncesine dayanan hayali
bir işçi cemaatinin kurulmasına hizmet etmektedir. Çalışmamın içine yerleştirilebileceği daha
geniş tarihsel bağlam Türkiye'nin 1980 sonrası dönemidir. Bu dönemde ihracat yönelimli bir
sanayileşme, bir tür sanayisizleşme ve esnek üretim tekniklerinin benimsenmesiyle el ele gitti.
Tüm bunlar sendikaların gücünü ve refah devleti söylemini sarsan gelişmelerdi. Bu yüzden,
çalışmam sendikalı işçilerin bu süreçlere olan tepkisini göstermeye çalışan bir an olarak
düşünülebilir. Tezim, Eylül 1999 ve Haziran 2001 arasında, Sefaköy'de elektronik yedek parça
üreten bir fabrikada yaptığım saha çalışmasına dayanmaktadır. Saha çalışması boyunca fabrikada
gözlemler ve derinlemesine görüşmeler yaptım. Ama fabrika dışında işçilerle bazı eğlence
amaçlı etkinliklere ve sendika merkezindeki toplantılara da katıldım.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii
ABSTRACT v
KISA ÖZET vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS vii
CHAPTER 1 ix
Introduction ix
The Trade Union as a Discursive Device xii
The state, citizenship and workers: inevitable engagements xiv
Of ‘Identity’ xviii
Porous Borders of Work and the Labour Process xxii
The Male Worker Dethroned xxvi
Class, once again xxix
CHAPTER 2 xxxv
In the Field xxxv
THE FACTORY xxxv
MALE WORKERS xxxviii
UNSKILLED WORK xlvi
METAL WORKERS AND THE TRADE UNION liii
METHODOLOGY lvi
CHAPTER 3 lxi
Two Domains and A Trope lxi
Two Domains: Two Sources of Agency lxi
The ship trope lxxi
CHAPTER 4 lxxx
Union Membership as the Source of Agency lxxx
Union membership: Rising Expectations lxxxiii
Memory and Agency xcvii
The fall of union power cii
What is to be done? cxv
CHAPTER 5 cxliv
Who is To Blame? cxliv
CONCLUSION clxxii
REFERENCES clxxvi
APPENDICES clxxxiv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction

The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the sources of agency among a group of unskilled
Turkish male workers and to relate these to some aspects of their identities. I argue that home
and work are the two domains in which workers’ everyday lives are situated and being the head
of the family in the former and union membership in the latter are the most significant practices
of agency. Agency is contingent on the use of certain discursive strategies that I aim to uncover.
Firstly, In a situation of apparent powerlessness blaming is interwoven with these practices and
blame operates as the markings of identity boundaries. Secondly, a ship trope used in different
contexts ties the workers to a rightist and statist position while maintaining a workerist stance. In
this context, my thesis shows that attempts to define worker identity (and elements pertaining to
it) are doomed to fail if broader aspects are related to the everyday practice of work and home
are neglected. At least in the current temporality in which Turkey lives through, there is no
discursive space for a worker identity in-itself as in some heroic narratives of Marxist depiction;
and any attempt to trace worker identity draws forth larger/other narratives, in which workers
embed themselves.

My account focuses on the factory lives of a group of unionised male industrial workers in
contemporary Turkey. Although this was deliberate from the beginning, I felt great uneasiness
about how to handle the issue both practically and theoretically. It was the first time I had
directly encountered factory life and had a face to face relationship with workers. My previous
readings during my undergraduate years were very effective in choosing such a subject.
However, I was biased to look for a given subject position for the workers embedded in a
framework of resistance. Although, I had already begun to see that even the western contexts for
worker identity became gradually complicated, I still imagined an abstract (Western), ideal type
working class identity and wanted to compare it with a practical one situated in Turkey. Some
substantive studies in non-western contexts only reinforced this imaginary with more emphasis
on “resistance” in the beginning. I would then account for what Turkish workers lack, and what
caused those lacks. It would be once again to repeat a well-known pattern that was seen in
western and non-western contexts in innumerable times in the modern age. That manner of
analysis makes the case at hand dependent on the ideal 1
model and inevitably misses its
imcommensurabilities, hybridities and particularities. Further readings, which I refer to below,
and fieldwork practices shifted the whole line of my inquiry: Without making the concept of
class obsolete, I concluded that it is not necessary to think of what the Turkish working class
lacks or how it is different from the ideal type.
Due to the nature of graduate admissions to the Sociology department at Boğaziçi University, I
knew from the outset that I would do ethnographic research among workers. Many scholars and
friends alike expressed the significance of such a study and also pointed out to me the dearth of
research on workers. In Turkey there was very little ethnographic work about workers, but
relatively 2more statistical information provided by some scholars and trade unions was
available. This relative absence of studies did not discourage me. A great anxiety on my side
was how to integrate my readings in current popular topics such as the ethnography of
modernity/alternative modernities, nationalism/transnationalism in a globalising world, new
theoretical developments in the triangle of culture, power and space with those specifically on
labor politics. Although there were some intersections or shifts from the latter to the former like
Ong (1987, 1997), I could not make a similar intersection of interests for a very long time and I
dealt with those readings separately. Zachary Lockman’s volume, in this sense is a turning point
through which the theoretical axis of this thesis could be constructed. Lockman himself and
Chakrabarty’s points in that volume, which I refer to extensively, offered clues – in fact more
than clues – to situate the workers in the interstices of some theoretical fields within a familiar
geographical space (Middle East) excited me greatly.
Some words on the issue of neglect: Zachary Lockman, proposes that this may be due to the
perception that workers did not constitute a distinguishable social group: “many believe to apply
class analysis to workers in Middle East was not appropriate and would even be
counterproductive”. (1994, xi-xii). This proposition may be irrelevant in a Western context, but it
becomes a very convoluted issue in such a country like Turkey despite more than half century
old project of development and modernization and an explicit scholarly appreciation of capitalist
relations especially in agriculture and petty commodity production. In my case, the task was to
unbundle class from class analysis but still retain their partial validities. It seems that even when
one accepts the significance of studying workers, the reductionist, essentialist and teleological
narratives are still available in the 1980s and they pose a significant obstacle. A general wave of
criticism was launched against them, and hence they became highly dubious, but there are very
few studies that integrate the result of those critiques into the anthropology of work.

A general rise and demise of interests in labor studies is also positively correlated with some
macrological developments. A renewed interest in labor studies since the 1960’s was
accompanied with the expansion of industrialism in new parts of the world, a global rise of
Marxist and radical thought and, an intense focus on ‘history from below’ and hence a renewed
interest in all subaltern classes including workers (see Lockman, ibid; introduction). The later
stagnation or fall of some of these developments surely has impacts on labor studies. In the
coming paragraphs I will provide concise backgrounds for these developments since they
affected my theoretical framework.

The Trade Union as a Discursive Device

Although I needed the help of a trade union for access to workers, I did ignore the importance of
the union in the beginning. Later I realised that the trade union is an important device through
which a discussion over my study's objectives could be carried out. Workers already live within
a web of modern institutional and social practices. But compared to others such as political
parties, neighbourhood solidarity foundations etc. the trade union seems to occupy a much more
significant place in the daily life of workers. In the beginning I was almost blind to that
institution. But when I began my fieldwork, in the very first days I realized its sensitive role in
workers' lives: It was a powerful and legitimate device of agency in modern life opening a
discursive space for workers’ demands. Thus, the union eventually escalated to a pivotal role in
my study.

Nevertheless, a thorough examination of the institutional and legal framework of the union (or
unions in Turkey) is not my objective. Rather my claim is to analyse the trade union as a
discursive space shaping the lives of workers. There are partial references to its organisation, its
legal aspects or state policies related with them. The precarious balance of power between the
management, the trade union and the workers was especially important in looking for a modest
examination of the unions’ legal status and what that legal status comes to mean in actual
practices. A prolonged collective bargaining process which was delayed by the factory
management for more than six months and which was a great source of annoyance for the
workers, was a fruitful case through which this precarious balance of power could be understood.
Like the shop stewards seen as the embodiment of the trade union described by Ecevit (1991),
union representatives played a similar role throughout my fieldwork and especially during crisis
of collective bargaining. They were the only ones who formally and socially represented the
union in the factory, and their work was very demanding. The leadership of the trade union
moved strategically and when things went worse (such as the delay in collective bargaining),
they became silent and sullen. They did not respond to workers’ queries and their rising tendency
was to put all the blame on representatives workers themselves without who are much legislative
and financial support. However, when things went better, the leadership of the union became
visible and by visiting the factory they attempted to take all the benefits of the situation.
Certainly, workers observed these moves and nurtured a considerable suspicion against the union
management but they also admitted the possibilities of obtaining new rights and benefits through
the activitity of this institution and thus they never thought of leaving the union altogether. They
initiated aid campaigns for workers and sometimes they attempted to negotiate with the
management about their problems without applying to the union leadership. Thus they developed
a unionised solidarity within the factory while overlooking the union leadership, which is
spacially situated outside the factory.

The state, citizenship and workers: inevitable engagements

Although I could not directly focus on issues of the state, modernity and citizenship, I have
pursued my research in the light of the following discussion.
Sirman (1990) had already shown the representational internality of the state in the very daily
lives of Turkish villagers but it was only after reading the warnings of Chakrabarty in Lockman's
edition (1994) that I realised the need to think of the state as an actor in my study. Chakrabarty’s
warning is about how most of the scholars in that volume treated the state: The state was always
depicted in a repression-resistance model as an enemy of and as an entity external to the workers.
He says, "[in those works criticised] the worker exists as an identity, an agency, a subject, that
has to negotiate with the state but only as an externality to itself. As categories, the state and the
worker are separate; history connects them but only as adversaries"(ibid, 323). Reminding me of
Foucault's emphasis on the productivity of power, he continues and extends the debate to the
issue of citizenship: "theoretically speaking, the processes through which modern classes are
formed can be logically (and historically) shown to be inseparable from the process of the
formation of the modern state... However, can one imagine a working-class organisation (e.g. a
trade union) functioning effectively without an adequate 'legal' space provided for it by the state;
that is, without the "rights of association" that citizenship entails? Which is another way of
saying that the struggle to form effective unions must be part of the struggle to forge a
'democratic' state. ...Therefore, ...shop floor conditions are not produced in isolation from the
larger political history through which the state is formed...the formation of class formation
cannot, hence, be separated from the politics of citizenship.” (ibid, 326-327)

In this context I will outline some of the main parts of the historical context, that is the post-1980
years in Turkey, in which my account can be located. I believe this will provide a better
understanding of what is told. After nearly two decades of import substitution industrialisation, it
is stated that Turkey shifted to export oriented industrialisation. But the data shows that
industrialisation is given up altogether. In a way, Turkey seems to abandon industrialisation
since 1980. According to Kepenek (1999) the post 1980 industrialisation of Turkey had two
main dimensions: first of all, the state stopped investing in industry and decided to privatise its
industrial establishments. Secondly, industrial investments and production were mainly left to
free market conditions. Public sector’s retreat from industrial investment was not
counterbalanced by the private sector. The latter’s investment rate decreased in parallel to the
decrease in the public sector. Meanwhile, despite the fact that industrial investments were less,
export of industrial products was reinforced by the state. Pre-1980 industrial establishments
would be used in the export campaign. In fact, neither the quality nor the costs of industrial
production were adequate to enter highly competitive global markets. However, state policies in
the post 1980 period assured export-oriented production: the real value of the Turkish Lira in
relation to foreign currencies was decreased through devaluations. Thus, demand from global
markets for products from Turkey increased. Low wages and subvention of agricultural products
lowered domestic demand and labour costs. Tariffs and protectionism were lowered through a
series of agreements with the EU and GATT. Direct monetary support was provided to exporters.

While the state obtained the foreign currency it needed especially in the first decade, worker
wages and rights were suspended for the sake of this goal and while global capital began to be
more available in Turkey through GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) and WTO
(World Trade Organization), domestic de-industrialisation continued unabated. In a global
context, the Turkish economy seemed to adapt itself to the changes in the global economy in the
post 1980 period.

Advanced industrial countries lived a period of economic restructuring and social and political
adjustments, which can be called a shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. This new regime of
production rests on flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products and
patterns of consumption (Harvey, 1989; 147). Harvey says “flexible accumulation appears to
imply relatively high levels of ‘structural’ (as opposed to ‘frictional’) unemployment, rapid
destruction and reconstruction of skills, modest (if any) gains in the real wage, and roll back of
trade union power – one of the political pillars of the Fordist regime”. According to
Swyngedouw (quoted in Harvey, 1989), changes concerning workers can be listed as such:

Fordist production Flexible production

single task performance by worker multiple tasks

payment per rate personal payment

high degree of job specialisation elimination of job demarcation

no or only little on the job training long on the job training

vertical labour organization more horizontal labour organization

no learning experience on the job learning

emphasis on diminishing worker’s emphasis on worker’s co-responsibility

responsibility (disciplining of labour force)

no job security high employment security for

core workers (life-time employment).
No job security and poor labour
conditions for temporary workers.

Concerning the state in Post-Fordist production regimes, Jessop (1994) argues that “it marks a
clear break with the Keynesian welfare state as domestic full employment is downplayed in
favour of international competitiveness and redistributive welfare rights take second place to a
productivist reordering of society. In no ways, can it be claimed that the Turkish economy in
general, and the factory in which I did my fielwork in particular adopted the ideal post-fordist
production but changes concerning especially the unionised workers were apparently in the
mood of global developments.

Therefore, in a post-fordist moment, the Turkish state seems to be reluctant to positively meet
workers’ desires. The coup d’etat in 1980 both prepared the appropriate conditions for the new
moment and, connected with the previous statement, destroyed the conditions that would help
workers to challenge new state policies. At the end of the 1970s, industrial workers in Istanbul
were relatively established in comparison to the contemporary situation. Domestic migration to
urban areas was less and many workers had acquired a worker identity, some patterns of
collective worker life had appeared in those years (Baydar & Koray). But during the coup years
and in the following period, all the activist elements of workers were persecuted by the state and
overwhelmed by the rising domestic migration. Migration created an unemployed labour pool
and the labour force was juvenilized accordingly. It is interesting that all workers below 40 are
considered young in Koray’s account whereas workers in my field called only those who are
single and in pre-military age. In fact, they were also considered young in relation to the worker
composition of pre-1980 years. Therefore, my thesis, indirectly, attempts to demonstrate what
claims and what limits workers as citizens have in the age of the weakening of the welfare state.
Of ‘Identity’

In common sense usage the notion of identity has “naturalist” meanings that is, it means having
some shared and “estalished” characteristics between individuals or in some groups of
individuals. Those characteristics are essential to their bearers, they are unchanging and given.
But the recent increase in the use of the notion was accompanied with a critical approach to it. In
contrast to its traditional meaning (that is, all-inclusive sameness, seamless, without internal
differentiation), discursive approaches propose that identity is an incomplete construction which
is constantly under revision. Identities are never unified; they are always fragmented in some
aspects. They are constructed within discourse, within representations (Hall, 1996:5). Here, I
take the practice of blaming as an important fragment of identity construction. In one context,
blaming managers targeted their preference of immigrant workers which would, some workers
thought, empower the immigrant type of family while weakening their own families. On the
other hand, some other workers would praise the immigrant families as an example to replicate.
In another case, blaming managers would aim to make them aware of the expected reciprocity
between all sectors of production in the workshop, in the restaurant or in the administrative
affairs within the factory.

Furthermore, Lockman points out another important point: “…However much we try to make
those categories and narratives complicated, contingent and provisional, we must in the end still
relate some relatively coherent story…keeping in mind that it is to a large extent through the
stories we tell about and to ourselves and others that much of the human social life is represented
and grasped. Moreover, however it is important to problematize and deconstruct categories to
further historical understanding, we must remember that in specific conjunctures people
(ourselves included) often do define themselves in terms of some essence (ie. as workers,
Egyptians, Muslims, women, African-Americans, Americans, citizens demanding their
constitutional rights, people endowed with human rights etc) and act collectively as relatively
coherent historical subjects. These categories are “real” because at times people act as if they are
real: they (we) live through these identities, see them as manifesting a sense of self and
community as well as a set of interests and sometimes even die for them…In other words, an
inevitable tension between the commitment to an antiessentialist epistemological stance and the
deconstruction of stable categories and identities, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the
commitment to retrieving, reconstructing and making coherent the stories of actual working
people and their struggles, fashioned into a narrative of working class (ibid, xxvii). In my case,
although workers have a heterogenous background, and there are no conditions to achieve a
perfect group of homogeneous workers, I did construct a relatively homogenous narrative of
unionised workers under mostly the impact of union representatives.

Therefore, using these frameworks for theorising identity, a new theoretical field in which
workers can be understood, may be launched. Here, the conceptualisation of workers as standard
“proletarians” is abolished. All too coherent narratives of proletarianization and growing class
consciousness had subsumed workers’ multiple, ambiguous and unfinished stories and thus we
lost sight of the specificities of their lives, identities and practices. (Lockman ibid, 101). It is time
to retrieve what we lost. Moreover, a brief survey of workers’ practical history shows that waves
of migrants throughout the Middle East formed the industrial workforce in all through the last
century and these workers always retained their past connections and modified them into new
webs of relations. In this sense, a worker entering the gates of a factory has already been loaded
culturally and this load is used to negotiate with the putatively abstract capitalist disciplining of
factory. But not only the past and present but also external connections, the new means of mass
communication – the print media, radio, television, the audiotape player and the video cassette
recorder – have all exposed them (like all other segments of society) to a commodified popular
culture of competing metanarratives (see also Steinmetz,
3
1994) which will in the end affect
identities both within and outside the workplace . Another point against the possibility of an
abstract identification is that factory workers also – serially or even simultanously – engage in
petty trade or craft work or some other occupation (Lockman, ibid; xxiv). Some of the workers
whom I interviewed talked about their other part-time or weekend jobs. This is just another point
for the inescapability of a multi sited understanding of the object of inquiry even if the fieldwork
is performed in a single factory. In this context being a worker coexists and interacts with other
discourses of identity, and “worker” may have no significant meaning in some dominant social
and political forces espousing other forms of social identity. (ibid, 94) Thus, “working-class
identity may be one component, one subject position, within the subjectivity of those we label
workers, but it is unlikely to be the only or necessarily the most important one”. (ibid, 77).

In my study I propose that in their very daily practices, workers act through two main identites:
being a head of family and a unionised worker. It is not being only a worker but being a
unionised worker that made sense in my case. Although these identites are peculiar to different
domains, they are interrelated and they refer to each other in varying contexts. Moreover,
workers located them in a particular statist and right wing position through the usage of a ship
trope. While this position made them refrain from leftist inclinations, it reinforced a large-scale
criticism of the state, portraying it as unfaithful to its subjects.

Porous Borders of Work and the Labour Process

Among others, feminist studies in labour history were prominent not only to challenge the
dominant identifications of class and to dethrone male factory workers as the single
representatives of workers but they were also effective in re-constructing the boundaries of work
at the most general level. Joan Scott (1988)’s work on garment workers showed that workers
defined themselves “in terms that were, at once, economic, sexual and political”. Representations
of family and gender were inevitably available in workers’ collective identification (a point that
can also be seen in this thesis). She points out that “scholars have tended to filter out these
subjects and arbitrarily made an abstract notion of work the primary referent for the labourers’
agenda, but it was not”. Later Ava Baron (1991) has noted that labour history as a discipline
continued to think about some dichotomies such as capitalism/patriarchy, public/private,
production/reproduction, men’s work/women’s work and class as issues that were peculiar to the
first term in each pair. Although the critique was directed to the concept of class, it inevitably
forces one to think of the notion of work itself. Work cannot be taken for granted, it is
engendered at least and its conceptualisation and practice works beyond the dichotomies of
“industrial/pre-industrial”, “capitalist/pre-capitalist”, “domestic/public” etc.
In another context, and specifically within the discipline of the anthropology of work, Nugent et
al. (1992) question whether the distinctions between work, nonwork, labour,4 pleasure, desire, and
performance etc can be maintained. They emphasize that the labour process is also a social
process, thus “without paying attention to the aesthetic and narrative forms that are embedded in
and shape both quotidian activities and production”, the labour process cannot be understood.
Many studies on the labour process cannot/do not relate it to the non-economic sphere because
“once labour is imagined as thoroughly dominated by economic forces, analysts have trouble
connecting it to everyday life” (ibid, 5). But in practice as Wallman (1979:vi) states “while
preoccupations of work are directly concerned with the work of making a living, they are
indirectly but equally concerned with the work of personal and social identity”. In my case,
personal and social identity are not only equally but also directly constructed at work. Workers
tend to dismiss altogether identifying themselves with the unskilled and sometimes deskilling
work they do and turn towards the family to compensate in the domain of home the sense of
impotence felt at work. Thus, their emphasis on making a living triggered identifications and
contestations at the personal, familial and sometimes national level. Their very daily problems
such as job insecurity and the minimum wage forced them to hold a stance in national politics
including street politics, radical politics, education as the source of skill and upward mobility, an
anti-immigrant stance etc.

Among many others, Comaroff and Comaroff’s (1987) study of Tshidi peasant proletarians and
Chavez’s study (1964) on rebellious Mexican peasants showed that work and construction of self
were mutually embedded and the notion of work could not be reduced to an economistic
understanding. In a more industrialised context, in fact in the heart of the metropolitan, Gramsci
(1971) noted that for the gradual hegemony of managerial ideologies “even the physical, sexual
and imaginative being of those who worked was continually subject to the ordering of
information about production and interwoven with the fabric of social experience” [quoted in
Nugent et al., p. 9]. Nugent et al. (ibid,9) noted that Gramsci’s notion of discipline implies that
the ordering of subjectivities takes place not only in the production process but in everyday life.
Hence a crude focus on labour/work as only the production of economic value situated in the
work place misses how the practice of work and other activities are culturally constructed and
how they are continually contested and the fact that struggles continue over the boundaries and
meanings. Nugent’s work played an orienting position for my work by positing an understanding
of the relationship between individual and collective identity and to my conceptualising the
transformative consequences of accommodation and resistance when they are regarded as
relational actions or processes rather than positional stances (Corrigan 1975 in ibid.187). Labor
studies teeming with resistance stories were certainly inspiring but they were also misleading
especially in view of the very complex and intertwined mechanisms that were taking place.
Disappointment on my part in not grasping some acts of explicit or implicit resistance at the
beginning of my fieldwork were later overcome by thinking beyond the dichotomy of resistance
and accommodation. The strong sense of impotence, for instance, could be drawn as the source
of rebellion or an example for capitalist hegemony but I belive it is more significant to
demonstrate that it signified both in changing contexts. In the hands of union representatives it
was a tool to attack managers and even union leadership and this, in turn, helped their hegemony
over other workers.
Backed by a renewed understanding of work and its overlaps with non-work practices, I could
better understand some events in the factory. For instance, during my initial visits to the factory,
the worker representations were leading an aid campaign for the earthquake survivors in Düzce.
Although those leaders were anxious and somewhat angry at the workers’ seemingly indifference
to the campaign, I was surprised: How could they force the workers to give donations? The way
they called the workers was somewhat intimidating, and they called everybody one by one to
participate in the campaign. More surprising for me was their feeling of righteousness in forcing
others to participate. Only very few workers could challenge that call. Later I heard that
departmental aid campaigns were routinely performed for fellow workers who have a new baby,
get married or engaged or who face a trouble such as a serious illness or fire at home. Thus the
pressing legitimating question Biz Termal olarak depremzedeler için ne yaptık? [What have we
done as Termal -the company that owns that factory- for the earthquake survivors?] became
more understandable for me. The “we” in that question has connotations beyond the working
activity itself.

The Male Worker Dethroned

Some words for my story’s main actors: That is, male industrial workers. It is somewhat
ironic to make this category of workers my main actors: the male (white) industrial worker was
epitomised as the main and maybe the single subject-position of all labor studies and heroic
narratives concerning workers, until the beginning of the 1960s. Despite its instigating force for
theoretical innovations, even in E.P. Thompson’s seminal book (1960) the modal worker was a
male factory worker. Since then this subject position came under multifaceted attack. For
example, feminist scholars stated that although female workers dominated many employment
sectors, especially
5
in the textile trade, they were scarcely to be found in Thompson’s account (J.
Scott, 1990).

Ethnic and race studies were the only other most prominent areas in which the hegemony of the
male factory worker was challenged. Later, studies in the mode of poststructuralism (only an
example) went further to undermine most of the fundamental tenets of labor studies. Criticism of
the male worker hegemony went hand in hand with the critiques of pertinent and broader
conceptualisations. At least since the early 1980s, but certainly there are previous cases, even the
concept of class became questionable and now it seems that a study on workers needs to be
legitimated.

The scholarly moment, then, when this thesis was being written has already witnessed the
dethroning of the male unionist industrial workers from being the classical representative of
working classes in the capitalist period. Women, migrants, non-whites and many others are now
also the objects/subjects of labor studies. Furthermore, the imaginary/geographical locational
attribution to the West has also shifted, or, let’s better say, been deconstructed. The British case,
which was the single exemple, lost its hegemony and historical inquiries
6
took place focusing on
other “Western” cases such as the French, German or American. This diversification seen in
historical accounts can also be transplanted to the contemporary period and other locations; the
non-Western contexts emerge as having a significant impact. Not only location, but more
importantly that abstract, universal modernity attributed to the working class and to their
classical representatives also lost its dominant position. Therefore in the time of writing this
thesis about workers, I do not have an essentialised subject position and moreover –especially if
one looks from an orthodox marxist dimension - I do not have a teleological understanding, that
is, the objects of study will not have a set future to follow.

Not only the theoretical dethronment but also the eveyday practices in an urban setting weakens
male workers' hegemony. In contrast to Ecevit’s case (1991) there is not a clear cut gendered
segregation among the workers. All the work is accepted as deskilled work and especially among
unionist workers, men do not have a superiority due to the nature of their work. The nature of
work is also effective in hindering any advantage that may accrue to seniority or youth (which
may signify “efficiency” or “productivity”; see Rofel 1992). In fact, seniority may be a
disadvantage as it causes higher wages through the increase in years of employment and as the
work done is unskilled, workers with higher wages are in imminent danger of being fired. Or in a
context such as mine in which formally every worker is faced with the threat of being laid off in
times of crisis - and the crisis is permanent - some senior workers, may engage in an alliance
with the union representatives for the in-factory hegemony over workers. The continual practice
of laying workers off confirmed this possibility (nearly 1/3 of workers from all categories were
fired within one year). This vulnerability of workers, of course has deleterious effects on the
male worker. The ability to secure a livelihood for his family, an education for his children and a
good name for all the members of his household which were all marks of success for a (village)
man as Sirman points out, are also at play in an urban setting and in this context of vulnerability
they become sources of men’s anxieties. Because they could not provide/perform the expected
masculine roles properly, there were always expressions of sadness due to the inability to realise
their masculinities and there were also the efforts to find new ways to deal with this agony.
Surely, expressions of masculinity are never uttered (or can be?) explicitly, and they are always
covered with the “general rule” (see below). Thus, when I was annoyed by the level of generality
at which conversations were pitched, I was failing to understand that this was the manner,
through which manhood was being performed. In fact, this point was already made in Sirman’s
account who says that: “[in the village of Tuz] men and women construct reality in different
manners. Men rarely talk about specific events within the history of their households or indeed of
the village. Any question is usually answered in terms of the ‘general rule’ (Bourdieu, 1977)”. I
am really surprised to see the perfect validity of that observation! Therefore, male workers’
account of and practices in a field of what can be called the politics of citizenship are
simultaneously acts of their gender identities.

Finally, the historical moment in which they live, the post 1980 years of Turkey, without doubt,
should logically prevent a positive and fatherly embodiment of the state, for the state is notorious
in curbing the many rights and freedoms it promises and it is seen very much as an accomplice of
the owner of capital. However, it is still fatherly embodied through a discourse of impotence. My
thesis accounts for male workers’ novel strategies of empowerment and his efforts to position
himself in a new map of identifications. The inevitable engagement of male workers with the
state, family and union under new economic policies always carries the quest of a new
configuration of a masculine identity which is itself an in-built character of that engagement.
Class, once again

Lockman (1994, 74-75) states that a particular theory of knowledge that makes a more or less
unambigous dichotomy between that which actually exists in the real world (in this case, a social
class), on the one hand, and its (admittedly sometimes distorted or refracted) reflection in
consciousness, on the other underpinned an empricist understanding of class which retained its
hegemony for a long period. Accordingly, class was understood as an entity that existed “out
there” in the “real world”. Hence it was “objective” and pregiven in external reality determining
the rise of a specific consciousness. Even Thompson’s formulation was trapped in this
objectivism/positivism: objective relations to the means of production were to produce some
“experiences” which would be processed culturally to produce certain meanings (ibid, 76).
Lockman says that, at this point, “to the extent that this way of putting things does not insist that
all experience is already cultural, in other words, that there is no pure, direct experience that is
not already representation, hence socially determined, we are still, epistemologically speaking,
within the realm of empiricism, if at its outermost regions”.

Before Lockman there were also some other figures who tried to free the concepts of work and
labour process from the mainstream distinctions and their determined relation with the economic
sphere and to situate them in the daily lives and point out their culturally constructions. Their
studies had shown that even the economic activity itself was subject to cultural meanings. While
Sewell (1980, 1993) argues against the materialist rhetoric dominating labour history, he asks
whether some very fundamental items for the economy such as money and advertisement can
really be confined to the domain of “material”. Money does not have a value in itself but it is a
symbol and its value is defined in relation to other symbols and things. Similarly advertising is a
“symbolic representation of a commodity to potential customers”. Furthermore, even the
production process cannot be “objectively” determined. Because “the productivity of machines is
not simply a function of their design and scientific efficiency; it also depends fundamentally on
the knowledge and morale of the labour force. At positions “when the labour power is
systematically alienated, productive activity is [still] culturally constituted and not productive
only of economic value” (Nugent et al.). Chakrabarty (1989) extensively discusses what Sewell
and Nugent et al. treat briefly. According to him, “rational needs” relating to technology are also
discursively produced in particular historical conjunctures. For instance, Calcutta jute millers
refused to follow technological innovations that were relevant to their industry because they
believed that as jute was cheaper than its would be substitutes, they would continue to preserve
their semi-monopoly on the jute sector and hence they would preserve their profits. This
collective belief among the mill owners led them to suppress labour more for maintaining the
cheapness but they never attempted to renew their technology. In my case, there are also
examples of the culturally constructed aspects of labour process. Foremen appointments are
arbitrary and they are not the result of technology and knowledge of machinery. Immigrant
workers are preferred by the management due to the belief that they are more industrious and
obedient than the local ones. Similarly, the same belief makes local workers more exposed to
dismissals, which are not the result of a some kind of collected data about workers' productivity
or cost for the company. Moreoever, although all workers are subject to the same kind of work
patterns, sources of agency for workers differ. Women workers, generally, do not depend on
union membership as a source of agency and in addition to factory work, they have to deal with
the housework. Senior workers tell that young workers in their pre-military years are not
interested in union membership, but I did not see any attempt to relate them to the union
activities. Still as far as I observed young workers have less attachment to workplace and a third
domain consisting of their peer groups seems to occupy their daily lives.

From a slightly different angle but still in the same vein, Chakrabarty challenges the traditional
class conceptualisations through a discussion of the problem of economism. He defines
economism as the “tendency …to construct “class consciousness” as a (pre)disposition in favor
of economic-secular rationality and then to oppose to it the sentiments and identifications of
religion, language, or other markers of what maybe called ethnicity. The latter are seen as
inherently destructive of class solidarity”. At this point, empowered by Joan Scott’s work, the
traditional dichotomy between class and class-consciousness loses its vigour altogether. In fact
“they are the same thing – they are political articulations that provide an analysis of, a coherent
pattern to impose upon, the events and activities of daily life. (Scott 1990).

Before discussing what is left of class-consciousness after such critiques, let me add some other
and similar developments among labour historians. Many Marxist and non-Marxist scholars
modified or challenged the uses of class and especially the supposed role that the economic
sphere had played. For example, Sewell, without negating the role of changes in the work
situation, proposed that understanding the conditions of workers was not enough; one also had to
observe the cultural process in which new meanings were created (in Berlenstein, 1993: 4).
Later, once a more conventional Marxist, Stedman-Jones, in one of his studies (1983), reversed
the roles and claimed that Chartism was the result of political discontent rather than economic
discontent. (Berlenstein, ibid.: 4). Similarly and even going farther, William Reddy (1984)
published a study on French textile workers and provided evidence for Sewell’s claims for the
autonomy of culture. He left class analysis altogether and said that the conflict was of a
community strife rather than a class strife. According to him, the market was a cultural construct
and the workers in the name of long standing cultural ideals such as family, honour and
independence opposed new ideas imposed by capitalists. Concepts deriving from 19th century
socialism were alien to the workers. In another context, Reddy (1987) also mentioned the
difficulty of defining a “socially distinct set of individuals, united by some identifiable trait or
traits, as having shared intentions”. There was the possibility to rework class analysis but there
were too many ways to carry out such an endeavour and that was making class “lose its rigour as
a category” (ibid). In fact E.P. Thompson (1966) had long before mentioned the “pre-industrial”
and communitarian values that were to become tools in the hands of workers against the
capitalists but the actors in his account were still thought according to their relations to the means
of production. Also Burke points out that Thompson’s concept of moral economy was extracted
from the language of the Manchester School and all of the critiques that were directed against
that school were valid for Thompson, too.

Lockman and Chakrabarty offer a new direction in understanding class and locate it in a new
theoretical framework. While both scholars share many common traits, I will concentrate on the
former scholar to emphasise how great a role the narrative/discursive dimension plays and hence
trivialises the centrality of class analysis without rejecting it altogether while the latter one will
help me construct direct linkages with the state, citizenship and modernity. Those linkages will
be dealt with later. What Lockman does is to treat class in a non-essential, non-reductionist
(refraining from economism) and non-teleological way but positing at the same time its
contingent existence. For him, and I agree, it might be more productive to consider class not as a
question of truth and falsity but as one of the competing representations of society, rooted in
different premises and conducing to different consequences” (Lockman, ibid; introduction). In
my case, at least a group of workers whom I worked with had a collective pattern of living, that
is they lived a particular class life. They lived mainly in two domains and despite individual
differences they had the union membership and the position of leadership in their family that
empowered them against the de-humanising effect of their work. Moreover, despite some
differences, they have a common anti-leftist, statist political stance. It is difficult to think of
commonalities concerning all Turkish workers but among them, this small group of workers
acted as a class.

In the following chapters, I use this theoretical framework to understand a group of male workers
whose identities are formed in conjunction with the capitalist labour process, unskilled work,
individual life stories, two significant institutions that is the family and the trade union, and a
particular kind of masculinity. Moreover, I think of this theoretical combination under the
concept of agency. Throughout the fieldwork a sense of having or not having authority to act and
pressures of desire to be powerful in decision making processes of daily life were so prevalent
that I have ordered the whole issue into a quest of agency keeping the theoretical issues
discussed above in mind.

The next chapter, "In the Field", provides a detailed description of the fieldwork I did. In the
third chapter, "Two Domains and a Trope", I discuss the two domains in which workers' lives are
mostly spent and a trope, which governs their lives in these domains. In the fourth chapter, I
focus on the union and union membership, which happens to be the most eventful position in the
work domain. In the fifth chapter, I focus on the discourse of blame, which operates as signposts
of workers' identities.

CHAPTER 2
In the Field

THE FACTORY

My fieldwork took place in a factory. There are many reasons for this choice. It is first of all a
space which epitomises its capitalist discipline temporally and spatially to the fullest degree.
Consequently it is a place where the struggle between labour and capital unfolds in its most
concrete and daily manner (Thompson, 1982). It would be an illuminating exercise to see to what
extent that “panopticon” view of the factory holds. In the end, it seems that my study challenges
both Thompson and Burawoy (1979) in the context that even in the factory there is no abstract
ruling of capitalism but
7
broader metanarratives are at play. Moreover, there were few
ethnographic studies and still, with some exceptions, they seemed to be descriptive and inspired
from some western models rather than being informed by a sense to understand the local in its
own specificity. Thus, I believed an ethnographic study for the concerned subject was legitimate.

Another reason for fieldwork in a factory, was my personal conviction that scholars in Turkey
are more interested in seemingly more “abnormal” or “deviant” forms of work such as the
informal economy in general, and such as the small producers that would disappear
8
through the
development of capitalism or that would be contained by the formal economy. Meanwhile, the
labour force in the factories, especially the unionised ones seem to be taken for granted. It is as if
there is nothing to know more about them, they are successful parts of the modernisation project
but the problem is that some others like peasants or small producers are obdurately available,
hence they get further attention. Also in common sensical usages, the word işçi [worker] does
not mean the lower part of the social structure. Especially unionized workers are seen to be
wealthy in relation to others in the lower classes. Therefore, workers sometimes do not seem to
be in a subaltern position in common sense and in scholarly works alike.

The factory belongs to the Istanbul plant of Termal A.Ş. This company has two plants. The other
plant is in Çanakkale and it produces ceramics. One of the six buildings in the Istanbul plant is
reserved for the marketing of Termal ceramics. But the other five buildings and the Istanbul plant
in general is for manufacturing spare parts. These spare parts include transformers for televisions
– this forms the biggest amount of production – bobbins (mostly for televisions again), lighters
for ovens, kerosene stoves and water heaters, radio assembling for cars, remote control operators,
injections. Currently most of the production is sold to Beko, a subsidiary company of Koç
Conglomeration. Arden and Profilo-Pek are other significant domestic customers of Termal.
Besides, despite recent decreases in exports, Termal continues to sell its products to some
German customers.

As I have just written the Istanbul plant consists of six buildings spreading over an area of nearly
20,000 square metres. A street divides the plant into two parts. On the one side (the left side)
there are four buildings and on the other side (on the right) there are two. One of four buildings is
for ceramic marketing and I had no interest in it. Four of the remaining five buildings are
production sites and I visited all of them. On the left, three of those buildings are built side by
side. In addition to main gates for every building, there are internal gates so that one can move
from one building to another without going outside. In the first building (I will describe them
from north to south), the first floor has a big warehouse. On the second floor, there is an
assembly line for small transformers. The third floor has an assembly line and workbenches for
bobbin wrapping. The fourth floor is the site for radio assembling. In the next building, the first
floor consists of the extension of the warehouse and casting workshops. The other three floors
(every production building has four floors) have lighter production units, repairing and casting
ateliers, and assembly lines and finally the quality control unit. In the next (third) building, the
first floor has a machine park (not operated at the moment) and on the second floor, there are
again assembly lines especially for bobbin wrapping. The Research&Development unit is also on
this floor. On the third floor there is the restaurant and on the fourth floor there are dressing
rooms and the union room.

On the right side, opposite the third building, there is the fourth production building. On the first
floor transformers for export are produced. On the second floor there is a machine park and an
assembly line for bandaged cables for televisions. On the third floor, there is a warehouse and the
fourth floor is reserved for lighter production.

On the north of the right side there is a small (in relation to other bigger buildings) administrative
building. Marketing, personnel, accounting, export-import and doctor’s offices are located in this
building. Between the fourth production building and the administrative building there is a
smaller building reserved for meetings with important customers and spaces for basketball and
volleyball playing (few workers play basketball but volleyball is played a lot). Besides there is an
unused open area.

The location of the factory (Sefaköy) was near my house although I had never gone in that
direction before. I went there by bus in 20 minutes in different days and at different times of the
week. The personnel manager of the factory gave me the official permission to visit the factory.

MALE WORKERS

As I already stated, working with male workers already was scholarly interests. But there are
also some practical reasons: First of all, I felt that I would have more access to male workers
than female ones as a male researcher. In fact, this is not only due to a feeling, it is also partly
due to the field stories that I have heard from several sources. Also it is part of the practical
knowledge I got as I am living in the same society with the workers. Although I was sincerely
welcomed by the workers in general, in practice communication with male workers was much
easier and substantive.

Another reason for choosing male workers is their relative under-representation in the studies on
workers. Although they form 81.4 % of the waged labour force (according to the State Institute
of Statistics, in 1996) as far as I could find, there were few studies focusing on them. Instead,
studies on women workers continued to dominate. This is related with the general rise of
sensitivity on women’s rights in the past decades and the particular exploitation based on gender.

Women workers were the objects of study in Ong (1987), Rofel (1992), Ecevit (1991), Koray
(1999), whose works provided me a sense of the ethnography of work in the initial stages of my
thesis preparation. Instead, along with practical reasons, I was curious about how male workers
understood their work and how they react to heavy exploitation. In fact, those male workers
refused to think directly about their (unskilled) work, which seldom provided them with a sense
of identity and preferred to be involved in a unionist discourse which includes a series of
complaints for not having been able to exploit the rights they have.
There are eight managers in the factory: the general director and managers for personnel,
finance, export-import, purchase, quality control, production and research and development
whose offices are located in the administrative building.

At the beginning of 1999, there were 629 workers in the factory (I have excluded and will
exclude 23 administrative employees from all numbers I give. As far as I know there was no
change in the number of the administrative personnel). One year later, there were 348 workers
and at the end of June 2001 there were 288 workers (the last number includes 46 workers of a
new department bought by the company this year). 150 of these workers were male workers. 129
(62 of them are male) workers were fired from the first day of 2001 to the end of June 2001.
While there were 430 unionised workers at the beginning of 2001, there are 136 unionised
workers at the moment. 64 of the unionised workers are male.

All workers qualified as skilled are non-unionised. The company offers higher wages if they do
not join the union and none of them join. All foremen, department chiefs, managers and all
administrative employees, all employees in the injection and mechanic ateliers are qualified as
skilled workers and are non-unionised.

Being skilled and unskilled is not related with the level of education. Foremen are mostly chosen
from those who had a process of apprenticehip after primary school. Only those immigrants from
Bulgaria are assumed to be skilled although they are all high school graduates in general.
However as I will explain in the next chapter, the nature of work does not really require a
background of a similar work experience. A combination of good connections with managers,
being obedient and industrious worker (that is mostly the reason managers prefer immigrant
since they are assumed to have that characteristics),
9
being male and a senior enough to rule over
workers is sufficient to be a foreman. Nearly 70% of foremen graduated from primary school.
They became skilled at work after primary school. Only the immigrant foremen from Bulgaria
graduated from high school. There are also a few mechanical engineers who have university
degrees. All administrative employees are high school graduates or higher institutions.

There are three union representatives: Ali Rıza is the chief and Erdoğan and Şükran are his
assistants. Ali Rıza is allowed legally to have 3 hours free in a day within working houırs to pay
attention for worker problems. Erdoğan and Şükran have a total of 3 hours in a week. But usually
they spend more time without working and without much fear of penalty. Union representatives
are also unskilled workers and their source of income is the wage they get from the company.
The union does not pay them an extra wage. Their most important legal advantage is that the
company cannot fire them. Only if the union dismisses them from their position, can the
company fire them. Most of their time passes in the union room.

Among male workers there are differentiations based on age, geographical origin or union
membership that prevents us from thinking of a homogeneous working class. In the case of age,
an important factor is whether the person has already done military service or not. Another factor
is whether one is married or not. In fact, age is interwoven with these rites of passage. Senior
workers assume that a young worker mostly feel work responsibility only after military service.
It is again at this time, that's after military service, that one begins to think of marriage. Hence
work responsibility becomes very much related with family responsibility.
10
Mehmet said,
Before the military service, one does not care much about anything, for there seems to be no
problem at all. And, one does not want to care either. In fact, society going worse, because we
like westernisation that much today. Today the young generation leads a degenerated life,
thinking of nothing but fun. But when one returns from the military duty, and when one learns
the hardship and discipline there, one has to change immediately. You will ask why. Because one
has no more an excuse or an obstacle that may impede one. Before the duty, for example, one
may say that it is not much use to start working or establish some kind of work even if one has
capital and opportunities, because the military duty will interrupt. So, one may say that it is
better to live as one pleases till one goes to the military duty. After the completion of the service,
he decides that he should marry, and he needs things to get married, therefore he has to make
investments. And this urges him to get wiser and get settled. His military service is now
completed, and he is married and he has a family to take care of, therefore he needs to be
wiser.Either in the factory or in the workplaces, he can take on full responsibility of his work, at
least.

Young male workers are not expected to be responsible in the organisation of relations within the
factory and in practice they are usually not interested in negotiations between the management
and the union or (directly) with the workers. As an example, they were criticised once in the
union room anonymously because a group of young workers preferred to go the cinema instead
of attending an important union meeting. Their "irresponsibility" is a usual point of reference by
senior workers who are heads of families. The main outcome is thus their exemption from any
issues of governance among workers. In fact, this attribution of irresponsibility is shared by the
management and senior workers. Although there is a high degree of arbitrariness in dismissals,
these young male workers are more exposed to dismissals. Their relative majority among the
workforce means that a major group of workers are excluded from the decision making
processes.

It should be noted that young female workers are subject to a different regime of power. Unlike
the male ones, this much smaller group of workers must be "responsible". From the outset 'our
girls' invest for the future.

Again, Mehmet said,

And today our girls are wiser, too. They are more responsible than their matches had been
before. More responsible, and you know why, they think of their future, they get prepared for
their wedding, they invest. Men do not have the same line of thought.. We have been through the
same period too, when we were young. And I don’t mean to blame them, but I say this because
Turkey is not headed for the good.

Immigrant status can be another divisive factor. Especially since work does not for other
reasons act as a source of identity or position, being immigrant can produce what work might
have produced otherwise. In Sefaköy, where the factory is located, there is a significant number
of immigrant Turks from Bulgaria. Although no worker I interviewed is from Istanbul, only
these are assumed to be göçmens. In fact waves of migration from Bulgaria took place but the
one in question is the last one that happened at the end of the 1980s. Others whose parents' and
grandparents' origins can be traced back to Bulgaria through previous migration waves, do not
identify themselves as göçmen (immigrant). This might be because of its pejorative usage and
being a target of anger by non-immigrant workers. But in my opinion this is not the sole reason
for their act. Recent immigrants’ existence entail the existence of a different labor discipline, a
different family life and at most general a different life style while previous ones had been
integrated into the rest of the population. Thus, like non-immigrants, previous immigrants cannot
think of a common identity with immigrants. Besides, there is no single göçmen characterisation.
I will deal with these characterisations in another chapter.

Another divisive factor is being a union member or not. This is interwoven partly with being
skilled as the firm does not allow skilled workers to join the union as noted above. Still, some
unskilled workers also did not join it. All those non-unionised workers are called memurs.
Memurs are non-unionised employees. The word, memur, is pejoratively used by the union
members to imply that those who refrain from becoming a union member cannot attain the social
status/ job security the real memurs, that is, government employees, have. In fact memurs are
mostly administrative employees who can be classified within the service sector. However, there
are also a significant number of industrial workers. Some of them are those who left the union
and some who never joined the union. Here I would just like to focus on foremen. They must be
non-unionised (worker representatives always regret that the union accepted management’s
demand that foremen must not be unionised), and hence they are also called memurs. Arbitrary
appointment of foremen by managers and their relative abundance is another divisive factor. One
can easily become a foreman and then a lay worker; one can be unionised and then a non-
unionised worker, or vice versa. There is no need for prior formal training to become a foreman.
Foremen are chosen among workers. Most of them are chosen from among immigrants but non-
immigrants are also eligible. Some graduated from high school and some did not. Managers
decide who the foremen will be. Thus sometimes good relations with a manager may lead to
becoming a foreman.

UNSKILLED WORK

Unskilled work: all the assembly line workers are unskilled.

They line up before a an assembly: one screws up, one puts
on the cable, one controls, one puts it in the box, one checks
the transformator, one does the labeling. These are montage
workers. The one who controls them is the foreman. But the
real skilled workers work in lathes, moulders working
mechanics workshop... And most of our friends who
use…..the machine or who work at injection are skilled, too.
But, they are not much educated, either. (Erdoğan, union
representative).
Unskilled work is neither desired nor practically possible without discontinuities. A few workers
had been working in the same factory for nearly 10 years. Thus a worker can maintain his/her
position as much as this period. But the problem is that to become a non worker is an ever-
existing possibility (and that worker who was working for nearly 10 years was indeed
dismissed).11Seniority in a workplace cannot prevent that possibility. Accidental entrance to the
workplace , no job security against dismissals, arbitrary rule of management, simultaneity and
possibility of other types of work while working in the factory all lead to workers being rendered
dispensable tools in the hands of management. This condition of workers is an obstacle for them
to think of a collective imaginary based purely on their work.

Before working in the factory, all the workers I interviewed worked in non-industrial settings.
Some of them, from time to time had part-time non-industrial jobs while working in the factory,
and most of them plan/desire to have their own businesses in the future. For example, Mehmet
worked in a restaurant as a waiter and in a supermarket, Ali Rıza,12the senior union representative
worked as an apprentice at an electricity repair shop and Hüseyin in his father’s dairy farm
before taking up a job in the factory.

While working in the factory, Mehmet worked at wedding halls as a photographer and video
filmer at weekends. (He began to work as a courier in a private postal service after he was
dismissed from 13
his job in the factory). For a short while, Erdoğan became a taxi driver. Another
worker, İlhan , worked in a restaurant at weekends. And some others worked as pedlars
including those who sold sandwiches in coffee-houses in the evenings. Sometimes extra-work
may provide a higher source of income than the normal salary. The cameraman says “there are
less wedding ceremonies after the earthquake. There were seven weddings in a week two years
ago. I was earning more than my wage. Now there are fewer weddings. I may work in a better
wedding hall”. This case even further undermines the significance of industrial work for forming
a stable worker identity. Another point is that extra work may be related to the agenda of family.
For example, İlhan ceased working in restaurants when he finally finished building his own
house, that is, at the end of completing a significant source of expenditure:

On Friday you leave work, and at the weekend continue to work all night and day, without
having rest. Then how efficient you can be on Monday. You earn your life here, too. There is a
certain number that you have to reach. But when there is any need, you have to do extra work.
But I have given up doing it now. Thanks God.

However, one should also not forget that although wages are low, factory work provides a steady
income and also social rights that extra work cannot have. In most of the cases, workers would
continue work if they were allowed. But dismissals prevent long term working opportunities.

For the future, having one's own business is an ideal goal. In fact, this is omnipresent ambition
among workers but due to lack of capital, it is postponed to a later, not clearly defined date: İlhan
says,

If I had the opportunity, I would start a trade work. Why? Because at least we will have a work
of our own.
You don’t have capital to start a business at the moment?
Exactly. Suppose you have decided to open up a store, the rents and taxation are increasing
madly. What can you do in such a situation? When you become a tradesmanship, you will not
expect any profit for about two years. You have to depend on other sources of income because, if
you use these sources for the store, you ruin it too.

Erdoğan, the union representative, was quite certain about the date and the kind of business he
wanted to start. His capital would be the money he receives when he retires and he hopes to set
up a small haberdashery shop.

Like the unstable and changeable character of personal working life histories, unskilled work
itself has similar characterisations. For İlhan, what one does is changeble and one has to adapt to
it. However, these attributions do not mean that there is no human suffering usually going
unnoticed:

Is your present work tiring?

So so. Neither too tiring nor too light.
Is it boring? Do you do the same thing all the time?
Usually you do the same thing but if there are few workers in your department then you have to
take care of other things as well. Because of the routine allocation of workers to different
departments, there can be changes in where you work. But when you work from eight to six,
your body adapts itself to it. For example, one who is used to working on chair, goes through real
trouble when he is forced to work on foot in a new job. Or vice versa.
Do you have such a problem?
I used to work here at the warehouse. You know, you have to run here and there at such a work
from morning to evening. Then how can you get yourself to working on the chair? But you get
used to it as well.

In fact, although uttered clearly, the listener, that is me, waits for a more explicit and prolonged
discourse on the bitterness of work, like the ones he had read in his literature research, only to
miss the points made. Instead, what unionised workers do in general is to channel the discussions
from the work per se to issues of union and maltreatments going on in the factory. Thus, the so
called adaptation process, which is almost against human nature, is overlooked.

Accordingly, although there are different departments in the factory, the management classifies
all under the same title of unskilled work and constantly re-allocate
14
workers into these
departments. In the light of the above examples what Aykut says summarizes how an unskilled
worker identifies himself his work in the factory. He seems to internalize this only grudginly.
Since his work is “unskilled”, this is inevitable:

We do all kinds of work. We are now classified as unskilled workers. We don’t have any
expertise, we do anything. At the warehouse, I learned how to use the computer. Nobody wanted
to work in this department. I was working with stylist buddies, I gave it up and I came here. I
have been in 8 or 10 departments. And the last one is here. My job is very good at the moment. I
cannot find the same conditions in any other place. But if there is need, I can work any where,
for I am married, I am not on my own. I have a daughter who is two months old.

In another context, Erdoğan gives more information about the work. According to him, there is
no need for prior education for doing this kind of work. Work in the factory equalizes all workers
who with backgrounds and renders them into an undifferentiated labor force. Erdoğan says,

Generally there is unskilled work and assembly line here. There are many high school graduates
at the moment. They accept to work here because of the unemployment problem. It differs only
if you are graduated from a vocational highschool, there is no difference in wage, but if there is
any work that needs skill, then where you are graduated from may matter. Otherwise, there is no
difference between primary school graduates and highschool graduates.

Then he tells his own work story:

I did extra work, too. I did bobbin winding. I wound transformer bobbin. My job was on
transformators. But here I have nothing to do with that job. Here I worked first on the regulators
then I wound up bobbin. Then I worked on things about DST. Now, there are the life-tests of
transformers. I do the daily and monthly checkings (control, ya da). And I also explore why the
junk is out of order and I write reports.

Erdoğan’s account gives several clues about the nature of work. First of all, he shows that work
has a de-skilling character. Many skilled workers accept to be employed in such work because of
the need to survive. Secondly, he implies that skill can be calculated by level of education. In
fact this is one way Erdoğan and some other workers criticise the state as will be seen in the
following chapters. According to them, children of workers and other poor people can not
continue their education because of the lack of adequate income and thus they remain unskilled
and therefore they cannot be upwardly mobile. On the other hand, as I quoted in the previous
section, he also accepts that skill can be acquired even if one is only a primary school graduate.
According to him most of the foremen who are non-immigrants are skilled although they are
primary school graduates while immigrant foremen are mostly high school graduates. However,
the general mood is to make a positive correlation between education and skill and one more
criticism that emerges from this mood is that education in Turkey does not have practical
concerns and thus less skill than expected is acquired in the process of education. The Bulgarian
state offers a degree including skill for work whereas the Turkish system of education does not
contain skilling, and one has to leave school and join a process of apprenticeship. Thirdly,
another point can be derived from Erdoğan’s account: Unskilled work can be constructed
without deskilling. Most of the workers who are called unskilled did not go through a process of
obtaining a skill before. As far as I observered all the workers I interviewed began their factory
work as unskilled workers and continued to work in the same capacity. Some of them also never
became masters but only apprentices in their sweatshop or some kind of artisan jobs outside the
factory. Here at stake is not losing a previously obtained skill, but to be denied that one is
acquiring a skill while a worker learns new techniques like computer using. What can be
maintained however, is that no matter what a worker does on the job, his stake as an unskilled
worker is maintained throughout his working life unlike the rather simple dichotomy drawn
between fordism and post-fordism in the introduction.
METAL WORKERS AND THE TRADE UNION

In the beginning of the fieldwork, I had no intention of making a connection with the trade
union. But when I began to think about how to access to workers, I realized that access through a
union would be better. I did not know any workers and even if I had known some and got their
help to establish connections with a wider group of workers, I thought, it would be very difficult
to freely visit the factory. My father and also some other friends would help me connect with
some managers or factory owners, but I thought if I had access to workers through the
management, this would really put me in a suspicious position. I would be seen as a kind of
agent working for the management. So I decided for the option of the trade union. It is a
legitimate worker organization that a management would not explicitly oppose and workers will
be less suspicious about me. Of course, access through the union would affect the workers to be
less critical of the union and my fieldwork has in fact been shaped by union politics to a large
extent. But I think this situation does not seriously challenge my theoretical framework.
Meanwhile, I was anxious about whether I would be permitted by the management to do the
fieldwork. Although I attempted to outline what my aim was, the personnel manager categorised
me as an engineering student who wants to do internship for a while and I was listed with other
engineering students. I learnt that in previous years, engineering students from Boğaziçi
University had visited the factory. But during my fieldwork I did not meet any of those students.
Since there is no visible unrest since the union change, the management seemed to be less
suspicious about someone like me, by the union.

Industrial workers in any industry would have served my purposes. After a period of searching,
the Istanbul branch of ÖZ ÇELİK-İŞ Union [True Steel Work Union], a member of a slightly
right wing conservative confederation of unions ‘HAK-İŞ’, helped me find a factory to do my
fieldwork. ÖZ ÇELİK-İŞ was established in 1976 for workers in steel work, iron work, metal
goods manufacturing and the automotive sector. In 1994, it advocated the transfer of Karabük
Iron & Steel Factories, which the State planned to privatise, to workers in 1994. Throughout the
last decade it organised many campaigns against privatisation, which would affect its members
in the public sector. From time to time the union issues bulletins, and since April 2001 it began
to issue a monthly magazine, in which one of Erdoğan’s essays was published.

All members of ÖZ ÇELİK-İŞ, in very general terms, can be classified as metal workers. It was
not my aim to look for a specific industry that had some particular characteristics. But in the end
I found out that metal workers formed one of the biggest sectors of the Turkish labour force:
according to the Ministry of Work and Social Security, metal workers were % 12.2 of the total
labor force in 1998, second in rank after construction workers (statistics taken from Çetik &
Akkaya, 1999). Also it is said that the first workers’ organisation Osmanlı Amele Cemiyeti was
established in 1894 by metal workers (Türk-Ar, 1995). Since the last decades of the Ottoman
Empire, metal workers had a significant place15in workers’ history through their organisations and
activities (Türkiye Sendikacılık Ansiklopedisi , v. 2, pp. 405-410). Unionisation rate (77,33 %) is
above the national average (69,39 %) according to the 1996 statistics of the Ministry of Work
and Social Security. Still there are more than 200,000 non-union members and it is argued that
subcontracting is the most important threat against unionisation (TSA, ibid).

The union officials and especially the union representatives who happened to be the closest
workers to me considered my work as an opportunity to make their opinions known. They were
very helpful in finding workers whom I wanted to interview, making the union room available
for interviews, delivering to me every document, book and magazine that they had or that I
wanted, making contacts with the union officials or managers. In fact, in previous years, they had
encountered with other scholars who visited them or whom they attended their seminars. Şükran,
the union representative, told me that she attended Meryem Koray's seminars for women
workers. They also hosted some leftist journalists especially at the time of transfer to Hak İş
from Türk İş. So they were somewhat familiar with the academy and the media. My concern
with daily practices coincided with their concern to express their daily problems to a broader
public. Thus although I insisted that I was only at the beginning of an academic career, they
continue to treat me as a full-scale scholar. However, I must insist thw workers and the union
representatives I had most contact with, did not try to impress upon one or another particular
view. They related their own views during the interviews and for the rest of the time, left me
pretty much alone to do my own observations. I was given freedom to move and work within the
factory. In fact, they believed that explicit attempt to influence somebody like me would have
unwanted consequences and they prefered to be self-criticising.

METHODOLOGY

I visited the factory -irregularly- for more than two years. I attended the preparation of aid
campaigns, trade union meetings, meals breaking the fast, iftar (in the month of Ramadan),
problem solving activities, some leisure time activities such as playing football, going to café etc.
I listened to the debates going on during a prolonged process of collective bargaining; I observed
a new addition to existing departments and consequently new recruitment activity to the union; I
witnessed one case of sexual harassment; I was involved in a campaign for earthquake survivors
and the struggle on the timing of iftar during the holy month of Ramadan.

The union room

Despite my unexpected freedom of movement, most of my hours in the factory were spent in the
union room. I was anxious not to distract workers since this would have a negative consequence
for their job security. Even if I had attempted to spend more time in the workbenches, I guess,
workers would reject my proposals since they were afraid of being dismissed. All in-depth
interviews and most of the conversations consequently took place in this room. It was the
headquarters of union activity and it is certain that workers undertook a harder unionist position
while in the room although we were alone during the interviews.
An Alevite leftist radio channel was always on (while the worker population was mostly
immigrants from the Balkans and union representatives were inclined to the far right); there were
frequent services of tea and coffee and workers wandered in and out especially at lunch time and
engaged in never ending conversations mostly orchestrated by the most senior union
representative, Ali Rıza. His already colloquially politicised manner of talking was being
constantly stimulated by the radio's news services, which was in a slightly leftist, oppositional
tone. For a long time I felt great anxiety because I was unable to grasp actual worker lives as any
issue directly related with what was actually happening in the factory or in their personal lives
immediately shifted into a discussion of high politics. I felt as if I was in a coffeehouse teeming
with old retired people passing their time with casual conversation on politics. However, I
realised eventually that this was not just idle talk and that their making of subjectivities was very
much enmeshed in broader policies and narratives. Taking aside their ideological convictions
(which lies on a nationalist-conservative field) and a masculine mode of generalising, unionist
responses to a moment when unions were for all practical purposes being dismantled had to be
shaped in broader terms since the weakening of their union were part of national developments.

What I asked

In addition to observation and daily conversations with the workers, I carried out in-depth
interviews with some of them. During the interviews with workers I focused on personal labour
histories. Instead of delving into a whole life story I concentrated on how and why one became a
worker. Stages in personal lives came to correspond with one’s current work status. A worker
who had several years of experience and who was the head of a family was of course different in
his/her comments than a young girl who was working for her trousseau or a young boy waiting
for the obligatory army recruitment and working in the meantime for a minimum wage (seen as a
harçlık/pourboire) and whose father continued to pay for his mobile telephone bills. Meanings of
work and class positions for workers as heads of families are again different from those married
women workers whose wages are mostly seen as complementary to the household head’s
income. Therefore, labour stories of workers corresponding to their life cycles were needed to
situate various meanings and motivations to work. Furthermore, future expectations and plans
were also important and very much related to their entrance to current work. Was work in that
factory transitory or permanent? Was the factory a relay point for future plans? Did they plan to
change to a status of semi- or full- independent small producer or something else? If they saw
themselves staying permanently with their current type of work, what were their plans for their
family members, especially for their children? Could we think of a generation of worker
families? The literature on industrial sociology until the 1990s mostly defined workers as having
peasant origins (Usumezsoy, 1984). My observations show that workers are more settled and
urban with direct access to a modern life style. Some of the workers whom I had met in the
factory were children, nephews or grooms of persons who had previously worked in the same
factory; the migratory/peasant characteristics attributed to workers seemed to have lost its
salience. Besides, I wanted to know whom they blamed for the problems they encountered and
what solutions they offered. Finally, I also talked about the current events that occupied
headlines and popular soap operas (such as Deli Yürek). Sometimes I initiated these
conversations and sometimes they refered to them while talking about their work lives.
In this chapter, I focus on the main components of the field in which this thesis was prepared.
After explaining the reasons why I chose a factory to do my fieldwork and clarify the practical
and theoretical reasons of studying male workers, I provide a broad decription of the workforce.
Age, geographical origin and union membership make it impossible to think of a homogeneous
collectivity of workers. Rather, it is the unskilled nature of their work and the discourses
constructed around them as a heteregenous community of workers. Unskilled labour is seen as
unstable and against human nature. Work may have a deskilling impact for some and for others it
can be constructed as unskilled from the outset of their work lives. Moreover, although there is a
general belief that education determines the level of skill, there are exceptions and discussions
regarding skill and education produce the feeling of shared problems.

In the next chapter, I begin to look for a mapping of workers' everyday life and focus on the
domains and a trope that connects them, all of which happen to be the sources of worker agency.

CHAPTER 3
Two Domains and A Trope

Before entering the daily practice of labor, I want to propose two domains, home and work, and a
recurring trope, ship trope, which I shall call the through which this practice is narrated. The two
domains are interrelated and they become the bases of two discursive sources of worker agency.
On the other hand, the ‘being in the same ship' trope ties the worker to the upper classes and to a
broader imagined community. It is a means through which negotiation between the company and
workers and its boundaries can be performed. It is the vertical dimension in which being
subaltern is accepted. This trope plays a soothing role for the accepted powerlessness but it can
sometimes open up moments for the contestation of power.

Two Domains: Two Sources of Agency

Home and work are said to be the domains where most of a male worker's life is spent. Younger
workers, mostly single, may have more time for other spaces especially on weekends. Going to
movies with peers is only one of those activities in other domains. (Even here those peers maybe
from the factory) But the married ones, which form the major part of the workforce in the sense
of decision making and union activities, have less enthusiasm or opportunity to engage in such
leisure spaces. Hüseyin said once: “I will tell you explicitly, I can’t properly read- maybe we
have the opportunity but we can’t make use of it appopriately. Or maybe there aren’t really any
opportunities to do something. That is, I am in a complex dilemma. In fact I want to do
something, for example I want to spend time with a hobby such as fishing or going to cinema
with my wife…” I believe that this is a representative statement for those married workers. They
mostly go their relatives' homes or they receive their relatives at home. During working days, a
male worker's life is mostly spent at work and in the evenings he may go to a coffe-house. But
normally, he returns home not so late
16
(at least according to the ones I interviewed), because he
becomes tired after a day at work.

Sometimes, trade union activities can provide a new domain. Extraordinary weekend meetings at
the union building to assess the aggravating relations between workers and management, or some
educative programs for workers at the union building, or group visits to earthquake survivor
camps to deliver the collected aid materials can be examples for those occasional different spaces
for workers to socialize in. In fact, when they were members of Türk-İş, a group of workers even
went to the union's recreation camps in Cyprus. But as the union's positive role deteriorates (I
will deal with this in another chapter), the significance of home and work is reinforced in the
eyes of workers. Therefore, a male worker is bounded by two domains and two corresponding
communities; that is, his family and close relatives and other workers in the factory. "(Close)
friends", if there are any, are singled out as exceptions, and are mostly treated as part of family.
Mehmet said:

My father always says, and he told me just before I came to İstanbul, that I should have few
friends but true friends. I mean, say you have ten friends but when you are in trouble and have
any sort of problem, they do not run for help, then they are not friends. But you have just two
friends, and they are true friends, and they will help you as if they were your parents or brothers.

The two domains are not separated completely. "Peace at home and work" is an ideal state of
affairs for workers. Family affairs are always part of the workplace discourse. If a worker is
dismissed, for instance, it is mostly family members who will console him/her. If there is less
than an expected pay rise, it causes anxiety because a worker will not be able to buy a new living
room set. Immigrant families are preferred by the management because their family type are
more used to factory work, etc. It is only in the simultaneous problem-free living in two
domains, that a worker can really be free of anxieties. Again Mehmet argues that peace at home
and peace at work at the same time will in turn increase productivity in favour of the firm and
meet the material needs of the family. This is a moment when weaknesses in the factory (subject
of next chapters) is compensated by being a successful breadwinner. Lack of harmony between
the two domains, then, is a legitimate pretext of worker to complain.

There is a belief I inherit from my parents: a man primarily needs two things : peace of mind at
home, peace of mind at work. When one has both, one’s capacity to work will increase
incredibly. One’s mind will be in a good status. One is certainly troubled by financial problems.
But I don’t blame the employers, they are right, too. I don’t know how they will react to all the
things the state does. Workers are usually in trouble, I believe. And there are as well problems
concerning the workplace. What for example, a fellow worker is supposed to do one thing, but
he is asked and forced to do something else, and this is irritating. When you have a constant
thing to do, you can adapt yourself to it and can take pleasure in what you are doing. And
sometimes there can be distressing things, like when your foremen show you a negative attitude.
In the remaining paragraphs of this section I will focus on how the family is constructed in
workers’ narratives and how the familial domain is interrelated with the domain of work. Later
chapters will peculiarly deal with the domain of work. However, the reader will see that there are
overlappings and references to the family throughout those chapters.

I have already told that workers need the help of their close relatives, mainly their families to live
with the minimum wage. As there are many impediments to other possible solidarities or
collectivities and as worker lives are bound by home and work, male workers seemed to relate
themselves with family-oriented life schemes. That is, ‘family’ is an important location in a
single worker’s life and future trajectories. Here I do not mean a cohesive and a neatly defined
group. The family is a discursive tool and its boundaries are subject to change, depending on
contextually determined strategies. To complain about the low level of the minimum wage, a
worker may mean the nuclear family consisting of parents and children. While talking about life
in the domain of the home, close relatives and even some close friends may be contained in the
term of family. In a much more broader scale, Ali Rıza rejected the possibility of adultery among
workers because they were all members of a family, which also implicitly rejects incest.

Military service and marriage are two rites of passage for being a senior worker. Before these
steps a male worker is not ‘settled’. Before them he is more a dependent of his parental family
and later he is responsible for the family he leads. Many of the strategic moves and ups and
downs in his (work) life is also decided within the confines of the family. For instance according
to Hüseyin, he wouldn’t have been a worker if his father had acted differently. First of all, his
father refused to send him to a far but better school. Secondly, he couldn't manage the dairy farm
and went bankrupt. If he could have managed it, he would probably be managing it now instead
of being a wage worker. In the future, he may begin trading if his brothers help him. His
marriage was also his father's idea and he seems to follow his father in determining the fate of
his children.

Our family ties are very strong. To tell frankly, I am really afraid that I might hurt my father in
any way. Or my mother. If I have a child in the future, I hope, I am planning to do the best I can
to upbring them within best conditions. Like their education…I would like to raise children who
will serve their societies.

I do not mean that he totally capitualted to his father. But I try to emphasise the frequency and
intensity of familial, and in particular fatherly intervention.

Union membership is also related with family concerns. Ali Rıza's case is very illuminating. This
relatively experienced and active unionist began his factory work and union activites with the
help of his aunt's son. In fact this relative is Erdoğan Aslıyüce, the ex-president of Türk-Metal's
Istanbul branch. Moreoever, his elder brother was also a unionist. These two close relatives
opened up the way for him. He tells about those days very sincerely:

After junior highschool, I worked as a electricity repairment shop. When I completed my

military service in 1978. I went on with the same work for a little while more. Then I worked in a
gas station, then grocery. I came to Istanbul in 1983. At the end of that year, I became a worker.
Why İstanbul?
My aunt’s son (cousin or niece) was the head of şube, and I thought he could find a good job for
me. I began working at Uzel in 1983.
…I came to Termal through the union . Şube başkanı had sent me here. I was the one with the
highest salary, for I was sent by a powerful acquaintance. My salary is still the highest, as a
sample.
…I was participating in the union activities in 84. Because Erdoğan Aslıyüce, my cousin, was
the head of Istanbul chapter of the union. My brother was also in the union.

Similarly, many workers’ wives or close relatives tend to be union members. In a way, union
membership becomes a family enterprise.

Wage work is not intended for future generations. Every worker I interviewed hoped that his
children would be upwardly mobile through education. But for the present generation both
spouses seemed to be workers (although wives became housewives later) and if someone's
parents were workers, and only if he is not lucky enough to be upwardly mobile through
education, he would probably become a wage worker, which is in fact the case for many workers
in the factory. Erdoğan is a good example. His wife was a worker and after he finally finished
building his house, she stopped working. Erdoğan's one of two brothers is head-master in a high
school and his wife is a teacher in the same school. The other brother is a civil engineer and his
wife is also an engineer. Thus his brothers had been able to educate themselves out of a life of
labour and stand as evidence for upward mobility through education for Erdoğan.

Erdoğan says life standards determined who one marries. Meanwhile Ali Rıza's wife had never
been a worker but his elder daughter, 19, began working in the Bosch factory. Industrial work
became a family enterprise for İlhan's whole family:

Where is the family?

I am the first of my family members to came to Istanbul. They came later. My siblings are
already here.
Are they working in a factory, too?
Exactly. My father is woking in the factory of Mercedes.
Yours is a worker family?
But my father is a retired worker.
Which position is he retired from?
Free-lance. These days, you need an extra income even if you are retired or not. My brother
works in Beko. My wife is employed in Mercedes factory in Hosdere.
17
In Ahmet 's family, there were many wage laborers.
What was your family doing before coming here?
I was going to school in the village. We’re seven sisters and brothers. I’m the sixth. They’re all
in Istanbul now. The village is Hayrabolu, Tekirdag. My parents are dead.
Anybody else working in the factory?
Two of my older sisters and one younger sister. One of my older sisters (32) got retired at an
earlier age; she is single. One of my brothers have trouble with his foot. He is also retired.
Meanwhile, factory work and union membership create less segregated relations between the
sexes and male workers need to define a new place for women. Even if one plans to have his
wife and daughters stay at home as housewives or future housewives, he encounters a flock of
female workers in the factory and to a lesser extent in union activities and he cannot escape
thinking about this issue. Moreover, deteriorating economic life brings an inevitable process in
which many workers’ wives or other close relatives join the workforce. Hence a need for a
discursive construction of male-female relationships seems to be a necessity. Family lives of
Turkish immigrants who came from Bulgaria stand as a comparable case. While they praised that
all the members, be it male or female, unhesitatingly joined factory work, and they all diligently
contributed to the well being of the family and (thus) their disciplined manners made them
preferable in the eyes of managers, it seemed that non-immigrants still tried to preserve inherited
gender roles in newer forms or at least they felt uneasy in accepting new modes. Here are some
passages from workers in which comparisons between different types of family are made and the
necessity for change is expressed.

(Ali Rıza) Was not like that until the ‘90s. There was abundant work. But the immigrants filled
most of the positions. The youngest is a high school graduate. Everyone in the family works. We
came from Anatolia. Females in the family did not used to work.

We have sort of transcended that culture because of obligations. There was actually no work in
Anatolia for females to take part…they had to be in the field and at home. [Agricultural work is
not assumed as work] Everyone has to work in the big city. They learned that now it is not a
matter of pride anymore. People from Kars, Artvin, Ankara and Corum. They could not accept
that before; now if it is possible to work in each corner of Anatolia, they would do that.

(Ahmet) Back in my hometown, a working woman was not tolerated. Except for doctors and
teachers. Those working in private enterprise were despised. Now in time, different shops have
been opened and women do work there…

(Mehmet) Now the thing is, the whole family works, and they get everythingthey need. They
know how to share things, too. We say women should stay at home and not work. That
understanding comes from our roots and the way we were brought up- but some things have to
change. Not that we should leave aside our traditions, but
if you can not make two ends meet, you should not force yourself too hard. Life should be shared
between husband and wife.
The immigrants being more advantegous, more prepared for work-
-surely their being prepared- say a woman gets married. And she has never worked before. The
first 3-5 months are OK, but then you start facing financial problems. The extra work you do is
not enough. The person should also carry out social activities, he has social rights. In this case,
he can not-

Losses at work are compensated mostly by family/kinship alliances. Most of the senior workers
whom I interviewed have recently bought or built their own houses or flats. Having a house or a
flat is a major of security. Such homes are the result of long years of collective work. Mostly
wives but also one’s (close) relatives and affinal relatives help this enterprise. Young workers
who do not own their houses yet are in the process of buying/building one. Moreover, young
workers, who are assumed to be the most irresponsible workers, are still in the material custody
of their parents. Thus the minimum wage, which is normally not adequate for living a secure life,
becomes bearable. Finally, bank credits can financially help workers complete their projects. As
far as I heard, most of the senior workers benefited or are benefiting from these credits. It is very
rare that those credits were wasted. With their very limited sources, workers have learnt to
productively use their bits of income to have a more secure future. I should say that this practical
knowledge is shared among workers both through daily chatters and house visits.

Of course, house ownership is a very important but not exclusive way for a secure life. Education
expenditures for children can form a significant part of a worker family's budget. Not always in
practice but always in discourse children's education and hence upward mobility of the next
generation is the desired rule. Most of the workers whom I am acquainted with have young
children and their aim is to provide their children their best for their future education years. One
of these children I heard has just joined a super lise. She is Ali Rıza’s daughter. Ali Rıza has
spent a lot of effort to register his daughter to a super lise. In these high schools, English is the
language of instruction and a high amount of money is spent for course books.

In the new family regime children occupy an important place. They are the object of the family's
future aims. Education as a means of upward mobility is strongly emphasised and as far as I
could see every worker prepared himself/herself to allocate the sources for his/her children's
education. Upward mobility through this means is not only an idle dream. There are immediately
available examples to sustain this dream. Some close relatives had succeeded through this way.
For example, Erdoğan's elder brother is a technician while Erdoğan himself is a mere worker. He
says he sometimes make comparisons between him and his brother in front of his children and
tells them to follow his brother's path as his income and life style are more preferable. Even the
daughters are expected to have an educational career. For them, it is thought, at least it is a
means of prestige in marriage relations.

What do you think about your child, it is a bit early, but still… Will he go on with his
studies?
Living conditions are hard, but we will have him study as long as possible. Even if she is a girl -
when she gets married- won’t have problems. She is two months old now anyway.
However, it is well known that hard economic conditions may destroy these aims. It was one of
the most important fears about the future. One of the criticisms levelled at the state was based on
its negligence in helping the education of workers' children. Below, İhsan probably talks about
himself. In another instance while talking about his own childhood, he told similar but less
detailed things about himself.

Look, nowadays, families with suitable conditions can not even have their children study. If a
family has three kids, the school expenses of those kids are a burden. Many families withdraw
their kids from school. Kids do not want to stay at home and face the problems, so they want to
go out for work. I would have liked to study myself, but-
The ship trope

Throughout the working life the ship trope acts as binding workers to the domains described
above. Moreoever, it regulates the degree of blaming/opposition to the company, managers, the
state etc. for which I reserved a whole chapter. I will now point out some contexts in which the
trope is used for various purposes.

The assertion of being in the same ship, produce the possibility of a common destiny with the
upper echelons. Here, a failure of any kind will be felt by all but especially by the workers.
Therefore, the maintenance and strength of the firm is very much pertinent to their future. It is a
wish not dictated by the management and it is a consent not based on deceit/false consciousness
of workers fooled by the management. Reference to the ship trope usually comes after a harsh
criticism of the company, in a way to balance what is said before. Sometimes this kind of
reference may precede the harsh criticism.

We are in the same ship. I will sink if the ship sinks. I work with all my will so that the ship does
not sink. If this company goes bankrupt, my family will go bankrupt. I do have compensation,
[This compensation refers to one a worker gets when he is retired. Since it is calculated
according to the years of work, seniority is advantegous here whereas dismissal compensations
are low and they are hard to get as I write in the next chapters. Besides, even the same
compensation or something else may be demonstrated as advantegous and disadvantegous in
differing contexts. The ship trope can just be used for contradictive purposes] but if the company
goes bankrupt, I can not save it. Then what happens to my kid?

Sometimes union activists go further and attempt an imaginary negotiation with the state as
representatives of businessmen like the one below. Increase in the profits of businessmen, they
hope, will in turn affect workers' well being (such improvement of work conditions, higher
wages and prevention of corruption in the state). This position advocated by both worker
representatives came after increases in taxes, insurance premiums and aggravating economic
crisis.

New alternatives may be offered to businessmen with low credits. Perhaps credits without
returns may even be offered. The government may not be asking for taxes from businessmen.
The government should rather audit. Income tax may not be mandatory, but your workers should
belong to the union. If there is profit, the worker may take his share. The purpose should be
direct businessmen to larger investments. The location of work is also significant. They would
have considerable positive value to the municipalities. Many expenditures would be made
around the area. The government, the municipality and the environment would all win…

In a different context, Ahmet criticises the union because it fails to create conditions for workers
to internalise the ship trope. Here, in Ahmet's discourse the state, work and wife (implicitly all
the family) is interrelated in a single equation.
Unions should care for workers’ education… the educated worker is different. The place he
works becomes national wealth for him. How do Japanese develop? First the state, then my
business, then my wife. If the state exists, my business and then my wife exists. Everything
improved within that logic.

Apart from some extraordinary moments such as more-than usual long periods of not paying the
salaries or not signing the collective-bargaining agreement, relations between workers and
managers are constructed not oppositionally but reciprocally as if forming a community.
Management is rarely seen as fatherly and a family like attribution is limited to relations among
workers themselves. But still, although management is seen as alien to the worker community
(see the following chapters), especially in cases of violations of assumed contracts (such as the
below example) between the management and the workers/ or of principles of community life, a
complaining, reproaching tone is adopted and grief for betrayal dominates workers' most extreme
discourses rather than enmity or an explicitly oppositional tone. In the end, even managers are
desired to be inside the worker community.
Here I would like to cite Hüseyin’s ideas about having lunch together.

I will tell you something I heard before working in Oerlikon. The boss was in line waiting for
lunch like the others; some officers went further in line near the workers The boss shouted at
those officers; condemning them for what they had done. He claimed that there is no distinction
in Oerlikon.
During military training, your superior coming to eat with you is something to be proud of. Life
in the factory should be the same.
(emphasis are mine)

Acceptance of subalternity doesn’t mean total submission as I have already implied. Acceptance
of subalternity through a discourse of common destiny broaches the single moments of open
criticism of and quarrels with the managers. But these moments could only be utilized by union
representatives who had job security. Here is a piece which shows how intense a union
representative seems to internalize the future of the firm.

For instance, I spoke plainly to my boss last year. About the general manager and the marketing
manager and how things did not work with them. I spoke in a meeting, too: “the factory gives
danger signals. The ship is sinking. Mice leave the sinking ship. We must save her”. The general
manager was also there.

Besides, opposition in the workplace may have broader ramifications. Government's/State's

inattention will cause social unrest and probable rebellions. Forecasts of rebellion - a symbolic
threat by workers - such as the one below were shared by many workers. Here the ship trope is
extended to symbolise a social contract and its break down by the ruling classes may result in the
disintegration of the whole society.

But you do not prepare these systems, they said. If you leave these people hungry, they will
cause social explosion soon.
OK, if not the state, the government. If I’m jobless today, the government is responsible for it.
The government should come up with solutions. Has not been doing that for three years. Many
heavy duties fall for government. One should consider the laymen rather than the top positions.

However, such rebellious forecasts, which depend on the ship trope, are followed by alleviations
which again depend on the ship trope. The ship trope in this context intervenes to smooth the
harshness of accusations. Union representatives and ordinary workers mark the better living
conditions in Turkey and industriousness of Turkish workers. They give examples from both
non-western (especially for the latter) and western (especially for the former one) contexts:

Being a worker in Arabic countries is like pleasure. The Iranians come there, too.
Those in Central Asia are less hard-working then us. Since everything depends on the state there,
3000 people could only manage to cover the work to be achieved by 300 people. I have been
there and that is the way they are. The Turks are really hard-workers.

Those that are not hard workers in Turkey are exceptions. Compared to other countries. If we
send the to the prisons here, they would understand the value of the conditions here. I listened to
Engin Ardic recently, he says the same thing. While we worked in Turk-Metal, trips were
organized abroad. Engl. Amric…Russia, to Turkish republics. We say there is much poverty in
Turkey. Abroad, there is more. My limited income fills up the bag in the market, unlike Russia.
In England, there are many, not able to eat hamburgers.

In this chapter I delineate the two domains in which workers spend most of their time. Worker
agency emerges out of these two different but interrelated domains. The ship trope through its
varying uses in different contexts acts as a means connecting these two domains. I have focused
on home/family in this chapter and in the remaining chapters I will pay more attention to the
work life since my fieldwork mostly dealt with the domain of work. However, I argue that work
and family cannot be completely separated and I will continue to refer to family from time to
time in the following pages. In the next chapter, I will focus on union membership, which is
doubtlessly a source of agency and thinking about it provides clues to see relations between
workers and their work.

CHAPTER 4
Union Membership as the Source of Agency

Needless to say, workers in the middle of an urban setting have complex relations and
experiences with modern institutions. However, throughout my fieldwork I realized that the trade
union and the family have a much more significant existence than other possible institutions such
as political parties, the education system, the military, the municipality, or some other non
governmental organizations. The importance of the union and the family derives from their
centrality in the making of subjectivities. They have a daily and ongoing existence in the lives of
workers and they structure their discourses and practices to a very significant extent. As
discursive devices these two institutions complement and shape each other. In this chapter I will
focus on how the trade union is a foundational means of agency for workers and why it cannot
realize the opportunities it bears. I will also argue that the discourse of impotence (acizlik),
which recurs usually among the workers, is a consequence of these unrealizable opportunities.

Before entering a further discussion, I would like to offer some quick words for the concept of
“agency”. According to Ortner (2000, 146-7): “in the context questions of power, agency is
(sense of) authority to act or of lack of authority and lack of empowerment. Within the
framework of questions of meaning, on the other hand, agency represents the pressures of desires
and understandings and intentions on cultural constructions. Much of the meaning uncovered in a
cultural interpretation assumes, explicity or implicitly, an actor engaged in a project, a game, a
drama, an actor with not just a ‘point of view’ but a more active projection of the self toward
some desired end. In the first context, agency (which can be shorthanded as empowerment) is
both a source and an effect of power, in the second (where it underwrites ‘the actor’s point of
view’), it is both a source and an effect of culture”. While I deal with the issue of agency, the two
contexts will be used interchangebly since strategies of empowerment within both domains of
workers’ lives are interwoven with cultural strategies.

Union membership: Rising Expectations

First of all this part emphasises how the trade union opens up opportunities of agency that can
locate unionised workers into a modern subjectivity. The union brings out the previously
unimagined; it raises the level of needs and rights and thus it causes newer areas of contestation
to appear. Secondly, this part is also a story of how this possibility of contestation is forced to
disappear. My fieldwork, in a way, witnessed the gradual vanishing of this discursive field. I will
attempt to relate structural changes in workers’ union experience in general and the change of
union in particular. Thirdly, I will demonstrate how the union is placed into home and work
domains and regulated by the ship trope. But I will argue that although the union can be placed
into the latter one, it also means a possibility of a third space for identity and agency apart from
work and home.

In an ordinary workday, the lunch break is the longest break in the course of work and apart from
having lunch it provides opportunities for workers to socialise. Next to the union room, which is
located on the top of one of the three large 4-floor buildings, there is a larger room. It is used as a
dressing room and there is also a table tennis there. Even the non-unionised workers frequent this
room. In the union room itself, tea is offered especially for the senior workers. During lunchtime,
there is always a high turnover of workers coming into the room. As the lunch hour begins
section by section, every member of a section visits the room for a while and then leaves while
another sections’ members begin to arrive. In more heated days such as in periods of prolonged
collective bargaining, there were more people staying londer.. But anyway, the union room
during lunch hours becomes a center for public discussion in which many issues of varying
degrees of seriousness are discussed. Sometimes this reminds me of the setting of an ordinary
coffehouse and its free chatter style but it is always more than that. First of all, it is less
masculine. Although women workers visit and participate less, there is still a visible and
significant presence of women. This determines the courses of discussions. Secondly, the crux of
discussions are mostly about worker lives in and out of the factory and they are mostly solution
seeking and thus geared to practical ends. Thirdly, its location – to be within the factory and its
accessible to workers – provides a better understanding of the union through workers’ eyes. The
ordinary workers also integrate the union
18 room to their eveyday practice of labor whereas the
union centre is remote and inaccessible . I can state that workers’ daily agenda is both
structured and shaped19 in the union room. I haven not seen another place within the factory as
significant as this.

The union itself was a main point of discussion in debates taking place in the room. The gradual
decline of union power led to a recurring questioning and legitimating of the union. Thus in the
recent times, union chatter dominated the debates. Ali Rıza said:

8:00 am, you got to be at work. Break at 10:00. Lunch break at 12:00. Time with workers. Topic
of the day is the role of the union.

One of the representatives told me about a worker who was an ex-union member and the
arguments he had used against him when he left the union:

He belonged to the union, then became an officer. He was happy as hell in the beginning. When
the raise in salaries was not enough, he blamed us. Why did you have me withdraw from the
union? [he is still doing the same job] Yes- he works his guts out, but he has his rank… like the
cleaner or concierge… They get limited income, but they are officers. Because they do not
belong to the union… The name of the union is enough, I say to him. I got a 25% raise. You did
not get even that. We are discussing 40% here. Even if we get lower raise. You can not even
discuss that. We can discuss because of the union. Who can you talk to? Can you go to your
manager? I can’t. You can’t talk to your chief, either. We can discuss these things since we have
the union.

I have encountered many similar discussions/arguments. These, especially when uttered among
other workers, serve to highlight and reinforce the importance of and opportunities provided by
the union. Unionists claimed that most of the contests with management were lost in the end but
the possibility of such contests and possibilities of rights could only be brought up due the
existence of the union.

The right of negotiating for collective bargaining is one of the most important activities of unions
(In the following paragraphs I benefit from the related articles in Türkiye Sendikacılık
Ansiklopedisi). Other activities of unions such as training seminars or establishing cooperatives
or legal counseling can be discountinous and side issues but collective bargaining is a continual
and bi-annual performance. Lateness in its signature, or sometimes-heated negotiations before an
agreement can be reached provides the agenda of worker polity for the most of the year. A
Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) can cover a whole branch of industry or smaller units.
The level of individual worker involvement in CBA negotiations is directly related with the size
of the unit party to the agreement. In my case, the agreement unit covered only one factory so
that every unionised and non-unionised worker is involved in one way or another in that
negotiation process.

A CBA includes first of all monetary benefits. Besides increases in wage, bonus payments
including special bayram bonuses, a payment20while on leave, premiums and others classified as
social aid may be contained in an agreement . Erdoğan concisely lists primary benefits:

Social rights are achieved by this contract: firstly premium. Sometimes four, sometimes three.
Even two. Sometimes in small-scale places, there is no premium. Generally in most working
places, there is four premium. It can not exceed that limit because after 12 September , the codes
are against that.

Then there are problems concerning testified pension, pre-information and seniority. These
events are for 30 days. But you may further these by contracts. You may increase it up to 40, 45,
50 days. Your pension is made up, you are supposed to do a notification before leaving. In case
of no notification, you are testified. The worker pays pension if he does not notify, but that is not
the case. The employers have their workers stay for a few more days instead.

There are shoes that fit the conditions of the working environment. You get aid for getting
married, military training, soap, towel and shoes. Also social aid package for your kids. Like
that, you make contribution to the wages received by the workers.

The point is that only the union members could talk about rights and needs. An ordinary worker
just points out this fact:

Why are you member of the union?

The trade unions, even though when they do not work well, are useful. We have high premiums.
Non-unionized workers can not know why they are fired and also they can not appeal to any
court in this case. They can not claim for their rights. But I can. Our wages are high. For
example, while our savings payment is 100, non-unionized ones are just taking half of it.

It was again, for instance, the unionist workers who could talk about how incentive payments
[prim] should be paid or about the destiny of their insurance payments. For the incentive
payments, I witnessed an intensive quarrel between some workers and worker representatives.
These payments were not realised due to several reasons used as excuses. Economic depression
is a beloved excuse. Besides, the 17 August Earthquake also became an excuse for not paying
them. Worker representatives decided to propose adding incentive payments to wages. Workers
opposed this. They thought these extra sums of money would lose their possibility of being an
object of saving. They would be spent with the main sum of the wage. Secondly, I deduced, this
would disappear as an item of right. That is, those payments would gradually be integrated to the
wage and would lose their autonomy. Therefore, there would be one less issue to negotiate with
management. In fact, difference between the unionised and non-unionised workers lies in issues
additional to the wage some of which are described in the last footnote. Thus, workers
21
are
opposed to this management strategy of reducing issues additional to the wage . Later, not the
representatives but the management directly demanded not to "deal with" clothes, shoes, some
items of food etc promised to be given to workers in the collective bargaining agreement. I
witnessed Mehmet Bey, the owner of the factory, desisting from talking about giving those
items. Accordingly, management violated the agreement this year and did not deliver them. This
became one more issue for workers to blame management. However, as the dismissals and wage
rises are much more significant issues at the moment, this is taken as a minor point of claim.

Even women workers may benefit from union membership while gendered relations are
maintained. That is, unequal treatment of male and female labour based on broader social
constructions of sexes can be seen in the factory in general. But the existence of the union may
alleviate this fact and open up a space of opposition. In a sexual harassment case, a married
female worker came to the union room and told the union representatives that she would leave
her job. Later she corrected herself and said she would resign after consulting her husband, who
was working in another factory. Probably due to my presence, she did not want to talk explicitly
so that I realised this was a case of sexual harassment case only during course of conversations, I
realized that this was a harassment case. It seems more normal for a female worker to lose her
job as a result of such a problem. She prefered to solve the trouble by leaving the factory. Even
being a member of the union does not mean that sexual harassment can be rectified through
formal chains. Ekmeğinden olmak is preferred instead of facing the spread of gossip about the
issue. Since her income is less valuable (what she does is considered22extra work) and since
women are mostly assumed to be responsible for their victimization. Most of the time female
workers are the losers. But it is significant that without the union female workers are more
vulnerable and they do not have any work related platform to express their anxiety. In this case,
worker representatives attempted to stop her from resigning and they succeeded. In later stages,
as far as I know, there was no formal complaint but the guilty person was warned. Although not
powerful, unionised workers may function as a collective sanction against
23
the transgressor. In
fact, most of the transgressors are kicked out of the union community .

In the confines of union membership, then, female workers are less vulnerable to unequal
treatments. Sexual slander is present and women have more tools for defence. Face to face
meetings to resolve slander cases are frequently held by worker representatives. Sexual roles and
the values of the worker community are redefined in these meetings. In one of such cases two
accused workers and their accuser were brought together and I was allowed to watch what
happened. Recep and Zehra were the accused ones. These were active union members. The
accuser, Nermin was Recep's wife's sister and she was working in the same factory. Recep and
Zehra believed that Nermin was spreading rumours to the effect that they were lovers. While
Recep was married, Zehra was engaged and planning to marry soon. The impact of such gossip
would go beyond the factory and would cause fatal hazards for both sides. Both R. and Z.
rejected any claim of sexual relationship and stated that although they were friends, that did not
mean they had sexual relations and they were loyal to their spouses. In fact, from the beginning
Nermin was assumed to be a slanderer. A little bit later she admitted that the source of gossip
was Recep's wife and Zehra's cellular phone messages in Recep's phone were her evidence. Once
again all others
24
stated that men and women could join together in many events without sexual
connotations. Many union and factory activities were cited. Union membership brought about a
sexual desegregation with the exclusion of sexuality.
25
In fact, that segregation is possible with
assuming that all workers are fictive siblings . The tension of sexuality is assuaged by reference
to a family-like organisation in the work domain. But the family is also a sexual unit. They refer
to the fraternity and corporatist aspect of the family.

Memory and Agency

The emphasis on lack of agency, which I termed acziyet in Turkish, was a recurring theme. From
the very beginning worker representatives, with whom I had the closest relations, put on a stance
of impotence. But ordinary workers in varying degrees also talked about how impotent they
were. I argue that the discourse of acziyet here, can only be possible with the existence of the
union and its gradual weakening. Increasing emphasis on lack of agency is connected with the
gradual disappearance of realisable opportunities and also the collective memory of the union
change. In fact, some of the problems the union encounters are not new and there were always
national/legal sanctions against unions since the foundation of the Turkish Republic. But the
transfer from Türk-Metal (Türk-İş) to Öz Çelik-İş (Hak-İş) in 1995 is remembered to be a climax
of unionist workers’ power and since then workers assume that union power has been (gradually)
weakening. Many moments labelled as the 'past' are in fact the times of union change when
workers seemed to have the initiative for negotiations. Therefore, I will provide an account of the
union change.

The conflict with Türk-Metal's leadership emerged when union representatives attempted to take
the initiative in collective bargaining arguments. They thought the union leadership was hesitant
to protect worker rights. In the previous two CBAs before 1995, wages had been agreed to be
much lower than worker expectations and union representatives had insisted in putting a
statement into the text of the agreement that would declare the agreement was below the inflation
rate. This act was the first sign of future conflict with the leadership. Erdoğan was threatened
with losing his position as representative but that did not happen. For the third CBA that would
happen in 1995, three union representatives pledged not to sign if the wage was again lower than
the demanded pay rise. More senior workers, as they told to me, supported their claim.

Worker representatives were successful in their attempt. CPA negotiations ended with a relative
success for workers. Though additional payments would be little, the rise in wages were very
satisfactory. But this in turn annoyed the union leadership and it refused to appoint them again as
representatives for the next six months.

Meanwhile, there was also a broader unrest within the union. Erdoğan Aslıyüce, the legendary
president of the Istanbul branch of Türk Metal was dismissed from his post by the central
committee in Ankara. They appointed a new president, Selim C., whom the representatives did
not like and were suspicious about his background. They thought he was appointed as a result of
patron-client relations and not bacause of his union activities. Although nepotism is not
altogether denied, since Ali Rıza is a relative of Erdoğan Aslıyüce, in gaining a post within the
union, representatives claim that there must also be a good record of performance as a union
activitist. Erdoğan Aslıyüce is legendary for Ali Rıza in the sense that owe a lot to his knowledge
of union governance and his support to them to join union politics, not because Ali Rıza is his
cousin. One of their sources of legitimacy comes from the fact that –as they claim – they26
are
proficient in handling the issues of union. I heard a few other workers also praise him.

Erdoğan Aslıyüce had at least finesse; the new president did not even have that. This was a
legitimate reason for Ali Rıza to decide to become candidate for presidency of the union’s
Istnbul branch for the forthcoming elections.

Despite all frauds, intimidations etc Ali Rıza got the victory. In addition to the result of the
election, the election process was full of struggle and became the stage for a high degree of
agency on workers’ side. Delegates were intimated and some were even threatened with
dismissal while the struggle lasted. Workers called for help from “the party” (MHP – Nationalist
Action Party) and prevented any dismissals. Meanwhile they prepared leaflets that were
explaining their struggle and position to unionised workers. They prepared a list of candidates
for the union administration that was, according to them, very representative of the labour force.
Every factory had a representative in that list. And all those in this list were chosen because they
had union service and thus they knew the union and worker problems. Ali Rıza and his friends
worked out through this process a division of labour and some even waited in the election
committee’s room for hours against an attempt of fraud voting. Ali Rıza's presidency lasted 6
days. Central committee set up a second Istanbul branch. It allocated workplaces for Ali Rıza in
separate locations and some were outside Istanbul. Even the factory he was working in was not
allocated to him. Furthermore, Ali Rıza's branch centre was robbed, probably a conspiracy by
Ankara, and all documents were stolen. Finally, some of the members of the executive
committee were forced to resign and Ali Rıza's presidency was overthrown.

Ali Rıza and his friends lost the struggle in general but it seems that they reinforced their
leadership within the factory. They led a signature campaign signed by 230 workers in the
factory against the central committee in Ankara and demanded the appointment of Ali Rıza and
his friends as union representatives again. Workers did not welcome the president of the Istanbul
branch, as I was told by several senior workers and Erdoğan, when he visited and waited in the
factory's restaurant (is also used for big meetings) and nobody volunteered to be representatives
in Ali Rıza and Erdoğan’s place. Finally they were re-appointed.

Since the unrest within the union did not come to an end, joining to a new union began to be
loudly discussed. There were two choices: Birleşik Metal (DİSK) and Öz Çelik-İş (HAKİŞ). The
choice followed a routine strategy: Worker representative, firstly, highlighted management's
pressure. Joining to a union is very difficult without its consent:

Our friends suggested changing the trade union. We searched for a solution. Some of us suggested
participating to the DİSK. Some others offered to go to Birlesik Metal (DİSK)or Ozcelik
(HAKİS). Then we decided that it would be very difficult to enforce a trade union in a work place
as well as to pass to another trade union. Honestly, if the employer does not want a trade union
here, it is very difficult to have one.

Secondly, workers' preferences were stated: They refused management's offer that they should
not join any union and would be organised only at the factory level. To further as legitimate act,
they even mentioned benefits that would acrue to the company in choosing a new union. It seems
that powerlessness in terms of talking about management pressure is compensated by the focus
on their own independent preference, which contains not only the benefits of workers but also
the company's. This strategy is used by many workers in recounting the events. Erdoğan said:

The employer said that stay here but leave the trade union’. Of course we were reluctant to be
left unorganized, After one year the worker is not going to have the compensation money or
whatever without the protection of an organization. Then we decided to participate to Oz-Çelık. It
seems better in respect to its consideration of ‘balance’because of the events before the 1980s, the
employers’ consideration of DISK is very different. It might have not been separated from Turk-
Metal.

The legitimacy of their choice is finally confirmed by the argument that the new union’s
administration is more protective of worker rights since it treats the administrative cadres of the
union much more decently than their precarious union. Erdoğan continued:

It is a very democratic trade union. People can talk there without any restriction. The rulers are
very kind. Their manners to the other workers are very gentle. They are gentle not only to the
representatives but also to the workers. For example, while we were at the Turk-Metal, they were
giving us a low wage, including the money for meal and the transport, just a little bit more than
the minimum wage. Here they are giving us four premiums and money for meal. The wages are
at least two times more than the minimum wage. And people are working here for many years.
Their working hours are regular. Here people trust each other. These are the facts because I can
compare the situations….

Meanwhile, to threaten other representatives not to think of a change, Ali Rıza was wounded
from his foot. The attackers were not found but it was widely believed among workers and
claimed by the newspapers that the attack was arranged by the Türk Metal leadership.

When he was leaving the union he was shot form his foot. At that time, we had not been at this
side yet. They shot Ali Riza in order to give the other work places a gozdagi….We were very
careful during this period. Our wives were waiting for us at the windows…

The attack was successful to a large extent since other restless representatives did not dare
mobilize for a change of their union. But from a different aspect, it confirmed the leadership of
Ali Rıza (and Erdoğan) within the factory. It was a final mark of the collective performance of
willpower of those days, in which even workers' families were involved (Our wives were waiting
us to come home by looking anxiously at the windows). Excerpts about the attack on Ali Rıza from
various newspapers ranging from the far right to the far left hang in the factory restaurant and are
visible to all workers and other personnel (See Appendix). Another set of excerpts are kept in the
union room and are shown to visitors like me. This story functions as the past and this past serves
to construct the present as impotent.
The fall of union power

The perception of a process of weakening depends both on experiences from factory history and
the general scheme of blame that is outlined in the next chapter. Apart from the increasing
distance from the most powerful moment of union power in the previous section, there are other
cases mostly refered to along with this episode that reinforce the perception of weakening.

Seeing me examine a commissions list in the room, Ali Rıza explained the way commissions
functioned. These are determined as a result of the legal agreement between management and the
union and they serve multiple uses. For example one of them is called the "damage
determination commission", which determines the level of damage to work materials and the
culprit. The pictures of union members included in those commissions were fixed on the table.
One by one Ali Rıza stated the current position of those workers. Nearly three quarters of those
workers were not working in the factory any more and the commissions, which were formally
still active, did not really function. Ali Rıza told me of an event as an example of agency that
took place in the good old days: One day, the production manager decided to dismiss one of the
female workers as an exemplary case (ibret olsun diye). She allegedly had damaged work
materials. Thereupon, worker representatives called for the "damage determination commission"
to determine the amount of that alleged damage. In the end, she was dismissed a little bit later
but only after being given her compensation. This was a case in which although the manager's
will could not be stopped completely, it could be (slightly) effected and the terms for that female
worker would be improved.

Again in the good old days, Ali Rıza says, they would settle issues of advance payment, overtime
work hours and leave periods with only a "request" but now they can not settle them easily. CBA
agreements cannot be concluded as favourably as before, either.

A foundational attribute of union education and its decline is a final sign for the decline of union
power. Both Ali Rıza and Erdoğan and a few workers who could attend education seminars
agreed on the same theme: They were not satisfied with routine union seminars because they
were not practice oriented and thus they did not produce the effect that was expected from such
an educational act. This recalled their previous union experiences which were much more
appropriate informative. Erdoğan said:

The history of unionization was discussed at the last seminar. I think it was not good enough. I also
mentioned my view in the interview done just after the seminar. Why? Because they superficially
discussed the history of unionization. Actually we should discuss: why there is a trade union,
how a representative should be; what the requirements of representation are. In order to increase
the number of unionized people what the represenatatives should do or what the workers could
do…. Otherwise, you can learn the history of unionization by reading a book. I believe that the
educational seminars should have a pushing power. Seminars should pave the way for becoming
leaders. I took such a seminar at the Turk-Metal previously.

When Erdoğan thinks of resigning, he explains his reasoning: "If I will only sit here and do
nothing except call the union and give them information, I don't deserve this position." He later
complains about union leaders because, he believes, they do nothing for the workers.
Furthermore he begins to accuse them and believes that they and the factory management are
accomplices: "In the past we could threaten the managers27of complaining to the union. But now
it is management that threatens us with complaining to it . In Erdoğan words, one can see the
increasing gap between the union and its members. Erdoğan's judgements are also shared also by
some unionised workers (İlhan and Hüseyin respectively):

In the last one- one and a half years, Mr. Ali Riza has been continuously complaining. He
says that they are not as active as they were in the past. Do you think so?
Active?
By active, he means that they were more comfortable in respect to money affairs. Is it
something related to economic crisis?
This is not their fault.
The reason is economic crisis or the incompetency of the rulers (mudurler) here?
It is the fault of the trade union. They are not supported by them. If the workers start to complain
a little bit, the employer threatens to fire them. And the trade union does nothing.
…..
The trade unions seem to pay no heed to the recent events. I mean the trade unions not the
representatives…
What the representatives can do! The unions do not help. The president comes when the workers
are working and then goes away. Sometimes he sends here the genel sekreterini who does not
have any idea what is going on.

Union representatives give other many other examples from the recent past and present to show
the increasing gap between workers and management. In some of these examples management
and union leadership are understood to be completely alike:

Because of the treatments of the people at the top, workers think that they are considered as
second(ary) class citizens. They feel like ‘Slave Isaura’. There was an architect working for
Erdogan Asliyuce (previously quoted as the patron saint of unionism). He is an Iraqi Turkmen.
He could stand for the tyranny of Erdogan.only for one month You can guess what kind of
oppression it is. The man at the top has money and salary. He tolerates everything. …. There is
a saying among the unionizeds. Workers are our bosses. However, it becomes visa versa when
lower segments are considered. We take appointments when we would like to see the president.
The boss takes an appointment from his own worker.

However, there are broader dimensions of the decline of union power. Various forms of alliances
between the judiciary, management and the state are weakening union power, which are in turn
the consequence of a new production regime, post-Fordism, and economic policies followed in
Turkey since the early 1980s. In fact these alliances, which I will mostly describe in the next
chapter are the source of the increasing gap between the union leadership and workers and the
decreasing capacity for worker initiatives in decision making processes within the factory. But
workers tend to overlook these broader process as sources of powerlessness. Broader
explanations may dismiss workers as agents and alleviate the guilt of the company and union
leadership. Explanations contained in the triangle of management, union and workers and based
on personality and attribution of moral degradation to those in the posts of management and
union leadership give the sense of access to those who are responsible for their weakness and
promises the possibility of potency to change the situation.

Nevertheless, those broader effects should be added to understand better how union power
declines. In addition to what is said before, I should begin with this: the trade union cannot
initiate an institution vs. institution legal struggle. Among other union-weakening factors, which
I will deal with later in this chapter, class action suits are not allowed in Turkey. That is, if a
company acts in a way to threaten its entire workforce, the union can not itself open up a lawsuit
in the name of all workers. Every worker has to be involved in the legal process. At least one has
to consent to give a procuration to the union lawyer. But individual based legal challenges
against the company are again doomed to fail in most cases as it is hard to maintain a long term
legal struggle by the individual worker.

It seems that new legislative procedures that must be adopted by the State during the process of
integration to the European Union will be adapted to existing practices. International Labor
Office (ILO) laws that provide union and employment security are welcomed by the concerned
workers but they are afraid that they may not provide as much opportunity as it seems.

From the outset, there is no requirement to join a union under ILO laws. Unionisation is an
individual initiative for the worker. However, without a union, many suggested rights are non-
available. It is true that the ILO demands a reason for every dismissal or it demands the
improvement of work conditions or it demands that social rights including seniority
compensations be secured. All these demands theoretically aggravate the burden of companies.
Without union surveillance, every single right can be violated. Companies prefer to document
formally as having as many workers as possible working at the minimum wage. Thus they also
pay insurance premium and other social rights according to the minimum wage requirements
while real wages and concomitant rights maybe higher.

In fact, the workers believe that with reason, that the company can try to circumvent existing
laws even when there is the union. But the existence of a union makes it more difficult to
perform all those tricks. In this context, therefore, ILO laws undeniably give opportunities to
workers but their better enforcement can only be possible with unions. And since secure
unionisation is still difficult under the would be ILO laws and in the current situation, existing
legal practices may prevail for sometime to come.

In the current situation, a preliminary observation is that both the trade union as an institution
and the body of workers -whether or not integrated into union politics- seem to be very
vulnerable in both legal and practical ways. This legal weakness is not only because there are
explicit laws -indeed there are - weakening unions (and workers' conditions), but management
has the power to even reverse the effects of worker friendly legislation as I have given examples
before.

The existence of a union in the factory is itself a precarious undertaking: Management can a)
abolish the existing union or b) it can prevent its formation. I will deal with both cases.
Management has the legal support and power to get rid of the union. Therefore, union leadership
becomes more dependent on the management than its member workers do. Its challenges and
struggle against the management has to be delicately performed. The union's dependence on
company management is one of the reasons for the differentiation between union leadership and
workers. I will deal with this later in this chapter.

The post 1980 labour laws limit worker rights even to a higher extent. As an example, there was
a "right of strike" before 1980: When wages were not paid, workers could stop and wait on their
workbenches until their payments were effected. Work could begin only after the payment. This
is now illegal. If management proves such a stoppage by bringing a notary, and it can dismiss
striking workers by referring to article 17 of the Labour Code (all references to laws are from the
Labour Code if otherwise noted). If management promises to pay, workers must work. They
cannot stop working in such a case but they have the right to sue management using article 16.

What happens at collective bargaining negotiations and agreements (CBA) is indicative of the
relatively low leverage that unions can exercise. The CBA is one of the most significant weapons
in the hands of a union. It is signed between the company management and the union that
represents the whole labour force (even non-unionist workers benefit from the agreement). It is
signed bi-annually and in recent years negotiation processes have become more difficult for both
sides. In addition to increasing postponements in signing the CBA, the company abstains
regularly from some of what it promised to do in the agreement. For the sake of preserving the
agreement, the union and more or less the worker polity overlook these violations. Since legal
struggles will prove to be too long and complicated –that is what the company wants- illegalities
of violations are normalised.

Thus, in the last CBA process, more than six months passed without a signature and hence it was
rumoured that workers would have no pay rise. Normally a company in such a situation must pay
retrospectively for the previous months according to the determined rate, but pay rises can be
inserted to future payments. In this case, management deigned to pay the rises for past months
when the CBA was postponed. But it began to pay them so late that real value of wages
decreased even more. For example, in May 2001, workers were paid a part of their pay rise from
December 2000. Meanwhile, workers were not as lucky in other kinds of payments such as
insurance premiums and bonuses for the same period. They were not paid and not even
mentioned.

Unions must be based on branches of industry. This is considered as another factor that
contributes the unions' lack of power. A union is not identified with a place or workplace but
with a branch of industry. Thus workers' union was a metal workers' union and it is assumed that
their primary interests and hence organisation must happen through a solidarity with other metal
workers scattered in other work places.

This system of organisation goes back to the pre-1980 Ecevit government. There are currently 28
branches of industry and the three labour confederations of Turkey can establish their federations
based on these 28 branches. Therefore, theoretically, if every confederation establishes its own
federation - and this is what usually happens - there can be 28x3 labour federations. Ali Rıza and
Erdoğan (this is such an 'expert' issue that I suppose other workers do not have any idea. At least
I didn't hear any) believed that this is a "divide and rule" tactic and although in the end there are
three loosely centralised confederations, the labour force is divided into many conflicting pieces
both within a confederation and between different confederations. Within every union a power
centre emerges whose main interest is its branch's specific interests that cannot28attract others. In
the last analysis, this system prevents the emergence of a unified labour force. Erdoğan said:
….If you have one union, instead of 28 unions, it means that you are the only power. That means
that one power is going to take only one decision. One decision taken by one person is going to
be applied. Since the other power does not want it -they are separated into pieces, and these
pieces are separated into smaller pieces…. According to the ideas…You know everybody has
different ideas.

What is to be done?

Within the domain of work, the perception of powerlessness because of the nature of unskilled
work and the decline of union power is compensated by at least two significant ways. One is a
discursive defence and the second is to practice union membership away from the centralised
union leadership based in Aksaray.

When I wondered how could unions exist despite all these legal and practical weaknesses,
workers provided different kinds of answers. First of all, even if the company wants to get rid of
the union, it does this gradually. An immediate expulsion of the union may draw the courts'
attention. Although legal processes can be manipulated and turned to favour the company, courts'
immediate attention to a collective grievance may unravel financial frauds. In a financial
investigation, the gap between the real salaries and official salaries can be found out and this
may result in high amounts of fines due to unpaid insurance premiums and taxes. For example,
some managers' insurance premiums are paid according to the minimum wage. Besides, many
officially promised bonus wages are not paid. All these can be a headache for the company. I
should add that unionised workers are willing to help investigators unravel the frauds after a
massive expulsion.

At another level, union existence is tied to the characteristics of workers in a factory and to what
market the factory produces for. In a big factory with many skilled workers it would be much
more difficult to expel the union. Moreover, if the factory produces export items or something
whose deadline violation may cause high amounts of fine, it is again easier to start a union
organisation or to preserve an existing one.

At a national level, Erdoğan and Ali Rıza added some few more answers. They think that if there
is an economic boom, unionisation will not matter. In years of prosperity, peace between labour
and capital will be a strategic move for management. For the unabated maintenance of
production, management may scale down ambitions. In such a context, workers may force ahead
to gain new rights since labour reserves are minimised in those times and companies do not want
to lose their workers. But in years of recession, reserves of unemployed reach maximum levels,
and the tools for effective negotiation for workers diminish. In such cases, workers cannot also
defend the existence the union. What is interesting here is that Erdoğan and Ali Rıza make very
similar arguments to Marx.

Furthermore, they (and also some ordinary workers) believe that unions are part of the national
power balance and for strategic reasons unions will not disappear. The state is the arbitrator in
this balance of power and unions are a tool for balance against capitalists. If one side, be it
capitalists or unions become too strong, it will dominate the state. But the state will not permit
this so from time to time it supports one side or another to maintain the equilibrium. This
discourse of balance of power can also be applied to unions themselves. There are three labour
confederations positioned to balance themselves in the political spectrum. It is believed that no
confederation will be permitted to upset the existing balance. Moreover, unions are not only a
means of balance; they may have many uses for the state. First of all, they may raise its income.
In a company where a union is organised, it is very difficult to produce fraud payrolls. Payrolls
must be in accord with the fee paid to the union. Every auxiliary payment must also be in the
payrolls and the state gets insurance premiums and taxes according to these payrolls. In places
without unions, companies usually calculate payments according to the minimum wage if ever
they do. Besides, auxiliary payments are rarely recorded in books and thus no taxes can be
derived from them. A statist view is thus constructed through the following arguments. Workers
tie their fates to the will the state. The state decrees labour rights because they are appropriate for
its interests and not because workers have those rights.

Accordingly, in addition to a surveillance function over companies, unionist workers themselves

are a significant source of income for the state. This income can be transformed into investments
beneficial to the public while capitalists pretend to invest and thereby abstain from paying taxes.
One of the recurring examples of those feigned investments is to buy land. The company
increases its land property but mostly this does not turn into a source of employment or tax-
generating activity (the last examples probably comes from workers' own experience. I was told
once that a bare land next to the factory was hired and reclaimed by the company but then was
left empty).

The second way to cope with powerlessness as a union member is to distance oneself from the
union leadership but keep on to union membership thus creating a community of workers at the
level of the factory rather than a community of unionised workers at the national level. The
union representatives lead this process. Ali Rıza and Erdoğan acted independently even in the
last days of Türk-Metal membership. But they were also bidding for union leadership. Since Ali
Rıza was shot and wounded, their union activities seem to be confined to the boundaries of the
factory. They continued their union activities by joining to present union. But the point is that
they are now more a part of the factory community in this union. Meanwhile, ordinary workers
follow them and they maintain their membership despite a critical stance against the union
leadership. As far as I could observe no worker directly communicated with the union centre in
Aksaray or joined any union activity independent of representatives. In fact, what is called union
activity (such as the aid campaign for earthquake survivors) is organised by workers and the
union leadership is called on only at the last moment.
Through accusing the union for not helping them, union representatives emphasise how self-
sacrificing they are and this in turn helps to justify their present leadership among the workers
and thus opens up new ways of agency.

İşçi temsilciyi şöyle bilir: hem işverenden hem sendikadan para alır hem de maaş alır. Para
babası sanılır. Aksine cebinden para yer. ...bütün masrafları cebinden çeker.
İstemiyo musunuz sendikayı?
[Hayır] Bi de aidat ödüyöz. Bari aidatları verin de [sendikaya gider gelirken vb] yol paramızı
çıkarabilelim...
...Sendikacıların lafı şudur: "işçiye ihanet eden temsilcinin boynu kopar." Ama işçiye ihanet eden
sendikacının boynunu kim kopartacak onu bilmiyoruz. Onu kimse kopartamıyor.

Some further moves reinforce their bid to embody union missions in themselves. It is stated that
as the law enforcing unions to have their bank accounts in state banks was abolished, union
leaderships have gained much more financial autonomy. But this autonomy did not have any
positive consequences for the welfare of workers. This autonomy, then, resulted in
unaccountability to workers. Another financial aspect are the exchanges of "present" between
management and the union leadership. Although this was mentioned only once and its
implications were only implied, a further bit of information buttresses the conspiracy theories:
The former head of the union's Istanbul branch and Mehmet bey were good friends, a
relationship thought to be more than a formal connection. I heard this point mentioned several
times.

Erdoğan gave another explanation for union leaders' distance from workers: Although most of
them had working class backgrounds, they joined the upper class through acquiring union
leadership. The life style of an administrator in the trade union resembles more of a manager
than a worker in terms of salary, consumption patterns and leisure activities.

The concrete ramifications of this context are the growing distrust among union members against
the union leadership. That is, fewer workers participate in the public forum that takes place in the
union room. And when I once asked explicitly whether the workers trust them, he replied with
the same explicitness: "No more trust. I don't trust the ones on top of me, either. [How can they
trust me?]" More efforts are needed to maintain the legitimacy of the union and this is in fact the
case where the complaints regarding lack of agency on the part of the union are accompanied by
new efforts of unionised workers that I will describe below.

One of the representatives, Erdoğan is the top actor of the 'bureacratic' aspect of those efforts. He
takes notes in all the seminars he attends and files them. Most of the time he represents the
factory workers in those seminars and similar activities. He also occasionally writes about the
issues on the agenda of workers such as the rise in insurance payments and send them to union
bulletins. Unfortunately, his writings are rarely published and this is a source of anger and
disappointment. In one specific case, a union chief belittled him for his writings. On this
indicative case, he says that he and that chief have similar educational background. He says, "we
both left secondary school.", thus emphasizing achievement as opposed to patronage.
Worker representatives also deal with the wages that need intricate calculations. They gain
legitimacy among the worker population most of whom cannot do their own calculations, and
sometimes the result of these calculations turn them against the union leadership. By doing so,
they believe that they can sometimes enter into negotiations with management by bypassing that
leadership. I will mention about these negotiations just a little bit later.

In addition to the emphasise on similarities on educational background, systematic documenting

of activities and recognisable scientific knowledge (in calculations etc), they demand the
employment of cadres consisting of rational and hard working individuals whereas the present
union leaders prefer to employ people who will not disrupt the existing hierarchy. In fact, no
sides would prefer disruption. I mean that representatives look for people who will actively
employ the ship trope within home and work domains and will challenge those who do not
respect the working of the trope. A representative in this sense must challenge the corruption
within the domains and in broader contexts, the betrayal from his work mates and union
leadership or the manipulation of the company. To accomplish these, union cadres should be
cold-blooded and patient. It is assumed that politics of work is a long term strategic game and
impatience may result in disrupting the game and thus risking an ending at the expense of
workers. In the following quotations, Ali Rıza draws an ideal type of union representatives:

Herkes yanına adam alırken şube temsilcilerinin aptal olmasını ister. Baştemsilci de yanındakinin
aptal olmasını ister. Kimse işi bilen birisinin olmasını istemez. Çünkü bu ayak bağı olacaktır.
Aslında tam tersi olması lazım. Şube öyle akıllı adam seçmeli ki temsilci beni rezil etmesin diye.
Bizde tam tersi. İşi bilmesi, her dediğime itaat etsin... Erdoğan tez canlıydı. Şöyle yaparım böyle
yaparım. Yok şöyle baskı yaparım yok böyle...Ula erdoğan dedim ayaklarını yere bas. Sen işin
nasıl yürüdüğünü biliyon mu? Başkan'ın düzenini bozmaya çalışıyon valla başkan sana bir
yerleştirir. Çünkü onun bir ilişkisi, diyalogu var patronla. Sen bu diyalogu bozmaya çalışırsan
yaşayamassın. Yani fincancı katırını ürkütmeyeceksin...Şükranın atanması sırasında ben aslında
onu istemiyordum. Erdoğan zaten tezcanlı, o da öyle. İkisi tezcanlı benim ocağım batar diye
düşünüyodum. Bütün dengeler bozulur. Ben de adam aradım. Şöyle iki laf da edebilecek brisi
olsun diye bakınıyordum. Bir baktım çıkışlar var ve bu kızın adı da var. Hemen yazdım adını,
atamasını yaptırdım.
Tezcanlı?
Ateşli yani. Anında olaylara patlayan. Ben de öyleyim de üçümüz de birden olunca ne olacak.
Ayaklarımız yere basa basa götürdük işte... Bazı şeyleri de göze almak zorundasın.
Sözleşmelerde falan söz hakkın yok. Başkan ne diyosa.

Consolidation of the distance from union leadership goes hand in hand with intervention in
decision making processes. Despite the limits on their actions and their relative powerlessness in
their decision-making processes, they reacted and intervened in some collective agreement
processes on behalf of workers. Here is a case I have already mentioned in passing when they
intervened and tried to exclude union leadership in negotiations with the management:

We had had enough by 1995. We are at Turk-Metal. We made a decision. They hadn’t shown us
anything in the rough. I said “I am going to prepare the rough draft” and so I did. Raises, rates,
social rights that I will demand… and I said whoever signs a low contract is dishonest. …
Finally, the boss called on me. “Ali Rıza, let’s finish up this contract” “I wish so as well,” said I.
“But there are some who do not want to make the contract.” “Who?” The president [of the union]
for instance. “What do you want?” “We wrote” said I… The boss is giving, but the president is
trying to obstruct… That’s how we took a risk in 1995. With Erdogan and Sukran. Do not sign
whatever I sign. Because they make promises to me as well in the contracts.

In the last collective bargaining process, which I also witnessed, a similar positioning happened.

The boss gave forty percent in the secret meetings over the last contract. Twenty now, twenty
later. The union was putting it off. Meanwhile, the administration went through its accounts and
decided to give only thirty percent. Twenty percent now, ten percent later on. Another meeting in
the union. They agreed to a raise of forty millions for everyone.

A rise of 40 million Turkish liras for all workers meant a 40% rise for those who were working
at the minimum wage and a decreasing rate of increase for those who earned more. This was a
humiliation for the latter ones and immediately a group of workers went to the union centre. In
fact this wage increase process was a further blow to the authority of the union leadership. In the
the beginning the union secretary announced a 40% rise. Then, a later announcement - not
directly but through the representatives- defined the rise as 30%. Then even that rise wasn't
guaranteed...The Union centre witnessed intense negotiations between leaders and workers (In
the end, an agreement of 30% rise was concluded):

“You ruined my dreams,” said I to the president. What does a raise of forty millions mean? You
ruined my dreams. I was going to buy furniture for my place. I can’t even buy that. When I first
moved in, I borrowed my table from my neighbor. I have been working for so many years, I was
only able to buy a simple table just recently.

Apart from their intervention in the collective bargaining process, unionised workers seem to act
independently from the union centre in organising campaigns and various activities among the
worker community. The union as an institution is used to legitimate these activities. When an aid
campaign for the earthquake survivors was completed, a delegation of workers travelled with
some of the union officials to the earthquake areas to deliver the collected goods directly to the
survivors in the name of the union. A collective iftar during Ramadan, contributions to the
organization of weddings and funerals and even seeking lawyers for dismissed
29
workers are
undertaken independently from the union at least in the initial periods .

Unionised workers themselves also have to deal with issues of law. Know-how about courts is
normally not available to most workers. The union and its representatives are vital at this point as
they can offer critical help. But as it has been demonstrated, union intervention is limited. This
is, firstly, due to limitations by law and state policies in general and secondly, as a result of union
leadership’s distance. For the issue of compensations resulting from dismissals nearly 20
workers sued the company and the way they found lawyers and how they started the process of
litigation is indicative of the options available to workers: Three lawyers were in found in three
different ways. One of them was known by union representatives as he was the one dealing with
union’s legal issues. He demanded 15% of the reparation as his fee. Then another group of
workers found another lawyer who demanded in only 10%. A third group chose a lawyer who
was one of the worker’s relative (I could not learn his percent of fee). None of the cases was
concluded at the time of writing these pages.

Though it is not as significant existence and as the first two ones, a third form of struggle can be
street politics. This is a form of action for which workers feel a strong ambivalence. According
to them, on the one hand, it is a field in which other interests always overlap with theirs and it
can never be purified of them. Thus, they argue without common interests and organization,
these activites are doomed to fail. On the other hand, this field has a strong potential to
demonstrate their situation and demands to other classes and to the state and thus it must not be
left totally to exploitators of workers. Annual May 1 demonstrations and other spontaneous
activities such as legal demonstrations to protest the economic crisis and corruption were thus
issues around which intense debates could be generated.

"I didn't want to attend those demonstrations" Erdoğan once said: He explained this by arguing
that when he went there he would have to "trumpet" for illegal leftist organizations and thus his
reason to be there would disappear since worker problems could not be the issue:

There is no reason for me to be present in a place where I don’t have my own crowd and
authority. Let’s go there but let’s go as workers. Let there be no banner of any political parties,
illegal organizations and institutions. Let there be the banners and placards of only the worker’s
organizations. The organizations which join in should come with a worker’s identity. We are not
going there with our worker’s identity. They come as members of the Nationalist Action Party,
HADEP (?), Republican People’s Party. Where is your worker’s identity?

On the negative side, street politics -mostly the human composition and agenda of activities -are
transformed into the issue of powerlessness and the negative picture is hence reinforced.

People believe that the demonstrations do not serve any ends. They believe that they do not
provide any solutions. 400 thousand people assembled together that day for the SSK (Social
Securities Institute) draft law. Bayram Meral took the stage and said that he came to an agreement.
Everything ended right then. There were so many people, but they nonetheless passed the draft
law with no amendments. Considering the groups who were present, they are all unionists and
representatives. The president and most of the representatives generally did not come. There were
also illegal leftist organizations which wanted to make an appearance in the demonstrations. They
only want to make themselves known.

On the positive side there is the never-perfectly attainable state of giving the working class
message and hence the chance to impact national politics in their own favour.

Why are you going then? You have to contribute. You nevertheless have to make a demonstration
of your strength. These groups are here. They are giving the message that they can assemble
together larger groups in the future. Demonstration is, as you said, sending a message to certain
places. That is the purpose of gathering together. But nobody is receiving the message because
they don’t take it seriously. I see illegal organizations, but there are not any workers. Maybe all of
them are workers, but go there as a worker. Then, it can make an impact…

You are going to a match of Fenerbahce. 40 thousand people are shouting for fenerbahce. How
many men are there who shout “ We are workers. We are strong”. 20 people shout from one
place, 20 people shout from another one. If the 20 thousand people that you assembled together
there can shout that “we are workers, we are rightful,” that is real power. Then you can believe
that you can force them to make some changes. But we don’t do so, we just take the banners and
decorate ourselves with them at some place. Here are my banners and placard so to say. That’s
why we are unsuccessful. The success of the workers comes from their unity and solidarity. If
everyone abandons their beneficiaries and severs their bonds with the politicians, then we can
arrive at some place as workers.

Although Erdoğan finally formulated the logic of entering street politics in a responsible way,
most of the workers and even Ali Rıza did not agree with him. In the May 1 demonstrations and
in some other casual meetings such as the anti-corruption meeting held in April, 14 of this year,
few of workers from the factory joined. Ali Rıza tended to escape when the meetings started.
Most of the workers had no idea or desire or hope about those events and Ali Rıza sincerely
uttered several times that all those event would end in vain. For most, the streets were invaded by
others they despised and they thought, theirs efforts would end fruitlessly, too.

In this chapter, I focus on union membership and I take it as the main source of agency in the
domain of work. Union representatives monopolize the chapter and they attempt to legitimize
their existence in a historical context that is detrimental to the trade unions. The process of
weakening of the union is reflected on the accounts of representatives with a discourse of
impotence.

I quoted them at length since they had also monopolized the knowledge of unions and other
unionist workers replicated what they said most of the time if they had ever said something
about. I tried to support my writings, which is full of quotations with the observations from the
field. Besides, while I argue that the union is the source of expectations and usually the future
disappointments, that section depends not only on representatives but ordinary workers. Later
sections beginning with "Memory and Agency" is in a way the account of how representatives
construct a hegemonic discourse of union legitimacy and how they appoint themselves as the
leaders of workers. Union representatives produce and reproduce a discourse of impotence and
its daily discourse of blaming, which will be dealt in the next chapter, and in the mean time they
perpetuate a personality cult through this discourse.

In the next chapter, I will focus how workers apportion blame. In case of deprivation from many
rights and means of action, blaming becomes a unique activity through which workers attempt to
intervene and regulate symbolically the domains in which they spend their life and construct
their version of an imagined community.
CHAPTER 5
Who is To Blame?

All along my fieldwork, dismissals continued unabated. Every discussion turned around these
dismissals and there was no worker who did not estimate the date of his own dismissal. At first
sight, from the accounts of workers, dismissals seemed to be totally arbitrary from the accounts
of workers. Later it became clear to me that there were some patterns for the dismissals although
these were not so certain. And thus not every worker has the same degree of probability of being
dismissed. Whatever the case, dismissals are the main source of workers’ complaints and along
with the various aspects of the decline of union power, dismissals produced legitimacy for a
series of blames. Throughout these discussions göçmens, managers, the boss, the union, the state,
sometimes other workers (especially junior workers) and radical politics are the objects of blame.

Among male workers, firstly, those who are employed less than one year and thus who have no
right of compensation are most frequently dismissed. These are mostly pre-military service age
young workers. Secondly, those whose wages are high are dismissed. Their compensations,
contrary to labor laws, are paid in instalments over a long period of time and thus these sums of
money lose their real value in case of high inflation. I should say that not all high waged workers
face equal probabilities of being dismissed. Union representatives are, at least, more lucky due to
their positioning between management and the union. Besides, the firm offers reemployment 30
at
the minimum wage to some of the dismissed high waged workers (that is, senior workers) .
Thirdly, non-immigrants are more likely to be dismissed with regard to göçmens. Hovewer, even
göçmens are increasingly subject to dismissals during the prolonged economic crises.

The way how workers are dismissed can be a point of accusation to the company for some
workers. İlhan, in a very sentimental account, points out that dismissals happen without warning.
Here not the dismissals per se but how they occur is questioned. Due to lack of any prior
warning, workers wait anxiously and suddenly lose their job. Prior warning would provide time
for preparation to leave the job, to look for a new job or to be calm and to be consoled within the
family.

Ilhan said:
The man is now dismissing the workers. He has to let them know a week beforehand. Everyone is
tense and stressful. No one is working properly and there is hardly any production. For instance,
he can say to me we are going to dismiss you this day. We are going to make our preparations
accordingly. We saw so many dismissed people who left crying. If they only let them know a
week beforehand, the worker at least can calm himself down. He can say so they are going to
dismiss me. Perhaps someone at home can comfort him. It’s okay, you can find a job at another
place. But when he is suddenly dismissed, he cannot even give an answer. Then everyone is in a
difficult situation. We’ve been around for a long time, we know that we will have to leave, but
we don’t know when that’s going to happen. If they could only say that they are going to dismiss
me in the sixth month, we’ll be fine. There are three months to the sixth month; we can find a
good job in the meantime, right? Maybe we can find a better job for the weekends for ourselves.
There are men among the dismissed workers. Even married ones. I feel very sorry for them. There
are also bachelors. They do not have to take care of a family, but one still feels bad. We had a
friend. He had to leave all of a sudden. Even he couldn’t understand what was going on. I saw a
crying lady and felt sorry. You are dismissing them. So at least let them know beforehand so that
he can say to his parents that he is going to lose his job, so that he can be comforted. He is being
dismissed and is returning home in such a bad mood. If they would do that to me, I would feel
sorry, too. Everyone knows the circumstances and they are also crying for getting separated from
their friends. About the ambience, let me tell you. I don’t believe that anyone likes the workplace,
but they have their friends.

Ahmet levelled another set of accusation to the firm through the issue of work accidents. Work
accidents are concealed and treated as minor issues so that workers cannot benefit from accident
compensations.

Are there any accidents?

Yes, but they cover them up quickly.
What kind of accidents? Are there heavy things?
There is a heavy pressing machine. If there are any accidents, they are because of it. I haven’t
seen anyone who was compensated for an accident. It is their right. They have to be compensated.
They take them to an affiliated clinic. They pay for the charges and give them a leave of absence.
As if they have (psychological) problems. The guy doesn’t get paid either. Can’t? Of course, it
happened to a friend of ours. His finger was about to be cut off. They sent him to the clinic. He
didn’t get paid. If he had been paid, he would have gotten thrice as much. Work accidents multiply
the amount of money to be received. The money is thrice as much. Is it the compensation? No, if
he is receiving 100 from the insurance, his employer needs to give 200.

The firm is also guilty of arbitrary evaluation of what is done. What is worse, favouritism can
cause an inverse relationship between work and what is deserved. While Mehmet said,

Basing it on here, the workers do not get their due. This is evident. But those who are not working
get more than we do. This is also evident.
Not working? You mean workers who do not work as much?
Yes. The guy is wandering all day long. It looks like they prefer wanderers to workers here. They
get more money than we do.

İlhan stated that responsibilities can be meaningful if only they can be mutually practiced. İlhan's
words point that the relationship between the firm and the workers are based on reciprocity.
Otherwise the contractual relationship will break apart and the worker will become "lazy". There
is no attempt to equalize those responsibilities. The point is that every side should exercise,
should sacrifice and should benefit what it deserves (although inequally). İlhan said,

If a worker does not get his due, he idles. If he gets his due, he works harder. If he were to ask me
to work for eighty millions, how could I do that?
So it is mutual?
Of course. We made a lot of sacrifices. Our insurance bonuses weren’t paid for four consecutive
months a year and six months earlier. They were paid in half. I took an unpaid leave of absence
for two months. They cut off everyone’s bonus including bonuses of those who didn’t take a leave
of absence.

An evaluation of work without arbitrariness/ an assessment based on what is deserved was

mostly explained in monetary terms since monetary issues were never solved throughout my
fieldwork. However, fair treatment, participation in some decision making processes, respect for
pro-worker laws including union rights and laws concerning the compensations etc are also
components of fair evaluation. These issues will be dealt with in the following pages while
discussing other objects of blame.

Finally, although there is not systematic surveillance in the factory, the firm has a web of
espionage which can be used to impede workers’ ability to plan counter-moves. Even the most
active, respected and right-seeking worker Ali Rıza applies auto-cencorship to counter this
surveillance. Ahment pointed out this surveilance:

Of course, the living conditions are rough, but it was we with higher wages who talked about this
raise. It was mostly our names which reached the inside. He is getting paid only eighty millions,
but he is not speaking. They are not talking. They rise to incite you so that you would talk. Why
doesn’t he speak? Brother Ali Riza is talking of course (he is making them angry). You are not
going to talk, you are going to be mute…But he’s fed up with it, too. He also worries about not
being able to get enough done.

In some moments blaming points out an alliance between management and the judiciary.
Power inequality is apparent when judicial processes are concerned. It is workers that go to
courts not the management. Because, as Erdoğan says, “…employer can directly solve their
problems but we can only solve ours by applying to judicial processes”. Moreover, judiciary
processes are full of obstacles that workers have to surmount in order to maintain their rights.
Besides, they can undertake such a difficult process only with an organized force, that is the
union. However, in the previous chapter I argue that the judiciary itself is an obstacle among
others for an effective usage of the union.

Management can act beyond the confines of the law whereas workers can not. Management can
manipulate the laws and more importantly, it defends its actions at courts after the fact whereas
workers can only act through a judiciary process. For instance, management may dismiss a
department's whole labor force. Then it can defend its act against İş ve İşçi Bulma Kurumu by
claiming that business is low. Article 13 gives management the right to dismiss workers in such a
case. I was told that such situations happen when workers begin to organize for a union. Orders
are delayed and the claim that there is no work is put forward. Through this pretext, all workers
who are trying to organize are dismissed not because they want the union, but because of no
work (article 13 again). After this de facto lockout, management changes the company name and
begins its activites again. In fact there is no need to stop. It may continue clandestinely without a
break. To monitor and sue all these illegal activities of management, the union must go to court
incurring large expenditures of union resources. Since the company can mostly cover up its
faults, it is likely that the union can not gain what it spends.

Similarly, if you are the dismissed one and your reparation is not given or it is given
incompletely you can get your reparation only by going to court applying article 16. When you
are dismissed according to article 17, management brings forth two witnesses and claims that
you have bad intentions. But your return to work can only be possible by going to court. Here
you will mostly need a lawyer and will spend large amount of money and this is a relatively
difficult task for workers who have limited monetary and temporal resources. Besides, if a
worker is dismissed, it is difficult to get his compensation immediately. According to labor laws,
compensations due to dismissal or something else that result in unemployment should be paid to
workers immediately. But management prefers to begin payments 5-6 months (or even later)
later by giving vouchers [senet]. In an inflationary economy compensations lose their real value.
Workers can sue the company to get their reparations immediately. I was told that there a high
chance for workers of winning such case. But still among the dismissed workers (nearly 200 in
the last two years) only 20 of them attempted to sue. One of the most important obstacles to
going to court is that workers hope to be re-employed. If they challenge the company, they may
lose the possibility of re-employment forever. As far as I observed, many senior workers were
working at the minimum wage instead of their previous high wages. So abstaining from courts is
not completely unreasonable. Moreover, lawsuits last so long that workers prefer the payment
the company offers. Normally a lawsuit in this context should end in 2-3 months according to the
law. But in practice it lasts more than a year. Therefore, very few workers sue. This, in turn,
encourage the company to pay less reparation amounts in longer terms ranging 10-12 months.

If one strives for his/her reparations a long and demanding process begins. Just 17 workers got
their reparations after a 15-month trial. An additional two workers are in the appeal stage of their
lawsuit. Erdoğan decribes this relatively long period like this:

The ninety percent of the people do not take it to the court. Always for these reasons. The trials
last for a very long time, this is the primary reason. The labor legislations say that the trial could
last only for three months. Or that it should be finished in two months. But the trial lasts for a
year. This action for money should not last for such a long time. The judge should only come to
this decision: should say only this to the lawyer: “Go and find the workplace, check through the
accounts and have it inspected by an expert. The judge should make his decision in the second
trial. But what happens with us? One of the parties does not come to the trial. The judge
postpones the trial to a day three months later. In the second trial, there are missing documents.
They are not bringing the documents to the court on purpose. They plan another trial for the
completion of the documents. This time the documents aren’t missing, but they ask for
witnesses. A fourth trial…meanwhile the expert has made an inspection of the workplace. At the
end of the year, the judge decides on the enforcement of the payment of the reparations…In
response, the opposing party rejects to the decision once again. They wait for another three
months in a higher court. All of this is profitable for the employer. It is like cheap credit.

Theoretically and practically the firm loses the lawsuit. But as it is just mentioned in the above
quotation, what it pays after a lawsuit may turn –indeed most of the time turns - into a credit with
a low interest rates. As an institution a company can enter a long lawsuit and in the end get a
profitable result. In some specific cases laws set the highest deposit interests for the time passed
during the lawsuit but still company is advantageous and continues to take such cases on.

Within the firm, managers are the main objects of blame. For an ordinary worker such as
Mehmet, they were guilty because they did not meet the expectations of paternalism. In one case,
it was through spatial segregation at lunch that Mehmet uttered this expectation of paternalism,
which I quoted before. In that case, spatial togetherness at lunch does not exclude the hierarchies
but reinforces the family-like collectivity.

Distance between the workers and managers is further reinforced by the structure of daily
relations. Only a few of them are accessible by only a few of the workers. Moreover, managers
seem to be not so much concerned with their problems. The daily problems of the lower echelons
of workers are the concern of foremen and union representatives. This last point is a further
consolidation of the domain of "work". Workers are a different and distanced collectivity from
managers and other employees. Three ordinary workers, Mehmet, İhsan and Ahmet respectively
pointed out the distance:

(Mehmet) When there is a problem, anything, concerning your work for instance, how does the
mechanism work? In other words, do you have a foreman? Is there a director? Do you go up to
him?
We have a foreman. But they have now become civil servants, so they cannot help us as much.
But it depends on your problem.
So it differs?
If there is a problem with money or the employer, we resolve it through the union. We do not have
any other means. Only the union fights for our rights. What can a civil servant do? If you wanted
to go up to the director, he would put it off --only with representatives…
(Ihsan) Can you go up to your managers?
Only to the directors of staff and production. The rest of them do not have that much of a function
anyways. You cannot see the others; they always try to get rid of you. Only our representative
friends. They can even go up to Mehmet Bey. Only they can see them.

(Ahmet) When there is a problem, how does the system work? Are you coming here?—
you always come here.
Do you talk to the representative or to the foreman? Or to the director?
It depends on the problem. If a person has a major problem, the distance between the worker and
the foreman is primarily decisive. If the worker feels close enough to his foreman to discuss these
matters, he automatically goes to his foreman. If he feels distant, he automatically comes here
[union]. If the foreman gives advice and assurance, it is okay. If not, our friends come here.
Do you ever contact with the directors?
No.

One more contribution to the distance issue is to do with the administrative cadres. They are
never thought of as part of the worker community. They get higher wages, their jobs are more
secure, they have no relation with the union and they do not mix with industrial workers. Only a
few foremen and three worker representatives can have close dialogues with them. They are
located in the administrative building and at lunch, which is the single possibility of mixing with
workers, they maintain their distance by having lunch together with the managers in a small
room within the factory restaurant. In fact, the term memur can be used for them without a
pejorative meaning.

A more informed discursive attack against the managers could be directed by the chief union
representative, Ali Rıza. He is more knowledgeable about them and his attack is based not only
on the fact that they do not meet the expectations of paternalism, rather as causing deteriorating
work conditions. And while he attacks them, he attempts to get rid of their agency, that is, he
attempts to cast them as so powerless or unsuccessful administrators. Sometimes the boss prefers
to ally with him instead of managers. Besides, he is the one who can differentiate between
managers according to their power in shaping workers' destiny and their accessibility to workers.
Again, he is the one who can find out allies among managers. Especially
31
Can Bey, the personnel
manager, was pointed out as an ally of workers from time to time.

Is it because of [economic] stagnation that you have all these problems? Do they always do
this? Since you’ve been around for ten years, you would know?
In fact, this place is in crisis. The business is not going that well, but the real reason is that general
manager at the top. What kind of a man was Sezai altinkaya? They do not their job properly. I
don’t remember any crises during the times of Selcuk and Turgay Beys (previous managers).
What should they do?
They can’t even make business connections. They can’t market their products. What happens to
production without marketing? …

There is a certain Nurcan Hanim, who is she?

She is the Manager of Quality. Does she have a lower status? Who is who? There are so many
managers.
They do not know what they are and what their place is.
The General Manager is now Sezer Bey. The biggest boss is Mehmet Bey. The Manager of Staff is
Cem Bey. The Manager of Production is Sezai Yilmaz. The Manager of Quality Control is Nurcan
Hanim. Marketing is Okay Bey. Six of them. It is actually more than six. Everyone is a manager.
I had a fight with the manager of production. It lasted for half an hour or an hour. Then the staff
manager said “okay, Ali Riza” and took me away. The manager of production didn’t come to work
for three days. He complained about me. Mehme Bey [the boss] called upon me: “What do you
want to do?” “What am I doing? Look, I’m here. Why doesn’t your dishonorable manager who
complained about me come here as well? This is a stinging word. If his manager is dishonorable,
then he is also dishonorable. Of course if he understands what I am saying. “Can’t you be a bit
calmer?” he said. “When I see an unjust act, I become unconscious” said I. I don’t know what I
am saying like a drunkard. I told him all about the manager and he started to curse him as well.
He forgot about me. I said bye and left him there. He had a meeting with the manager the next
day. He said to him that there was only Ali Riza who liked and protected the factory and the firm.
How did you hear all about this? The Staff manager. Also from the rest of them. He said that they
were all lying and that they would henceforth contact with me for the right information. I always
tell the truth.
One more aspect of ordinary workers' accusation of managers was about göçmens. All the
discussions about göçmens had turned into a questioning of family types and managers'
preference for them. It should be argued that since the existence of immigrant families was a
challenge to workers' positions, managers were to become guiltier by prefering immigrants and
hence increasing the degree of threat against their positions.

However, alienation from the upper classes is not absolute. Unlike the managers, the boss is
visible. He frequently walks around the factory and he is careful to construct an image of himself
in which he is a hard working and self-sacrificing person who tries to create more areas of
employment. In my single encounter with him, his discourse was similar to what is just said and
that reminds me Ayşe Buğra's points. According to her this is a common discourse of Turkish
businessmen, that is, they attempt to show that they work for the national well being and they
prefer to have an image of modesty and self sacrifice (Buğra, 1995). Mehmet seemed to
internalize the image of his boss:

What kind of an image does mehmet bey have?

Despite his age-I appreciate-he is still trying to do some things. He is trying to provide people with
employment. He is trying to provide them with a living. Though I don’t know him personally.
There was only Thermal-Electronics five years ago. Later on he added Ceramics

However, İlhan did not buy that image and gave a reason for his visibility and hard working,
sacrificing image. According to him, the nature of the firm determines how the boss acts.

Have you ever seen Mehmet Bey?

We always see him.
So he is walking around? Yes, he does. It is not a very big firm. We’ll surely see him. You can
never see some of them, so he walks around.
You cannot see men such as Koc and Sabanci. We see them on TV. But these ones? Where are
they going to go? Here. Here and there is also Sogut.

But both Mehmet and İlhan agreed that managers are guilty for the deteriorating conditions of
the firm while Mehmet bey, the boss, was innocent:

What is Mehmet doing?

Worse. His business is falling apart. Unfortunately, our managers are trying to bankrupt it but to
no avail yet. I wonder. If he would only take charge of everything, it wouldn’t turn out to be like
this. Unless the general manager changes, the problem cannot be resolved. Brother Ali Riza said
so many times that one cannot do business with this mentality. But they don’t understand as if we
are not telling the truth.

In one case, Ali Rıza provided a reason for why managers failed. This reason of failure is also
the difference between the boss and managers as I have already shown. Managers should be
visible and they should not distantiate themselves from the workers. Work should be done
through face-to-face relations, managers should be bodily in the workplace so that the work
required could be produced.

Who you consider a manager—I remember previous managers, they used to check upon every
section each morning. Then they would go back to their places. These ones don’t even walk
about. They sit. They do their business over the phone. It cannot go on like this. Then they hear
something from someone and believe it. They do not see what’s going on.

In fact, as the managers are detrimental to the well being of the firm, the ability of the boss to
administer can be questioned. I wondered why the boss allows managers to damage the firm.
Mehmet's answer actually attributes a partial impotence to the boss. He is so busy (or so gullible)
that he cannot be aware of what his managers do.

Is Mehmet Bey gullible? He doesn’t see what’s going on because he’s always walking
around? Or does it suit him well since the money is flowing in? doesn’t an owner want such
managers? They show him the good side of the medallion. Nobody sees the bad side. Something
is going to befall him and he is going to regret it.

Nevertheless, there are broader objects of blaming. For example, Ali Rıza, points out the
difference between public and private employment. While the fate of the private sector is tied to
economic prosperity, the public sector is independent from economic situations. Accordingly, it
is legitimate for the private sector to look for productive and obedient workers to survive in
fluctuating economic conditions. Hence, Ali Rıza, in a way, legitimizes dismissals in general and
dismissals of young worker in particular. His account couples unproductivity with the discourse
of irresponsibility of young workers; juniors are not assumed to be proper workers.

We are working in the private sector. We don’t have the securities of the civil servants. For
instance, you’ve been working for three or four years. When the orders stop coming and the
business falls into a critical period, what are you going to do? If there weren’t any work
anymore, why would the guy pay or keep you? At such times, the tolls of danger automatically
start to ring for us.
What are the criteria for dismissals?
They are usually a result of the crisis. Do they first dismiss the ones with the minimum wages?
The youngsters who haven’t served in the military yet. They see the world through rose colored
glasses. They give some of their wages to their family and they spend the rest away drinking and
eating. They don’t know how to survive in the factory. They try to get out of doing their work
and ask for permissions to leave. As far as I can see, they are the first ones to be dismissed. If
they are going to cause damage, get out of doing their work i.e. be unproductive, they will be the
first ones…

The state is also criticised in the scheme of blame. In a general level, Ahmet cites attitudes
towards labor in Western countries as the appropriate manner of management. A worker not only
gets the compensation for work related damages, but also gets a wage that will provide him
opportunities for recreation and save money for future project. Without providing such a wage
and welfare in general, a worker cannot be a docile/"good worker". The authority of the state on
workers in general and of the firm in particular, then, depends more on repressiveness than
consent.

Having been a worker for 15 years, what is a good worker like?

A good worker, frankly, shouldn’t be engrossed with other things. A comfortable environment…
My uncle is in Belgium. I want to give a few examples from over there. My uncle has been there
for a long time, for more than ten years. He had found a job in a silk factory. (…) The inside is
covered with dust. He goes up to the doctor. The doctor tells him that he is going to help him.
My uncle is Turkish, but doctor is a foreigner. The doctor gives my uncle advice telling him that
he can take the factory to the court. My uncle says “How is that possible? I am Turkish. I am a
Turkish worker”. The doctor assures him of his rightful action to take the firm to the court. My
uncle takes it to the court and he wins. In accordance with the court’s decision, he is on lifelong
salary. He’s still there although he’s not working anymore. … If he is paying rent, how much is
his rent? Electricity, water, telephone, monthly food costs…They also write down the health costs.
When you add all this up and put them aside, these guys can save some of their wages for social
activities. They pay their workers so that they can have a comfortable living. Moreover, they give
them the chance to save up some money for future investments. I heard these from my uncle.

Therefore, according to İlhan, Turkey does not have the right to join the European Union since
there are many lacks in constituting a proper workforce.

I am saying all this because the conditions in Turkey are becoming worse. Believe me, you have
to do it now, at this age when you are able to do something. If you cannot do it now, hard days
are waiting for you. They talk about the EC. I am thinking: Nothing has changed in Turkey. Why
should everything change when we enter the EC? We don’t even have an unemployment security.
We do not have rights to proper health service and education.

The state is also blamed for some specific issues. In fact, relating these specific issues to state
policy is a discursive act mostly performed by worker representatives. The minimum wage
(MW), which is determined by the state, is one of the most hotly debated issues. Although the
Wage Determination Committee has members representing the unions/workers, their roles are
insignificant. According to Erdoğan, the MW is one of the most palpable interventions of the
state. As the state sets it at a low level, companies prefer to dismiss high waged workers to
employ workers at the MW. Dismissed workers usually accept to begin again at the MW as it is
hard to find a new job. Therefore, dismissals become easier and high wages are abolished as
companies are tempted to exploit the low level of the MW. Erdoğan also argues that the low
level of the MW puts a worker below the hunger level, not to mention any social needs:

The survival limit is 225 millions in Turkey. The subsistence limit for a family of four persons
has gone up to 720 millions. How many people are working in a household in Turkey today?
Generally one person. Or two…Then what would you do to earn 720 millions? You have to earn
360 millions. The minimum wage should be that much. That’s how a husband and his wife can
meet the subsistence limit. The survival limit is 225 million. Humans need to engage in social
activities as well. So a human being dies of 102 millions. That’s how we live in Turkey. Our
conditions of living don’t differ from the animals we keep in barns. We are eating, drinking,
sleeping. They are forcing us to work and milking us. We are human beings. In order to live
as human beings, we need to be paid humanely. They say that they are paying us the necessary
amount. There is a committee on the minimum wages. Its members come from employers, union,
state, and university. Have some mercy! Determine the right amount of minimum wages so that
when two people come together they can pay their rent and meet their living expenses. They are
aware of the situation. It is the employers who force this upon them.

Besides, according to Ali Rıza, the minimum wage is a symbol of polarisation of life styles and
the accompanying moral degradation of society. If higher life standards are set and violations are
policed carefully, many social problems will disappear.

We have a very high and a very low life style. The ones in the lower ranks, whatever their ideal,
try to reach the ones in the higher ranks through every illegal means. We are made to struggle for
the life style at the top. The mentality of those who proclaim “My civil servant, my worker knows
his way” has dominated our society. Whichever way you earn, you should earn it. Hence, people
make it somehow. That’s why we have so many dishonest men and thieves in this country. Of
course. If you provide people with the right living standards and legislate harsh punishments, will
they be able to do it anymore? The wrongs have their sources in the uppermost levels.

In sum, the MW makes a decent living standard impossible for individual and nuclear family.
One way to cope is living in extended families, mostly with the husband's family. Another is
living with the inheritance etc. gained from spouses' families. And another way is to preserve
relations with the village. Mostly parents still living in the countryside supply provisions for the
nuclear family in Istanbul. A final way which seems to provide individual solutions is to work in
additional jobs in addition to overwork in the factory (ek iş). But this is over-tiring for most the
time and it does not indeed dispense with vital kinship help. Besides, although families manage to
achieve minimum living standards, this is not a humane life.

Another hot debate concerning the state is about the forthcoming Social Insurance Law (SSK
Yasası Tasarısı). SSK is another area in which the state directly determines working conditions
in a national scale. The new draft law, among other things, raises the age of retirement and
increases insurance premiums. These two points in turn shape the characteristics of the worker
population. The difference between the MW and the base level insurance premium – the latter is
higher – prompts firms not to resist paying premiums and abstain from employing insured
workers. Increased insurance premiums probably aimed to raise the level of social insurance. But
they are relatively high and become a financial burden for many companies. Some workers
believe that companies are not guilty in this situation. While criticising the SSK law, workers
should also care for the employers' benefits. Erdoğan believed that companies should not be
under financial burden, they should be protected, too.

Another issue in the SSK law is that the state sets age limits for working. The point of anxiety for
Ali Rıza is not that they have to work for longer years but that there is little job security. After
the age of 40 neither the state nor the private sector tend to employ workers. Young workers
especially under 30 are very advantageous for the employer. They work for lower wages and
they tend to change work more frequently and voluntarily so that employers have to pay no
reparations or very little amounts. It seems that it will be very difficult for many to reach the age
of 58/60 as a worker. I think it will be an interesting and also an upsetting inquiry to look at what
older workers who cannot find a new place to work after dismissal will do before their retirement
years. Erdoğan believed that laws making dismissal difficult must accompany such a legal
retirement age. But SSK lawmakers seem to be disinterested in this possible consequence of the
law and this irritates workers.

Some accusations of the state mark her accomplicity with the corrupt businessmen. Ali Rıza's
account below claims that the source of many businessmen's wealth is the state. This enrichment
happens through unfair ways and members of the parliament serve this unfair enrichment.

Who did it? The state did it. Sabanci is saying that he is selling rotten cheese, but he is getting a
subsidy from the state. Sabanci is saying that he was used to be in the cotton business. The state
has provided these men with subsidies. People have recently become rich in the mafia way. For
instance the Erol Evci’s incident. What is his past? What is his mother’s, ancestor’s wealth?
None. But the mafia way… The state is rendering them rich. The employers render the
parliamentarians rich. First, they elect them to the parliament and then they steal away.

Ali Rıza and Erdoğan respectively elaborate the system of corruption. Government and the state
are used interchangeably in these accounts.

(Ali Riza) Who supports up the government nowadays? The employers. The government or the
parliamentarians… Their financial resources are the employers. The financial resources of the
mayors are also employers. In return, they have to protect their financial resources.
(Erdogan) Within these parameters, the state can win. But the state also rejects it. Because most of
the parliamentarians of the state are originally bosses, business owners, general managers or their
consultants, lawyers or journalists who collaborate with certain circles…How can they help you
out? There are a very few workers or unionists who entered in the parliament. Encircled by the
rest, these few cannot have their voices heard. It is very difficult, almost impossible to pass such
legislations. But if they want to enter the EC, they have to sign certain documents which guarantee
labor conditions in accordance with the norms of ILO. Even then there are going to be practical
problems.
There are no equal opportunities for education. The tuitions have increased. I am working now.
If I don’t work now, how I am going to come up with my daughter’s tuition? The government or
the state should definitely find a solution.

Moreover, education, which is one of the most available means for upward mobility, is also an
elusive possibility and the state seems to be reluctant to provide equal opportunities.
However, education is not only a means for upward mobility. It has a foundational power that
restructures the whole society. When opportunities for education are equally provided by the
state, "intelligent" ones will have the chance to move up and hence rule the country. Otherwise,
rich people's children get educational and the chance to rule. Despite the lack of intelligence they
rule and this is the root of social and governmental problems. In case of incompetents’ rule, that
is the present situation, society is conditioned to accept such a regime. Furthermore, millions of
very intelligent children in schools are educated as if they are deprived of intelligence. It is also
significant that not themselves but the children are given as the disadvantegous group. A critique
of the system is brought by way of workers’ family strategies.

Of course it is the problem of financial resources. I try so hard to change the fortune of my
children. If there were really an equal opportunity for education, if our children were equally
educated from the scratch, millions of children like mine would have served Turkey much more
than those in the universities presently. They would have benefited this country much more than
those with money, than those who educated themselves with their money. Thousands of children
in Turkey are educated as if they were lacking intelligence. Despite the fact that they are so
intelligent… Nowadays only those with money are in good positions. Since we do our business
under the direction of the intelligence of those people, our society becomes vulnerable to their
domination.

Finally, a positive role for the state: In some specific cases the state can positively determine
individuals becoming workers. Military service is one of most critical phases in a man’s life, in
his becoming of a worker as I mentioned several times. This is a moment when being a proper
worker is part of an ongoing process of becoming a man (Sirman, 1998). That is, military service
is a rite of passage, to become a socially accepted man and thus legitimately gaining the status of
head of family in the domain of home is also a rite of passage of becoming a proper worker in
the domain of work.

Girls are more responsible. You know why? They think of their future, they want to prepare
something for their trousseau. In order to make an investment. (Before their military service) Boys
do not have the same mentality. They need to change automatically after their military service,
after the military discipline. You’re asking why? Because they can neither find an excuse nor a
problem. Although one can have an opportunity or a capital to start something, they think that the
military service is going to ruin it. So he decides to have a great time until he gets drafted. After
his military service, this man automatically decides to get married and realizes that he is in need
of certain things. He starts to make the investments necessary for getting married. This causes
him to settle down. He needs to take care of a family. The man is married. He has already done
his military service. He acts more maturely. Both in the factory and workplace, he at least feels
responsible for his job.

The last objects of blame are radical politics (particularly leftism) and esnafs. Most of the
workers I interviewed felt that workers’ demands at the national level could only be legitimate if
it excluded leftism or defined themselves as completely apart from left politics. Furthermore they
did not approve the demonstrations that esnaf held recently. The ship trope is invoked by
excluding other narratives. DISK, which is one of three big unions of Turkey and which still has
leftist leanings serves as a scapegoat. The pre-1980 experience of DISK in leading worker
activities is especially brought up as a negative example.

No. We are underdeveloped because of the pre-80s’ mentality. We got angry with the employer
and the foreman. We broke the machines. We weren’t aware that we were damaging the national
economy. What did Ridvan Budak say? We expressed our regrets to our employers. We made a
great mistake before the 80s.
Worker representatives are constructed as rational, cold-blooded, and responsible, they know the
legislation and they are not adventurous, and thus they work for the benefits of workers whereas
their "others" have the opposite characteristics. Union representatives state that an image of
strong unionist instead of coward one was propagated previously. But if objectively analysed,
according to them, no benefit but much disappointment was gained from such explicit resistance.
The ship trope, then, cannot be classified as false consciousness; it is a formulation having
practical and discursive aspects in workers’ lives. Ali Rıza said,

One of them complains: “ Why haven’t you led the workers to the streets and made
demonstrations? Why haven’t you stopped working? Hey, man. Don’t shoot the shit. Are you
aware that you pay for such actions? So what, he says. The employer can dismiss all the
demonstrators in accordance with the Article 17 which permits him to dismiss those who stop
working. Read and learn about the labor legislations and then speak. If you work at another
place, don’t believe in those stupid representatives. They would urge you to make a demonstration
and then you would lose your reparations. We do not look for adventurous representatives. We
really read the book and the legislation. We act knowing what’s going to befall us. You know
the incidents of Kristal and Sisecam. They dismissed workers because of the demonstration in
accordance with the Article 17. We are heroic unionists! The workers need to be dismissed. Run
to the demonstration and then the inspection of the notary and dismissal.

Erdoğan explains the logic of exclusion like this: Workers are a powerless section of the nation.
Empowerment as a class is to attempt to provide the balance of classes in society. In this scheme,
worker interests per se have to be the primary agenda of workers. Only after realizing their
primary agenda workers can attempt to deal with other, broader issues. It is argued that only after
realizing workers’ interests can they be powerful enough to have the licence to deal with
nationwide issues.

We are first and foremost workers. We have to act for the good of the workers. Aren’t we going to
concern ourselves with social policies? Of course we are, but when? We will have been stronger
and powerful. We will have resolved all the problems of the workers. They do not have social
problems anymore. They have reached a certain standard of living. So the workers do not have
any expectations from us concerning these matters. Then we can think about social welfare, in
other words health and individual problems. If we try to take care of latter type of problems when
we’re grappling with all these major problems, we lose it all the way.

Accordingly, Emek Platformu, the umbrealla organization of all major labor confederations of
Turkey, is unsuccessful due to the confusion of interests. Besides, those interests are supposed to
be unrelated with the workers and furthermore some of these interests are seen as anti-national
and terroristic. They are again supposed to be non-class based.

For instance Emek [Labor] Platform: You have problems as workers? For example, the lack of
organization. There are labor legislations and draft laws. A leftist comes up and talks about the
problems in the prisons. We are going to make a demonstration in support of this. If you concern
yourself with other matters when you have your own problems as workers, everything reaches a
dead end there. What does the opposing party do? So what why should I care whether they die or
not? It is not my problem. I am dying of hunger here. I cannot interrupt my struggle for workers
so that that man can make his individual propaganda and live comfortably in the prison. I know
you have to struggle for that as well. The other party- the nationalists—struggle to gather together
the Turkish nation. Some others prefer to struggle only for their own country. The demonstrations
in Kadikoy. The windows went down. The cars were burnt. Our platform, on the other hand, lays
carnations in the memory of the dead. As we do so in the memory of the dead, we have to make
a correction. This is our area, not a terrorist nest. We have to give the message that we can make
demonstrations simply as workers. If you continue to collaborate with the terrorist groups, you run
into certain difficulties. That is the reason for the loss of the power of the unions. In this way, you
are playing into their hands. As the Emek Platform, you have to curse those who do such things.
You have to curse those who betray national wealth. You have to do everything to exclude such
men and display them. So that they will not be out there in our space.

Erdoğan uses the same reasoning to attempt to stamp out the differences between the three labor
confederations. Thus their ideological foundations, historical
32
developments and current positions
are transformed into mere administrative differences.

But all unionisms have one basic principle in common. Birlesik Metal-Is, Turk-metal or Ozcelik-
Is all have basic principle. It is their administration and style that is different. They do not give
different things to the workers. They basically fight for the rights and benefits of the workers.
There is no ideology of labor and bread. Rightist or leftist unionism…Both fights for bread.
There is no question of ideology here. They diverted us from our track by ideology and the
worker…

Their blaiming of esnaf involves an attempt by workers to delineate clearly their difference from
the esnaf. Although most of the workers plan/hope to have their own business in the future,
recent esnaf demonstrations were not approved of. Esnaf are castigated because they did not see
the interdependence between them and workers in the past. Workers are the largest population
who buy shopkeepers’ goods. While workers were suffering from aggravated conditions, the
esnaf did not support their biggest customers. Secondly, most of the workers are living to
survive. Their problems are directly related to the issue of survival. On the other hand, what
esnaf lose in the latest series of economic crisis is their rate of profits. It is believed that esnaf
live a better life than workers do. Finally, esnaf, like company managements are an irresponsible
category of citizens. Their employees do not have insurance and they pay very little amounts of
tax.

All this discourse of blame points out what workers’ expectations are and how they construct the
ideal worker. Workers do not assume their relationship with the company to be merely
contractual, that is they agree to sell their labour and the company offers a price for it. It is more
than that, somewhat paternal and in this sense while dismissal itself is bad enough, dismissal
without prior warning or adequate compensation is terrible. Dismissals can be understandable
since the country is passing through difficult times at the level of economy. But the company’s
relationship with a worker does not end until the end of the dismissal process and the company
should care for its workers until that stage. Similarly, while a worker is still employed by the
company, he should be treated fairly and if an accident happens, he must be tended with care.
However, the company does not perform its paternal duty and deserves whatever a worker does
to get his revenge.

This emphasis on lack of paternalism in the case of the relationship between workers and the
company can be extended to the relationship between workers and the state. At stake is not a
demand of social justice or equality but but for the reconstitution of harmony and balance in
society. Workers imagine themselves to be under the leadership of a caring sovereign in a society
with no challenge to paternal authority. However, this imagination cannot be realised in currently
and the worker community in the factory is constructed under the leadership of union
representatives through a reiteration of this unrealisable desire. A discourse of impotence and
blame emphasizing the missing balance and harmony in society is the major strategy through
which the community of workers is produced.

This chapter shows that there are specifically two ways through which workers use the discourse
of impotence. On the one hand, workers themselves are impotent since they are the ones most
affected by deteriorating conditions resulting from the lack of balance and harmony. Here
impotence signifies an effect of social breakdown. On the other hand, impotence is also
described as a cause of that breakdown. Impotence this time, is attributed to the administrative
cadres at all levels, ranging from the union and factory to the state, who are thereby responsible
for the break up of harmony and balance in society. I argue that these uses of impotence are
made a part of everyday experience through the use of the discourse of blame. If there is
impotence, someone, depending on the context, can be blamed for it. Through such collective
attribution of blame, a worker community is constructed with the conscious use of the discourse
of impotence and an emphasis on the lack of harmony and balance, thus creating a collective
desire for their restitution. These precepts are used daily to explain every wrong done by
workers, whether at national level or within the factory. Moreover, this construction paves the
way for a statist stance. Although the state is not so good at caring for its citizens, further
deterioration is to be avoided and the worker community is constructed as conserving what is left
from a society of balance and harmony. Personalizing the guilt of the state (i.e. corrupt statesmen
and businessmen as the reason of the state’s incapability to attend to society’s needs instead of an
attack against an abstract system such as capitalism or globalisation) allows the possibility for
redressing the situation through worker agency such as electing “capable” statemen (or indeed
union representatives). Meanwhile, any possibility of further breakdown of harmony is opposed
by this community such as in the case of leftist politics and esnaf who resembled leftists with
their demonstrations in the first half of 2001.

CONCLUSION

In this thesis I attempt to understand a group of male workers whose identities are formed within
the capitalist labour process; I look at unskilled work, individual life stories, two significant
institutions that is family and the trade union, and a particular kind of masculinity to seek sources
of agency. A sense of having or not having authority to act and a desire to be powerful in the
decision making process of daily life were so apparent that I have ordered the whole issue into a
quest for agency keeping the theoretical issues discussed above in mind.

The historical context into which my study can be located is Turkey’s post-1980 industrialization
policies and the new production regime of global economy, that is flexible production or post-
Fordism. There are many aspects of this context but the most salient in this context is that unions
and unionised workers have lost their former power. However, since there were no unionised
workers who lived pre-1980 years, workers' emphasis on "losing power in relation to past"
cannot depend on their own observations of a Fordist moment, when the unions were assumed to
be powerful than they do now. I argue that the union is a powerful and legitimate device for
agency in modern life opening a discursive space for workers’ demands and this construction of
agency is completely an invention of post-1980 years. Thus, a discourse of losing power or a
discourse of impotence should be understood as a constituting part of an imagined community
rather than a comparison between an abstract fordist and post-fordist moments.

In the thesis I state that age, geographical origin and union membership make thinking in terms
of a a homogeneous collectivity of workers impossible even among a group of male, middle aged
and married workers. Their work, which is classified by the management as unskilled has an
unstable and changeable character, which seems to be against human nature and creates an
uneasy work environment. That work can have deskilling effects and indeed it is deskilling in the
sense of making a person perform unskilled work and changing his post constantly. But since
some workers did not ever have a skill, I refrained from using the term “deskilled” to label their
work. Moreover, workers believe that education can be an important source of skill. But skill can
also be acquired on the job even if one is only a primary school graduate. The education system
of Bulgaria, often used by way of contrast by the workers provide a high school degree including
work skill whereas in Turkey there is no acquiring a skill at school. Therefore, a person in
Turkey can only get skill by leaving the education process and joining a process of
apprenticeship. Skill per se is not assumed as a source of identity and discussions on skill are
blurred by the immediate shift to the discussion of the role of the state although the state is not
the only source of skill acquiring. However, this serves opening up a space for state agency,
which may in turn realise the workers' ideal of a society in harmony and balance. Besides,
despite the heterogeneity of workers in objective terms such as age and geographical origins,
unionised workers construct an homogenous discourse which renders all differences into a single
dichotomy, that is a homogenous worker self and others. Being unskill used as a component of
this construction.

My study proposes that there are two domains in which workers spend most of their time,
domains which also provide workers with agency: work and the family. But I argue that work
and the family cannot be completely separated and they are mutually referred to their everyday
discursive practice. Especially the ship trope acts as a means of connecting between these two
domains and as a means of connecting them to state agency. Moreover, it helps constructing a
workerist stance and excluding a left-wing political position simultaneously.

I paid more attention to the work life since my fieldwork mostly dealt with the domain of work. I
focused on the union membership, which is the main source of agency within the domain of
work. I tried to argue that the sense of gradual decline of union power affects every unionised
worker in varying degrees and instigates a discourse of impotence among workers. When I argue
that the union is the source of expectations and usually the future disappointments, this argument
was supported by the quotations from not only representatives but other workers.
Representatives construct a hegemonic discourse of union legitimacy and they appoint
themselves as the leaders of workers. This in turn results in a gap between the unionised workers
and the union leadership and reinforces a unionised collectivity within the boundaries of the
factory.

Blaiming becomes an inevitable part of a daily discourse when means of action are restricted by
law. It becomes a unique activity through which workers attempt to intervene and regulate
symbolically the domains in which they spend their life and construct their version of an
imagined community. This community is based on the precepts of balance and harmony and the
current lack of these qualities, is both the cause and effect of the discourse of impotence
prevalent among workers. That is, on the one hand impotence as an effect of social breakdown is
attributed to the workers who deeply sense a lack of harmony and balance in society and and on
the other hand it is attributed to the sovereigns whose incapability is the reason of social
breakdown. The discourse of blame is the everyday form and reproduction of this dual use of
impotence which in turn reinforces workers’ construction of a statist/right-wing political stance.

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APPENDICES
1 Among others, Chakrabarty’s (1989, 1994 and 1997); Chatterjee’s (1986, 1993), Lockman’s
(1994) and Gupta’s (1998) work occupies a significant place in shaping my ideas.
2 But apart from general issues of reliability concerning any statistical information, these were
mostly worse in their structuring of questions, their hasty and groundless generalizations,
temporal and geograhical incongruities to make comparisons. What was worse for me, I felt
mostly alone to find out the patterns to incorporate those to an ethnography. However, the reader
will find them from time to time in my account. I hope I could successfully deploy them.
3 For the last point: an always switched-on radio airing a center-left Alewite radio station
was available in the union room whose programs and news were from time to time to initiate
heated debates. Also some workers referred to soap operas and other TV programs frequently as
analogies for the state of affairs in Turkey.
4 Since Braverman (1974) “the labor process” approach, ostensibly a Marxist one, is dominant
among industrial sociologists and among other scholars who have similar interests. According
to Brown (1992, p. 175) the labour process is the “one in which the purpose of the activity is
laid down by the capitalist, and the means of production, both the objects on which work is to
be carried out and the instruments to be used in performing the work, are the property of the
capitalist. The essential preconditions for the development of capitalist labour power are therefore
twofold: the existence of a category or class of persons who have accumulated sufficient resources
to be able to employ workers and to provide the raw materials and the buildings, tools, machinery,
etc. necessary for production to take place; and the existence of a category or a class of persons
who lack the means of production themselves and therefore have no other commodities to sell
than their own capacity to work. This they must be both free to sell (i.e. they must not be legally
prevented from doing so as, for example, slaves would be), and forced to sell in order to provide
themselves with the means of subsistence”.
5 Similarly Tom Dublin, Mary Blewett, Ardis Cameron, Christine Stansell, Alice Kessler-Harris
(among many others) showed the central role played by female wage workers and stated their
important contribution even at the beginning of capitalist period.

6 Ira Katznelson’s (1986) volume offers diverse formations of working class even in the
“centre”.

7 Yıldız Ecevit’s (1991) work on female workers, Ayşe Güneş Ayata’s (1994) and A.R.
Dubetsky’s (1977) studies in some working class neighbourhoods, and two other recent works by
Zeki Parlak and Engin Yıldırım [in Kahveci et. al. (1996)volume] are the most significant ones I
encountered.
8 In fact this is marked by Ferhunde Özbay, 1998.
9 Since I did not encounter any single foreman, I assume that seniority in this context requires to
be head of family, which will in turn help his rule.
10 Mehmet had been working there for five years. This factory is the first place he became a
worker. He lost his job in the first months of 2001. Mehmet is married and has a daughter who
is two years old. He is in his early 30s. Although he can be as classified young in other contexts,
in the factory he is only younger than other married workers. Among the workers I interviewed,
he was one of the most critical ones over the young workers and he was again among those
who emphasised the family the most. Under an apparently forced show of tolerance, he was
suspicious about the life styles of immigrant families and advocated women to be housewives and
educate their children as their mothers. Meanwhile he refrained to criticise both the union and the
management. I thought he was a little bit afraid of espionage and he maintained an appearance of
the obedient worker.
11 By accidental entrance I mean this: There are many options for work in the beginning and they
begin to work in the factory because they are called by their friends or close relatives. When they
come to Istanbul , they have no deliberate intention to work in a factory. It seems that coincidences
make them factory workers: when there is a need for workers, someone from the factory calls one
who is available at that time. Ali Rıza found his job through the help of his aunt’s son. Hüseyin
came to Istanbul after the bankruptcy of his father’s dairy farm. One of his friends who was
working in a factory, helped him find work. Mehmet found his work by the help of his step-father
while he was working in a restaurant.
12 Hüseyin is similar to Mehmet in years of work (nearly 5 years) and family structure. He has a
daughter (older than Mehmet’s) and he is in his middle 30s. Again he was dismissed at the same
time with Mehmet. Although he attended union activities, Hüseyin seemed to be indifferent to
union issues and tended to avoid making any comments about it. He does not have any ethnic
relationship with those who are called immigrants. Mehmet, by contrast, who tended to criticise
immigrant family structure was indeed a grandchild of a man who migrated from Bulgaria in
1960s.
13 İlhan is one of the most active workers in terms of extra work and commentary about the
union and the company. Ali Rıza was suspicious of him and in fact he is the only worker I did
my interview despite his opposition. He implied that İlhan worked against the union. He is an
immigrant working in the factory for more than 6 years. But he is married to a non-immigrant
woman and because his wife’s parents opposed that marriage, they had no relations with the new
family. His marriage located him in a position between immigrants and non-immigrants. Although
Ali Rıza was suspicious of him, he agreed with other workers about the benefits of the union but
he was more critical about the union leadership and also management. In fact, this makes him
closer to the union representatives as will be seen in the following chapters.
14 Aykut is a friend of İlhan and they have many similarities. They began to work in the factory at
nearly the same time. For a while, they were in the same department, the warehouse. He is married
and has a young daughter. He is not an immigrant and his relations with his wife’s family is better.
He seems to be indifferent to any issues concerning the union or management and did very little
talking in general.
15 TSA from now on.
16 Ali Rıza, senior worker representative, was notorious for spending of time outside his home
in the evenings, thus ‘paid inattention to his family’ (his words). But gradually he left his night
life and began to spend his time with his family. I heard 2 or 3 similar cases. This refrain from
spending nights outside was mostly described as an ideal behaviour.

17 Ahmet has been working in the factory for three years. He is married but has no child yet. He
was relatively silent and obedient for the orders of the union representatives.
18 The Istanbul chapterof Öz Çelik-İş is in Aksaray, which can be assumed to be in a more central
position in Istanbul. On the other hand, Sefaköy, where the factory is located, is peripheral to
Istanbul and it is a recently burgeoning town. In fact, one can normally arrive from Sefaköy to
Aksaray in 45-60 minutes by Istanbul municipality's transportation buses and most of the workers
may come Aksaray and beyond for other purposes such as shopping and leisure time activities.
However, there is always a distance between the ordinary unionist workers and union leadership
that prevents workers to visit. This is reinforced by the fact only union representatives and other
few chosen by representatives are invited to union education seminars. Besides, it seemed to be
that the union centre, which is a large flat, is not organised to host casually visiting workers. And
finally, the union centre wasn't open full time throughout my fieldwork period, because 17 August
earthquake damaged the building in which union centre was and repairs lasted more than one year.
19 In summer or spring days short outdoor activities can outstrip the significance of union room
but as a public forum the room still keeps its importance.

20 Some other possible kinds of benefits that were seen in Turkey include these items: aid for
illumination, food-bread, milk –yoghurt provision, service or transportation aid, tranpsportation
to health service, participation to lease payment or accomodation provision, bathing and other
cleaning services, giving loans, provision of cleaning materials such as soaps and towels, free
or cheaper provision of company productions, land allotment, aid for fuel, clothing and children
education, aid for marriage, birth, military service or worker’s death ceremony, workshop
premium, accident reparation, pay rise for financial responsibility, funding for foreign language
learning, extra payments for extraordinary times of working… for more information see Türkiye
Sendikacılık Ansiklopedisi, v.3, pp. 263-4.
21 In the end, a time table for the payment was aggreed. Although the payments were not effected
perfectly, workers were comfortable and they felt secure about their payments.
22 If the female dog does not want to attract the male dog, the male dog does not chase after her.
If the woman is in control of her manners and the man is in control of his manners, nothing
wrong is going to happen in the work place. All of us here have a family structure. We do have
families. Actually nobody has this understanding. And this is better.
23 Formen cannot be union members due to collective bargaining agreements. Having a more
powerful group and not in the immediate surveillance of unionised worker community, they are
notorious for harassments.
24 Ali Rıza: "We do not want people here who have forbidden kind of relations. We did such and
such kind of things; we went to holiday together; we visited several places; we called each other;
we spent the night at one’s house. So what?"
25 Ahmet said: "everybody sees each other as sibling here. Neither, nobody intends to do bad for
other, nor they are loyal to each other. There is no unity here. Let me say this. For example if a
representative calls us for a demonstration no body will attend”

26 But most of the senior workers left the factory, younger workers do not know Erdoğan Aslıyüce, who is retired
now and no longer interested in union politics. Despite the general praise, Erdoğan and Ali Rıza are also highly
disappointed with him because he was the initial president of the union who did not appoint them as representatives.
Aslıyüce was angry for their intervention in the CBA.
27 ...işveren atarsa üç katı ihbar alır temsilci. Bi de mahkeme işçiyi değil sadece temsilciyi işe
iade edebilir. Sendika görevden alırsa beni, tabi ihbar falan gider. Erdoğan points out that it
is very difficult for the company to dismiss the union representatives. If the union does not re-
appoint him, then he will be an ordinary worker and can be dismissed easily. Since the union
leadership approaches the management, it can obey management's request to dismiss him from
the representative position.
28 “Divide and rule” aspect of the organisation is also raised by some leftist writers, see Oğuz,
1995.
29 Lawyers are needed to sue management for not delivering compensations. Management prefers
to give compensations in the long term with instalments. Meanwhile, the real value of money
decreases. This is one of the rare cases where legislation seem to favor workers. So they seek
lawyers to sue management. Unfortunately, the union offered a lawyer who demanded a high rate
of the compensation as his price so workers themselves found a cheaper one.
30 Although it is better than to lose one's job completely, it is certainly financially and psychologically a heavy
degradation for the worker being reemployed with the minimum wage. İlhan said: “In fact our wages are no high. If
we could get 300-500 millions TL…We previously discussed this with the union. If the company will survive when
it dismisses 10 high waged workers, let it dismiss us. The company employs a state policy? It insists on a 25% pay
rise. They want that everybody should work with the minimum wage. Maybe they plan something like that: There is
a friend like me, who has been a worker for 10 years. He works in the warehouse. Maybe we will be dismissed and
immediately re-employed but if we accept the minimum wage. Probably, they will use a tactic of girdi-çıktı.
Girdi-çıktı?
To leave the job formally and then being re-employed with the minimum wage. But this is not
suitable for us. If you accept you will get the compensation not immediately but in one year’s
time. It will lose its real value then. So I will tell them to pay me an appropriate price immediately.
Or I will look for what I can do.
31 In my first visit to factory, I was introduced to Can Bey and he welcomed me sincerely. In later
encounters with him, he continued to maintain his welcoming attitude.
32 This reminds Şerif Mardin (1994, 96-7)'s reference to Mannheim about 'bureacratic thinking',
which transforms all political problems into administrative problems.