Emerging Forms of Social-Union Organizing Under the New Conditions of Turkish Capitalism: A Class-Capacity Analysis

1. Introduction

The working-class movement has been a critical agent of social and political change in Turkey’s post-1980 neoliberal era. A good example is the 50,000-strong antiausterity Zonguldak miner’s mobilization in 1991. This mobilization was the main factor in the defeat of Turkey’s first neoliberal government, headed by Turgut Özal, who is viewed as the nation’s most influential leader after Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (the founder of the Republic) and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (the current president of the Republic). Özal’s electoral defeat resulted in a 11-year period of weak coalition governments, stalling the full implementation of the neoliberal agenda. Throughout the 1990s, the fervent struggle of public servants’ unions played a key role, not only in the socialization of left-wing politics, but also in the fights against state terror and in defense of the rights of the Kurds. Since the millennium, the resistance of the SEKA (Turkish Cellulose and Paper Factories) factory workers in 2004 and TEKEL (Turkish Tobacco Enterprise) workers in 2009–2010 has led to the revitalization of left-wing politics and the socialization of the fight against privatization. As a background information, there are three leading union confederations in Turkey, namely the center-right Türkiye İşçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu (Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions, or Türk-İş), the leftward Türkiye Devrimci İşçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu (Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions of Turkey, or DİSK), and the conservative Hak İşçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu (HAK-İŞ, or Confederation of Turkish Real Trade Unions). Their membership base changed from around 1,915,560, 368,505, and 302,804 in 2002 to 877,587, 144,264, and 436,542 in 2015, respectively. The two main public servants’ unions are the leftward Kamu Emekçileri Sendikaları Konfederasyonu (Confederation of Public Workers’ Unions, or KESK) and the pro-Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, or AKP) Memur Sendikaları Konfederasyonu (Confederation of Public Servants’ Unions, or MEMUR-SEN). Their membership base changed from 262,348 and 41,871 to 221,000 and 956,000 in the 2002–2015 period, respectively. Of particular notice is how pro-government and conservative unions have considerably expanded, whereas the membership base of other unions that are not organically tied to the government has visibly contracted in the AKP years (Gürcan and Mete 2017: 84).

We see then that the working-class movement is at the center of social struggles in neoliberal Turkey; therefore, this paper focuses on the development of this movement. Turkey’s case is particularly important for understanding the effects of neoliberalism, and how these are contested by working-class movements. Based on our book (Gürcan and Mete 2017; excerpts reproduced with Palgrave Macmillan’s permission) that provides a broader perspective into the history of Turkey’s working-class struggles since the late Ottoman era and the development of traditional unionism under neoliberalism, this paper is, thus, framed around the following core questions: How has neoliberal restructuring transformed Turkey’s class structures to spread precarious forms of labor through flexibilization and informalization? How has Turkey’s working-class movement adapted to the new conditions of capitalism? Apart from traditional trade unionism, what alternative forms of struggle have emerged to counter neoliberalism?

In this introductory section, we begin by discussing the relevance of our case, justify the focus and scope of our case, and present our argumentation in respective order. Our focus is placed on Turkey’s emerging forms of unionism rather than on traditional unionism. In Turkey, social unionism is still in its infancy and has been peripheral in union organizing. However, it is growing stronger in certain sectors: construction, domestic care, communication and information, and tourism. It is important to note that these sectors are thriving in the conditions of new capitalism: they have become more prominent with the booming of the service sector in the neoliberal era, parallel with the globalization of the Turkish economy. Consequently, they have been subjected to precarious forms of labor—flexibilization and informalization—with the partial retreat of the state from social protection and labor market regulation. These changes form part of a global trend (Connell 2013; Hampton, Jeyacheya, and Lee 2014; Kaufka 2003). The same goes for the construction sector and neoliberal urban renewal strategies, which have also gained pace with the accelerating commodification of urban areas and capital accumulation (Harvey 2015). Moreover, the communication and information sector has thrived with the technological advances in this area that have defined neoliberal globalization since the 1970s (Kalleberg 2013).

By providing a bottomup account of social-union activism based on interviews with the activists themselves, we aim to fill a major gap in research into the development of Turkey’s labor movements under neoliberalism. Interestingly, there is little contemporary literature in English on Turkish labor movements: the few published monographs are mostly confined to the historical development of the working class up until the 1980s, with limited extensions into the 1990s (Mello 2013; Önder 2015; Yirmibesoglu 2009). One notable exception is Peride K. Blind’s research (2009) on the effects of privatization on the so-called democratization of Turkey’s trade unions, in comparison with Argentina. Much of the rest of the literature on the Turkish labor question does not directly engage with trade unions, but rather focuses on the history of labor (Atabaki and Brockett 2010; Çetinkaya 2014), the globalization of labor and its regulation (Blanpain, Pennings, and Sural 2006; Blind 2009; Dereli 2012; Dereli et al. 2013; Duman 2014; Nichols and Sugur 2004), neighborhood mobilization (Deniz 2011), and gendered migrant and child labor (Celebi 2010; Dedeoglu 2012, 2014; Kayaalp 2009; White 2004). Rarest of all is literature on social unionism in the neoliberal era: the main focus of this article.

Our interview data suggest that the new conditions of neoliberal capitalism have structurally incapacitated working-class organizing in Turkey through a precarization process, manifested most strongly in the flexibilization of labor via subcontracting and increasing turnover rates. Importantly, these changes expose workers to employer abuse through various mechanisms such as the reduction of nonwage benefits, discriminatory workplace practices that alienate temporary workers from permanent staff, practices such as contract seizure and sexual abuse, and legal intrigues by ill-intentioned corporations. Similarly, workers are discouraged from unionizing as they perceive their jobs to be temporary; instead they limit their demands to daily bread-and-butter matters. The incapacitating effect of these processes is further amplified through sociogeographical unevenness and cultural identities. Sociogeographical unevenness is seen in the absence of concentrated workplaces and the distance of certain workplaces from economic centers. Cultural identities refer to a set of factors: most workers not perceiving themselves as belonging to the working class, the individualistic culture that can be prevalent at cosmopolitan workplaces, and the paternalistic culture at workplaces where traditional and communitarian ties are stronger; all these act to the detriment of class organizing. Depending on the context, however, traditional and communitarian cultures can also facilitate class organizing. By traditional and communitarian cultures, we understand group-oriented identities characterized by such values as group responsibility, harmony, social order, and loyalty, which can be attributed to rural and small-town communities in Turkey’s context (Picart 2014). Two cautionary remarks are in order regarding traditional and communitarian cultures. First, we deliberately restrain from making a universal claim that cosmopolitanism and communitarianism are by definition harmful or helpful to class organizing. As per the nature of qualitative research—which also applies to our own research design—we are not interested in fully generalizing our data-analysis results. Our aim is rather to reveal the peculiarity of a focused locality, that is, Turkey’s social unionism. Second, the paralyzing effects of cosmopolitanism on class organizing are embodied in the peculiar context of Turkey’s skilled white-collar workers employed in metropolitan areas, rather than in the general context of workers’ concentration in urban areas. Our data only show that certain skilled white-collar workers can develop individualistic and careerist tendencies that impede class organizing.

Also revealed in our research are the ways in which social unionism is responding to these structural challenges by devoting its efforts to developing bottom-up mechanisms. Particularly, Turkey’s social-union activists voice resentment about the top-down approach of traditional unions; even though lack of resources has forced certain social unions and representatives of the sectors that have recently emerged under the new capitalism to cooperate with traditional unions. Innovatory methods introduced by social unionism include the organization of forums of exchange for sharing workplace experiences, grievances, and confrontation techniques against employers; a stronger assertion of white-collar identities and the accentuation of the emotional and gendered dimensions of class struggle; and greater reliance on internet activism combined with street activism and solidarity action with blue-collar workers.

This paper is structured in four sections. The first presents our methodological and conceptual framework; the second discusses how subcontracting and increasing turnover rates have affected working-class capacities. The third section focuses on the cultural dynamics of structural class incapacitation; these are peculiar to Turkey’s political-cultural configuration. In the final section, our focus shifts from structural incapacitation to the ways in which social unionism is responding to the challenges of neoliberal capitalism at the organizational level.

2. Methodological and Conceptual Framework

This paper is part of a fieldwork that was conducted in 2016. It involved 22 union presidents and other top-level leaders, former union militants, and professional cadres from unions’ research, organization, and education departments in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir: Turkey’s three largest metropoles. It included interviews with members of the most salient constituents of Turkey’s new generation of unionism, concentrated in the aforementioned newly emerging sectors. In Turkey’s case, social-unionist tendencies are present in traditional union structures. As such, our interviews included representatives of traditional unions in newly thriving sectors, such as the Devrimci İletişim ve Çağrı Merkezi Çalışanları Sendikası (Communication and Call Center Workers’ Revolutionary Union, or Dev İleti̇şi̇m-İş) and Devrimci Turizm İşçileri Sendikası (Tourism Workers’ Revolutionary Union, or Dev Turi̇zm-İş). Our research also included interviews with representatives of the new social unions, including Plaza Eylem Platformu (Plaza Action Platform, or PEP), Ev İşçileri Dayanışma Sendikası (Domestic Workers’ Solidarity Union, or Evid-Sen), Bilişim Çalışanları Dayanışma Ağı (IT Workers’ Solidarity Network, or Biçda), and İnşaat İşçileri Sendikası (Construction Workers’ Union, or İnşaat-İş). At the request of PEP, Biçda, and Dev İletişim-İş, we have protected the anonymity of the interviewees from these organizations.

We asked the interviewees about how neoliberalism affects the relevant sectors and unions in general, as well as the ways in which unions respond to the challenges of neoliberalism. The role of cultural identities was a central concern in our enquiry. Furthermore, we enquired into internal union dynamics: unions’ organizational structures and aims, recruitment and training activities, alliance politics, and important events that marked their historical development. We used qualitative content analysis to process our interview data by dividing interview transcriptions into coding segments in light of our main theoretical framework.

We employed Erik Olin Wright’s notion of class capacity (CC) as a conceptual tool to assess how the working class responds to the changing political, cultural, and economic environment under neoliberalism. CC refers to the ability of the working class to develop an awareness of its long-term interests and organize to struggle for these collective interests. Put differently, the term refers to “the social relations within a class which to a greater or lesser extent unite the agents of that class into a class formation” (Wright 1978: 98). Erik Olin Wright distinguishes between two types of CC. First, structural class capacities, conditioned by broader socioeconomic structures outside of workers’ direct agency, which constrain or strengthen the power of the working class to organize and struggle for its collective interests (e.g., the concentration of workers in large-scale factories as a strength factor). Strong community relations outside of the domain of production and direct class organizing—such as ethnoreligious relations and strong neighborhood ties beyond the workplace and labor movements—may sometimes serve as catalysts that facilitate class mobilization (Wright 1978: 99–100). In other contexts, the overarticulation of ethnoreligious relations may instead undermine class solidarity and hence be conducive to class incapacity. Other potentially incapacitating and fragmenting factors include geographical location and mobility, increasing home ownership, credit availability, suburbanization, privatization policies, and subcontracting. Furthermore, structural class capacities also concern workers’ marketplace and workplace bargaining power. Marketplace bargaining power results from tight labor markets, which may increase in the case that workers possess skills in sparse supply, general unemployment rates are low, or workers have the ability to survive on nonwage income. In turn, workplace bargaining power mostly concerns the presence of tightly integrated production processes in key industrial sectors (Silver 2003).

Second, organizational class capacities, concerning external political arrangements and working-class agency; these include organizational forms that are directly related to labor and union organizing (e.g., the prevalence of combative rather than clientelistic union practices as a strength factor). As such, the prevailing forms and strength of union organizing are typical examples of organizational class capacities. Other potentially capacitating factors may include the presence of a strong and cohesive leadership, availability of resources for social mobilization, existence of enabling institutional settings such as political parties, the inexistence of flexible labor and welfare policies and regulations, and accumulated experience of struggle from the past (Gürcan and Mete 2017, 2019; Wright 1978 ). In this article, we extend the scope of organizational capacities, the conscious organization of a social class, to include external factors (or, more precisely, top-down institutional arrangements) concerning the organization of the working class. For example, the government’s labor and union policies (Gürcan and Mete 2017, 2019).

A few words are in order concerning the key concepts that frame our research. We understand neoliberalism simply as a set of policy actions that find their expression in the principles of trade and financial liberalization, privatization, deregulated labor markets, and flexible labor (Gürcan and Mete 2017, 2019; Harvey 2005). At the global level, neoliberalism is perhaps best represented and actively promoted by US-led dominant international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. The extent to which neoliberal policies are implemented at the meso-level depends on the (sub)national peculiarities of the given institutional settings, sociocultural backgrounds, and the balance of social forces (Peck and Theodore 2012; Peck, Theodore, and Brenner 2012).

Precarization describes how factors such as unstable work, job insecurity, temporary or part‐time employment, lack of social benefits, and low wages lead to fragile conditions of life (Millar 2017). This process has gained momentum in the neoliberal era: labor flexibility is one of its strongest manifestations. Labor flexibility can be defined as facilitative state regulations and firm practices that are geared to “adapt[ing] the use of labor to changes in other markets” in four major areas (Bezuidenhout and Kenny 2000: 3). First, numerical flexibility: the adoption of loose employment practices such as subcontracting, seasonal labor, and home working with fewer benefits. Second, work time flexibility relates to the loosening of working time patterns, including such practices as shift systems, part-time work, home working, temporary work, and job sharing. Third, wage flexibility: performance-based pay systems such as productivity bonuses. Fourth, work process flexibility: skill-related practices such as multiskilling and job rotation (Bezuidenhout and Kenny 2000). Our study incorporates an extended discussion of two of the four major elements of labor flexibility, namely numerical flexibility and work time flexibility. We maintain that the adverse effects of labor flexibility—manifested in the abusive nature of subcontracting practices such as seizure of contracts, lack of social insurance, short-term contracts, and high turnover rates—do not merely generate frictions within the working class; they also relegate the constituents of flexible labor to a dispersed modus vivendi. Ultimately, these discriminatory and fragmented structures undermine structural working-class capacities. In turn, we see subcontracting, or “services or facilities provided by or for concerns outside of [one’s] firm,” as a form of labor flexibility (Barrientos et al. 1999: 19; Moseley 1973: 265). Finally, we use the term “social unions” to refer to a form of union organizing that “involve[s] both engagement with social justice struggles beyond the workplace and methods of union activity beyond the collective bargaining process” (Ross 2007: 16).

3. Subcontracting and High Turnover Rates Under Flexible Labor Regimes

Our interview data confirm that the newly thriving sectors under neoliberalism are highly vulnerable to flexible labor practices, particularly subcontracting and increasing turnover rates. A case in point is the domestic care sector, where subcontracting has had serious implications in terms of abusive practices such as the seizure of labor contracts:

Contract seizure by the employer exacerbates the precariousness of domestic care workers and renders them more submissive in the face of oppressive behavior, to the detriment of working-class capacities. In struggling with contract seizure, Gülhan Benli recommends her colleagues to regularly photograph their workplace and employers’ utilities bills so they can prove when they need to that they were hired by the given employer.

The abusive behavior of subcontracting agencies is not limited to the sphere of contract seizure. Another commonly observed abuse in the domestic care sector is the general failure of subcontracting agencies to offer health insurance or other benefits for the workers they represent:

Indeed, the negative implications of these precarizing practices are further amplified by domestic workers’ lack of marketplace bargaining power, particularly when it comes to the fact that the domestic care sector does not really require scarce skills and that domestic workers’ ability to survive on nonwage income is severely constrained in Turkey.

Subcontracting is also common among white-collar workers in sectors such as communication and banking. A Biçda member (whose name is concealed by the researchers) complains that subcontracting has become an underlying norm in the communication sector:

An anonymous member (and a former leader) of Dev İletişim-İş distinguishes between two types of contracting firms in the call-center industry, namely large corporate firms and small-scale intermediary firms [merdiven altı şirketler, “under-counter firms”]. He affirms that labor disputes tend to be more frequent in merdiven altı firms because of their heavier reliance on informal labor arrangements, which is why Dev İletişim-İş devotes greater energy to workers from these firms:

As for work time flexibility, the Dev İletişim-İş member’s account provides a general picture of how overtime work is imposed in the so-called merdiven altı firms in the call-center industry. The Biçda member adds to this picture by describing the situation of the average white-collar worker:

In relation to structural class capacities, the call-center sector does not really rely on the use of scarce skills, even though it draws its employment base from college students and graduates. Relatedly, not only has this sector’s employment base been represented by younger generations that typically have limited ability to survive on nonwage income, but also workers with no foreign language skills represent a majority in the sector (Türkiye Bankalar Birliği 2017). Worthy of note here is that unemployment among workers with advanced education (i.e., short-cycle tertiary education as well as bachelor’s and graduate levels of education) has increased by over 138 percent in the 2006–2017 period, from 2,694,000 to 6,421,000 persons to the detriment of structural working-class capacities (ILO 2019). All of these factors combine to constrain marketplace power.

Similarly, the lack of corporate identity and the prevalence of informal employment practices create an unfavorable environment for workers to organize and push for their collective interests. For example, the same Dev İletişim-İş member mentions that Dev İletişim-İş sued a subcontracting firm because subcontracted workers were being discriminated against and had fewer benefits compared to the regular staff, even though they were performing the same tasks. Dev İletişim-İş in fact won its case against the subcontracting firm. However, the judicial process lasted too long—a full one and a half years—and the subcontracting firm changed its legal name to evade the consequences of this case. Similarly, Participant B of PEP (name withheld by the researchers) explains that banks prefer “rental workers” for work in departments related to bank cards in order to avoid costs related to severance and annual leave:

Employment benefits and insurance can be placed within the category of numerical flexibility. Discussing this, the Biçda member implies that the flexibility of regulations regarding insurance is another important problem faced by many white-collar workers. According to him, his “colleagues’ insurance is registered based on minimum wage,” which means that the employer makes workers’ wages look like the minimum wage on paper in order to evade tax. However, minimum-wage-based insurance plans cannot protect white-collar workers from work-related injuries and illnesses; including commonly suffered problems such as hernias and mental disorders. Minimum-wage-based insurance payments are also commonplace in the construction sector:

Akyol also reminds us that the construction industry is one of the sectors that suffer from so-called occupational “murders” (deadly occupational accidents), with an average casualty rate of five workers per day. Social insurance problems only aggravate the effects of these accidents. Undoubtedly, most construction workers’ lack of scarce skills coupled with their inability to survive on nonwage income and Turkey’s unemployment rates further amplifies precarity in the construction sector. It is worthwhile to mention that Turkey’s unemployment rate increased from 6.5 percent in 2000 to as high as 11.3 percent in 2017 prior to the 2018 economic crisis, which is expected to further aggravate the unemployment problem in the near future at the expense of workers’ marketplace bargaining power (ILO 2019).

High turnover rates constitute another major hindrance to structural working-class capacities under flexible labor regimes. According to the Dev İletişim-İş member, for example, call-center labor suffers from high levels of employee turnover, which makes unionization very difficult:

In his view, many call-center workers see their job as temporary and thus do not put extra effort into union organizing:

In Turkey, tourism is known as one of the most difficult sectors for unionization. As Mustafa Safvet Yahyaoğlu, President of Dev Turizm-İş, explains, tourism characteristically relies on seasonal work and suffers high turnover rates:

The Dev İletişim-İş member acknowledges that union activism in the call-center sector feeds off daily grievances at the workplace and block dismissals, but adds that these material struggles do not assume the form of a long-lasting campaign, especially once the daily problems are resolved:

The construction sector is also characterized by short-lived unionization episodes, caused by high turnover rates and the prevalence of daily material demands. In particular, Mustafa Adnan Akyol points to frequent changes in his union’s constituency:

Finally, it is relevant to note that the intensity of turnover rates varies from sector to sector with regional differences. The Dev İletişim-İş member states that call centers are expanding in Anatolia, and that Anatolian workers are inclined to be more motivated to work at call centers, which may serve as a facilitating factor for the development of class capacities:

Overall, the data suggest that many of the studied sectors suffer the grave implications of flexible labor regimes in the form of subcontracting and increasing turnover rates. A number of sectors are subjected to precarization, which in turn renders class agents more vulnerable to employers’ oppressive and exploitative behavior at the expense of structural working-class capacities. Precarization is most obviously seen in contract seizure, the absence of nonwage benefits, disappearance of permanent positions and increasing turnover rates, and the weakness of corporate identity in the workplace.

4. Sociogeographical Unevenness and Cultural Identities

In this section, we shift our focus from the implications of flexible labor regimes for structural class capacities to those of sociogeographical unevenness and collective identity within the working class. These factors play important roles in shaping structural class capacities under the new conditions of capitalism in Turkey. Regarding the problem of sociogeographical unevenness, Evid-Sen’s experiences are highly instructive, especially given that domestic care workers—this organization’s main social base—are spatially dispersed, without concentrated workplaces located in tightly integrated production processes at the expense of workers’ workplace power. Communication and call-center workers are in a similar position, although sociogeographical unevenness in that sector is due to corporate geographical investment strategies. Over the last decade, a growing number of call-center companies have chosen to move their operations from metropolitan areas to Anatolia’s inner regions and small towns in order to reduce labor costs. The government actively supports this relocation process through subsidies, hoping that call-center firms will foster economic dynamism in inner regions and relieve youth unemployment. The relatively lower quality of human capital in inner regions due to their economic underdevelopment does not discourage firm relocation to Anatolia, because conservative small-town values, as well as the existence of paternalistic relationships between the employer and employee, render the disadvantaged sections of educated youth in peripheral areas even more submissive and manipulable (Özkan 2012). The reluctance of small-town workers to challenge traditional authority relations, and their feelings of gratitude and loyalty toward the employer, are meshed with the constant fear of losing their jobs in the face of scarce employment opportunities. These qualities go hand in hand with lower expectations of wages and other employment conditions, as compared to their metropolitan colleagues. Working in a “reputable” white-collar company is a status symbol in small-town communities, where the few white-collar jobs that exist are mostly provided by public institutions; this encourages relatively educated youth (mostly without scarce skills) to go along with lower wages and other precarious conditions in an environment characterized by high unemployment rates, impeding structural working-class capacities (Özkan 2012).

It is possible to argue that the uneven effects of geographical differences on working-class capacities are inextricably linked to identity issues. Our informant from Dev İletişim-İş affirms that a major challenge in union organizing is the sociogeographical divide between metropoles and inner Anatolian regions:

Another example showing the intertwined nature of geography and culture comes from Mustafa Adnan Akyol, who maintains that union organizing is more difficult among conservatively oriented Central Anatolian workers, and these workers tend to distance themselves from İnşaat-İş because of its left-wing stance:

Our interview data thus reveal that the peculiar cultural configurations of the working class can generate major hindrances to class organizing. Mustafa Adnan Akyol of İnşaat-İş emphasizes how in the construction sector, paternalism (understood here as sentiments of gratitude and allegiance in the workplace) not only shapes employment patterns but also creates significant hindrances to union organizing. According to Akyol, paternalism manifests itself in the notion of townsmen/countrymen (hemşehri)—cultural bonds of attachment, trust, and loyalty that stem from sharing the same birthplace, usually in rural areas:

In Akyol’s view, a mix of religious and paternalistic feelings prevailing in workers’ mentalities keeps them from seeing how to resolve their problems. However, he insists that this does not prevent them from feeling the presence of class exploitation and oppression:

In certain cases, paternalism is expressed even without the mediation of hemşehri relations, taking the form of sentiments of loyalty to a long-time employer, mixed with religious references. These sentiments are also very much present in the domestic care sector, where working without social security is a common problem. Evid-Sen’s Gülhan Benli asserts that paternalism is more likely to be amplified when workers lack a working-class identity:

Among white-collar workers, the context of cultural identity shifts from paternalism and religion to a desire to reach bourgeois life standards, which overshadows the emergence of a working-class consciousness:

According to the Biçda member, the goal of rapidly moving up the social ladder also serves as a chief factor driving white-collar workers away from working-class consciousness:

This kind of individualistic thinking undoubtedly hampers the further development of working-class capacities.

5. Organizational Working-Class Capacities: Critique of Traditional Unionism and Bottom-Up Organizing Alternatives

In the previous section, we addressed the structural incapacitation of Turkey’s working class in the thriving sectors of the new capitalism. An important impediment to structural class capacities is the cosmopolitan and individualistic character of the workplace in metropolitan areas. The interviews reveal that individualism is also strongly fostered in technology-intensive sectors, to the detriment of working-class capacities. Furthermore, the prevalence of the conservative mindset, religious and paternalistic allegiances, and traditional and communitarian cultures constitutes potential hindrances to unionism; however, traditional and communitarian ties may also operate as a strength factor that facilitates collective organizing, depending on the individual context in which class capacities are structured. Therefore, as we have seen, structural incapacities present difficult challenges for emerging initiatives of social unionism. However, these challenges are not necessarily insurmountable. Our interview data demonstrate that the lack of resources is a major impediment to organizational class capacities, but that this does not prevent innovatory practices of unionism from the ground up, drawing on an explicit disillusionment with the top-down practices of traditional unionism. Regarding the logistical implications of resource shortages for social unionism, the Dev İletişim-İş member discusses how, in nationwide organizing, financial difficulties make it harder to gain access to Anatolian regions:

Dev İletişim-İş began as an association for workers in the communication and information sector. The Call Center Workers’ Association has actually achieved significant successes in claiming unpaid insurance deposits, reinstating unjustly dismissed workers, demanding severance payments, and exposing the corporate practice of reducing full-time workers’ severance payments to the level of part-time workers. Later, the association decided to create Dev İletişim-İş and join DİSK, though without dissolving itself. Joining a traditional union provided this organization with greater financial resources and legal-institutional leverage. However, Dev İletişim-İş did not abandon its status as a social union, nor did organizers in the communication and information sector coexist with the traditional union structure. The Call Center Workers’ Association is still actively involved in class organizing, especially when the political and legal environment of certain workplaces does not allow for formal union involvement or affiliation. To illustrate this, the Dev İletişim-İş member discussed his organization’s dispute with Xerox, a Dutch corporation that offers call-center services for prominent companies such as Samsung and Apple, over the payment of premiums and other previously promised benefits such as the provision of food services. The unwillingness of certain workers to join Dev İletişim-İş played an important role in the organization’s decision to instead involve itself in the dispute through the channels of the Call Center Workers’ Association.

Representatives of social unions such as PEP and Biçda criticize traditional unions particularly over the nonrecognition and even exclusion of white-collar identities by formal union leaderships. As expressed by PEP Participant E, traditional unions tend to “view white collar unions as outsiders and [their constituency as] ‘well-heeled’.” Also from the white-collar sector, the Biçda member confirms PEP E’s point:

A similar type of discontent is expressed by Gülhan Benli of Evid-Sen, who offers a gender-centered critique of the traditional model of unionism. She maintains that most traditional unions avoid addressing domestic workers’ problems because of their belief that women do not belong in the world of work in the Turkish context:

Mustafa Adnan Akyol of İnşaat-İş asserts that his union distances itself from traditional unions because the latter have adopted a top-down reformist strategy that rules out revolutionary alternatives:

Social unionism’s critique does not imply a refusal to collaborate with the traditional working class. On the contrary, Turkey’s social unionism is open to the idea of using working-class solidarity as a tool to boost class consciousness and organizational capacities. As such, PEP took an active part in the Gezi Park protests, whose participants came predominantly from white-collar backgrounds (Gürcan and Peker 2015a, 2015b). Similarly, white collars’ solidarity actions in support of blue-collar workers have served as catalysts for the consolidation of union organizing. For example, PEP actively participated in popular protests against the private- and government-affiliated Soma Holding, which was accused of severely neglecting workplace safety in its responsibility for the Soma mining disaster in May 2014. This claimed the lives of 301 workers, making it Turkey’s worst mine disaster.

According to PEP Participant E, PEP’s encounter with employees of TEKEL was a turning point in the organization of white-collar workers:

As observed in the case of PEP and TEKEL, social unionism exhibits genuine interest in innovatory methods of bottom-up organizing. PEP members assert that when they mobilized in solidarity with TEKEL workers, they realized the need for white-collar organizing to transcend mere solidarity demonstrations and address specific white-collar grievances regarding what they call the “emotional side” of class struggle; these are strongly articulated in the service and high-technology sectors. On the issue of emotional labor, PEP E maintains that white-collar workers in his sector—such as those working in the call-center industry—are subjected to peculiar forms of workplace exploitation and oppression, in addition to traditional blue-collar grievances. According to him, emotional labor supplements the articulation of familiar economic grievances:

Acknowledging the centrality of emotional labor, PEP started to hold regular meetings and forums to allow white collars to share their experiences, aiming to combat their tendency toward over-individualistic thinking and dissociation from one another:

These meetings have become free spaces where white-collar workers can share their grievances. This not only facilitates the growth of class consciousness among the meeting participants; it also socializes practical knowledge on how to deal with workplace problems such as mobbing, emotional distress, and dismissals.

PEP B asserts that once these meetings were seen to be successful, PEP members regularized them and turned their proceedings into reports. Discussing white collars’ sharing of personal experiences, PEP Y refers to the detrimental aspects of the Turkish corporate culture in which it is not appropriate to reveal one’s wage. Being unaware of wage levels in the workplace allows the employer to normalize unequal treatment and undermines class consciousness. Revealing this information can hence be helpful in experience-sharing meetings, transcending social fragmentation and creating a collective class agent. Similar meetings are also held by Biçda members, with the aim of creating a new culture of solidarity among white collars. These meetings are particularly designed to reduce intraclass competition and encourage white collars to share their technical knowledge and business contacts with one another in order to foster professional development:

Due to the technically skilled background of its constituency, PEP’s activities rely on a heavy presence on the Internet and use of new communication technologies. For instance, PEP created a website called I Have Been Dismissed (istenatildim.org), which serves as an online platform for white-collar workers to share negative workplace experiences and surmount the barriers against union presence at the workplace. Platform users are also provided with legal consulting, thanks to the availability of volunteer lawyers who support PEP’s cause. PEP militants even take their online activism into the workplace, engaging in propaganda work by leaving computer screens on with PEP-affiliated websites displayed. PEP organizing also makes active use of chat groups on platforms such as email and WhatsApp groups.

Finally, the domestic care sector is not an exception to the trend of innovatory methods of bottomup organizing by social unionism. For instance, Benli highlights Evid-Sen’s future project of instituting workers’ schools, which will start with a pilot project in the city of Bursa in order to arouse awareness of social rights, labor laws, and the other procedures that domestic care workers could use to seek their rights. Likewise, this organization takes an active approach to overcoming the adverse effects of sociogeographical unevenness on structural class capacities. As part of these efforts, Evid-Sen organizers draw strategic maps of selected zones to locate bus stops and public parks where they can encounter domestic care workers with the aim of recruiting and distributing surveys to collect information for forming policy (Interview with Gülhan Benli).

Conclusion

This article used interview data from social unionists militating in Turkey’s newly thriving sectors in order to understand how the Turkish working-class movement has adapted to the new conditions of capitalism under neoliberalism. In our analysis, we resorted to Erik Olin Wright’s notion of class capacities, which helps us discern the emergence of alternative forms of struggle by reference to the ways in which broader socioeconomic structures, external political arrangements, and working-class agency shape the working class’s ability to organize to struggle for its collective interests. Our interviews reveal that domestic care workers’ precarization is particularly evident in the sector’s excessive reliance on subcontracting, which facilitates the involvement of abusive private employment agencies and uninsured labor with no benefits. In a similar vein, high turnover rates in the construction sector lead to short-lived unionization episodes. When it comes to such sectors as tourism, communication, and banking, the most common problem voiced by our interviewees is how the increasing prevalence of short-term contracts and high employee turnover rates make unionization very difficult. This adds to workers’ precarization when it comes to the practice of overtime work as a norm, not to mention contracting wages and insurance benefits with no severance pay and annual leave. Indeed, the discrimination of subcontracted workers against the regular staff structurally undermines working-class capacities. In summary, flexibilization and the concomitant precarization foster submission and fragmentation at the expense of structural class capacities.

The class capacities of social union constituencies are also hindered by sociogeographical unevenness and other cultural factors. Exemplary of such uneven and cultural dynamics is white-collar individualism in metropolitan areas, as different from Anatolian regions where white-collar workers have a stronger propensity to community-based solidarity, if they ever dare to challenge the employer’s authority in a conservative small-town setting. White-collar workers’ distanciation from the working-class identity—even when they are paid below the minimum wage—turns out to be another common hindrance for class organizing. Moreover, our interview data reveal how workers’ conservative disposition in the domestic care sector hinders class organizing through religious paternalism toward the employer. This sector’s lack of concentrated workplaces and workers’ geographical dispersion work against structural capacities. Finally, the construction sector is no exception to the hindrance of conservative biases, particularly when it comes to how unionists are accused of terrorist affiliation and how workers overvalue townsmenship.

Resource poverty is a major issue that limits the reach of social unionism and the organizational capacity of the working class. However, social unions’ experiences suggest that class organizing is not doomed to fail. This is clearly exemplified in the success of union activists’ persistence, solidarity with blue collars, and consideration of the peculiar dynamics of white-collar organizing such as emotional labor. Social unions criticize traditional unionism for its neglect of white-collar identities and the gendered division of labor, lack of support for grassroots work, and its reformism. This critique fosters the use of innovatory methods of bottom-up organizing. Such methods as forums of exchange, internet activism, and street activism (e.g., the Gezi Park protests and propaganda work at bus stops and public parks) add greatly to the arsenal of organizational working-class capacities.