Rethinking Migration in the Context of Precarity: The Case of Turkey

Introduction

The term precarity has become a focus of fruitful theoretical discussions revolving around capitalism, changing class relations and formation, and also around movements contesting neoliberal hegemony, globally and locally. The term basically refers to insecure labour conditions, which appear in various forms, and the accompanying insecure, impoverished living situations that are typical of the neoliberal era. This paper discusses the term precarity in relation to human mobility across nation-state borders. More specifically, I evaluate discussions on the concept of precarity as it relates to the living and working conditions of irregular migrant workers in Turkey. The aim is to reflect on the relationships between migration and precarity by using the Turkish context as an empirical ground.

Analysing the Turkish context contributes to theoretical discussions on precarity, as there a critical perspective has developed questioning whether the term can be applied in a similar manner to geographical locations with diverging development paths. As an illustration, Munck (2013) claims that there is a tendency in the literature to treat the term precarity as a new development by collecting evidence mainly from the ‘North’, thereby failing to recognize the ‘South’s long prevalent experience of precarity. Also Breman (2013) adopts a similar critical perspective, arguing that precarity is a term that actually speaks for the ‘West’ rather than the ‘Rest’ (Hall, 1992). Taking these critical perspectives into account, studying the relationships between migration and precarity in the Turkish context appears productive since an analysis of one particular form of precarious labour in Turkey could tell whether emergent theoretical discussions and empirical evidence focused on precarity apply to a country that is difficult to place within either the ‘West’ or the ‘Rest’ (or, the ‘North’ or the ‘South’ respectively).

Although these dichotomies are too rigid for explaining and understanding global inequalities, the tendency to explain international inequality and differing levels of welfare and poverty by referring to an affluent ‘North’ and impoverished ‘South’ has been dominant, especially in the 1960s and 1980s (Therien, 1999: 723), and still is prevalent. However, the South as a homogeneous, monolithic category has been disputed, especially since it has become increasingly difficult to identify who actually belongs to this ‘South’. The economic development trajectories in certain countries such as Mexico and South Korea bring them closer to the conventional ‘North’. Turkey can be considered to belong to this category as well (Therien, 1999: 726). While Turkey may not be considered as part of the so-called North (or West) due to its fragile, unstable socio-economic and political structure, its development has nevertheless made its credentials as a Southern country debatable. Thus, at the beginning of the 1990s, Turkey was considered by the US Department of Commerce to belong among the ten ‘big emerging markets’, alongside China, Indonesia, India, South Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and Poland (Broad and Landi, 1996: 7). Turkey’s liminal position in relation to global hierarchy thus offers a rich context for both theoretical and empirical analysis of the relationship between precarity and migration.

In what follows, I critically discuss relevant theoretical discussions on precarity in relation to migration, with a specific concern for their applicability to the Turkish context. I then analyse the work and life experience of mainly irregular ¹ migrants in Turkey by reviewing the most recent field research by academic, journalistic and civil society organizations. Finally, I conclude by discussing the relationship between precarity and migrant agency, with a focus on existing counter-precarity movements in Turkey, and consider to what extent they incorporate migrants into their ranks.

Precarity and Migration

Contemporary references to the term ‘precariat’, i.e. ‘precarious proletariat’, applied as an analytical construct to explain the nature of work and class relations in post-Fordist capitalism, are especially inspired by arguments that treat it as a new social agent or a new social class (for example, see Standing, 2011). Thus Standing (2011: 10) describes the precariat as a new social class, argues that precariat is ‘a class-in-the-making’ which lacks ‘seven forms of labour-related security’. More specifically, this new class-in-the-making is insecure in terms of a macro-level ‘income-earning opportunities’ and long-term contract protection. They suffer from obstacles related to skill development and promotion; workplace health and safety, long non-regulated working time and ‘unsociable hours’. They are barred from developing and reproducing work-related skills, obtaining an adequate and stable income and opportunities for collective organization representing them in the labour market. Although every worker has the potential to become a precarian, the precariat is, argues Standing, mainly constituted by youth, women, old age workers, the less educated and, important for the focus of this paper, cross-border migrants. The precariat is a heterogeneous group but, maintains Standing, feelings of ‘anger, anomie, anxiety and alienation’ bind them together.

The growth of this ‘new class’ is considered to be a consequence of neoliberalism and globalization (Standing, 2011). Thus, according to this narrative, the world is faced with something new that typifies the neoliberal or post-Fordist epoch. This understanding, treating precarity as a new phenomenon (or a new class in the making), derives from an accompanying narrative of how the Fordist period and the welfare state connected with it functioned to bring security, stability and social protection to the lives of workers, ² and how the world ended up with the insecurity, flexibility and deregulation of neoliberalism. This argument has been criticized, however, for ignoring the historical and geographical development of capitalism, and how capitalism from its very beginnings has brought about precarity. For example, Neilson and Rossiter (2008: 54) argue that it was actually Fordism that was new and an ‘exception’ in the history of capitalism, and that ‘it is precarity that is the norm’. Thus, argue critics, precarity is intrinsic to capitalism: ‘employment under capitalism has always featured some element of precariousness’ (Spencer, 2012: 688). Following similar lines, Seymour (2012) acknowledges that the number of people suffering from precarity is increasing, leaving aside only the capitalist class and some very small sections of the middle class. Hence, he argues, the idea of the precariat should be treated as a unifying force, reflecting the fact that ‘we are all precarious’ in post-Fordist capitalist society, rather than as a specific new class (Seymour, 2012).

From another historically and geographically critical perspective, Munck (2013) examines the meanings associated with the idea of the precariat by comparing it to notions of ‘marginality’, ‘informality’, and ‘social exclusion’. He traces how the terms ‘marginality’ in Latin America in the 1960s, ‘informality’ in Africa in the 1970s and ‘social exclusion’ in Europe in the 1980s were used to explain ‘a form of work (and living) which does not appear to conform either to liberal notions of harmonious development or Marxist theories of capitalism generating a proletariat which was to be its gravedigger’ (Munck, 2013: 751). He argues that the recent debate over the precariat should be rethought against such a ‘political genealogy’, which indicates that it is hardly a new phenomenon, especially from a ‘Southern perspective’, which has not experienced welfare state capitalism (Munck, 2013: 752).

Taking into account criticism towards the applicability of the term precarity in a North-South perspective poses the need to carefully assess the specific Turkish experience, which cannot squarely be positioned within the South or in the North, but belongs to a category in-between. Departing from this proposition, the article questions whether or not migrant labour constitutes a quintessential form of precarity in Turkey where there has been neither a northern way of Fordist development and welfare state nor a typical southern development of market economy. Consequently, the article adopts a theoretical and empirical analysis ³ of the relationship between precarity and migration in the Turkish context by critically evaluating the life and work experiences of migrant workers there.

Migration, Labour and Social Transformation in Turkey

Protectionist measures were common in the Turkish economy in the post-Second World War period, including controlled international trade, import substitution policies and a large public sector integrated with the private sector (Boratav, 2006). According to Boratav (2006), a relatively advanced social security system was established as part of statist populist policies in the 1960s and 1970s, while collective bargaining and the rise of trade union activism guaranteed continued increases in workers’ real incomes. After the global economic crisis hit an already dependent Turkish economy by the mid-1970s, the ‘solution’ in the form of neoliberal economic policies decisively altered this relatively advantageous position of Turkish labour in relation to capital. Turkey’s neoliberal economic program, adopted in 1980 with the support of the IMF and the World Bank, was a typical structural adjustment program: liberalization of trade and financial systems, removal of price controls, and the imposing of constraints on organized labour.

The 1980–83 military regime vigorously initiated and boosted neoliberal policy of structural adjustment in particular by targeting organized labour. The new authoritarian state suspended trade union activities, put trade union leaders on trial, banned strikes and abolished collective bargaining rights (Boratav, 2006: 124, 148–50). Consequently, in the post-1980 period trade unions in Turkey lost their strength in terms of the diminishing membership base and socio-political influence (Toksöz et al., 2012: 128). Based on the official statistics of 2014, of the 12,287,238 workers, only 1,189,481 are members of a trade union. The unionization rate is much lower (4.5%) in the OECD statistics since it is based on the number of unionized workers who also benefit from collective bargaining (Hürriyet, 28 October 2014). Nevertheless, the current weakness of trade unions should be explained by referring to a complex dynamic of factors, rather than referring solely to an anti-democratic legal setting of the post-1980 period: increasing levels of privatizations and subcontracting in public and private sectors, rising unemployment, bureaucratization within the trade unions, and their incapacity to develop new organizational strategies have all contributed to the unions’ weakness (Toksöz et al., 2012: 128). This situation is also exacerbated by Turkey’s large informal economy. ⁴ Against such a backdrop, migrant labour’s contestations of precarity in Turkey and their relation to anti-precarity activities either within institutionalized trade unions or loose networks of social movements emerge as a pertinent issue for inquiry.

The relation between migration and precarity points primarily to the link between nationally particular politics and policies – including the ones on migration – and varieties of capitalism. Prevailing politics of citizenship have been shown to have decisive impact on the segmentation of labour markets in an age of increasing global migration (Bauder, 2008). Migration research has shown that the protection of socio-economic and political rights of non-citizens is failing, which creates a very specific form of inequality in the current nation-state order since the number of international migrants has grown significantly. This situation is especially apparent in the case of irregular migrants when they lack permits of entry, residence, and/or work.

People have been moving, especially from less developed countries to more developed ones (the so-called South-North migration), pushed by effects of neoliberal policies since the late 1970s (Castles, 2013: 123). Less developed countries’ integration into the global economy has brought about a significant transformation of their economies and societies. Traditional relations of production have been undermined and new forms of economic relations taken sway, in rural areas and in industry. As a result, a population has emerged that is ‘socially and economically uprooted and prone to migration’ (Massey et al., 1993).

Such a transformation can also be observed in Turkey. The impoverishment of Turkey’s rural areas, especially between the late 1940s and early 1980s, was mainly due to mechanization in agriculture, which caused many peasants to become unemployed. The elimination of ‘small-scale subsistence-oriented farming’ by market-oriented production increased unemployment in the rural areas, which has in turn caused internal migration (Çelik, 2005: 139). This was also when Turkey turned into an emigration country. During the 1960s in particular, large numbers of peasants and workers from Turkey moved to countries such as Germany, France, Holland, Belgium and Austria and enrolled in guest worker programs included in bilateral agreements between Turkey and the countries of reception. Turkey subsequently became a receiving country itself towards the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, in tandem with its greater integration into the global economy and development of neoliberal policies. The structural change brought by this integration increased the share of informal/undeclared employment, which eased migrants’ integration into Turkey’s informal economy (Gökbayrak and Erdoğdu, 2010: 92). Immigrants arrived from a wide variety of countries, including former Soviet Socialist Republics like Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Armenia, together with Moldavia, Romania and Bulgaria. These immigrants came mainly as irregular migrant workers and worked in Turkey without work permits (Toksöz et al., 2012). Most of the irregular migrants in Turkey, as elsewhere, ended up in unskilled and insecure work irrespective of their actual skills.

A lack of pertinent civil, social and labour rights is not exclusive to irregular migrants, but shared by different categories of cross-border migrants. However, in the case of irregular migrants, the rule of law is particularly absent. Although the logic of developed national economies tends towards increasingly unrestricted market-based regulation of supply and demand for labour, they have developed increasingly restrictive policies towards international migration. This has happened on the background of the growing number of migrants who, from being conceived as ‘guests’, have become permanent residents, combined with the rise of an anti-immigrant political discourse and nationalist populist movements. Hollifield (2004) speaks of a ‘liberal paradox’ with reference to the predicament facing the developed countries of the North: ‘the economic logic of liberalism is one of openness, but the political and legal logic is one of closure’ (Hollifield, 2004: 887).

However, it could be argued that there is not much of a paradox here for states to ‘escape from’ since closing legal routes to migration has only increased irregular streams of migration, which in turn have provided a desired flexible labour in a neoliberal economy. Labour on the move across national borders in a neoliberal world order serves the interests of many employers, not least when migrant workers are enrolled in temporary work programs or without any official documents, i.e. as irregular workers, making hyper-exploitation possible through cuts in real wages and the undermining of labour rights and other measures of social protections (Ferguson and McNally, 2014). Thus, under neoliberal conditions, irregular labour migrants are ‘functional’ for many employers as they accept low-waged, insecure, unskilled and informal work (Overbeek, 2002: 3). Standing depicts accurately the significance of irregular migration for the current economic structure, arguing that:

Undocumented workers provide cheap labour and can be fired and deported if necessary or if they prove recalcitrant. They do not appear on the payrolls of firms and households, and fade into the nooks and crannies of society when recession hits. Productivity appears to rise wonderfully in a boom, as more are recruited without appearing in the statistics, and employment mysteriously drops less than the drop in output and demand in recessions. They are truly a shadow reserve army. (2011: 91)

Contingent on this, the majority of irregular migrant labour ends up in jobs that are labour intensive, low-paid, and beyond the reach of collective organization. As stated by Ferguson and McNally (2014: 9), a migration-related ‘massive expansion of the global labour reserve’ is the most important change taking place in the neoliberal order, and the Turkish economy has also started to use this global labour reserve since the 1980s and 1990s, as mentioned above.

The Migrant Precariat in Turkey

As I set out in this section to look closer at the life and working conditions of Turkey’s international migrants, especially those staying and working in Turkey with irregular statuses, it is worth noting that, at the time of writing (Summer 2015), a large group among these are displaced persons from Syria. ⁵ According to official records, as of August 2015 there were 1,905,984 Syrians in Turkey. Among these, nearly 262,000 live in 25 refugee camps located in 10 different cities, with others spread across the country (Hürriyet, 13 August 2015). Most of these Syrian migrants have already integrated into Turkey’s large informal economy as an irregular labour force.

The legal routes to formal employment for migrants is complicated and circumscribed by many restrictions, a background for the large proportion of informal employment among migrant workers. The law governing work permits for migrants in Turkey (Law no. 4817) enforces a complicated bureaucratic process for granting work permits to immigrants. ⁶ Permits are granted only when Turkish citizens cannot be found for employment in the specific jobs concerned. Moreover, even after satisfying the criteria for any type of work permit, it is at the discretion of the Ministry of Work and Social Security to grant the permit or not. In other words, the law allows a side discretionary power to the authorities. The number of issued work permits is rather small, with employers ⁷ not even applying for work permits, either because they consider the process too complicated and think that they would not be able to get the permit or because it is more profitable to have migrants work informally (Toksöz et al., 2012: 27, 52).

The asylum regime in Turkey further contributes to a rising number of irregular migrants in the country and a deterioration of living and working conditions connected with this. Although Turkey is a signatory to the 1951 Geneva Convention governing the conditions of asylum seekers and refugees, it still grants refugee status only to applicants arriving from European countries. However, as most asylum seekers come from non-European countries, they add to the irregular migrant labour force, often as transit migrants waiting to be settled in third countries or without even making any kind of application and registration. It is extremely difficult for them to receive work permits. Currently Syrian migrants ⁸ are protected under a ‘temporary protection’ regime, which concerns the mass influx of people forced to leave their country as defined in the new Turkish Immigration Law on Foreigners and International Protection of 2013. Rules and regulations governing temporary protection and the associated rights and liberties of the concerned people were established in secondary legislation (Temporary Protection Regulation) in October 2014. It is through this regulation that Syrian migrants’ legal status has been finally defined and their fundamental rights and liberties protected, including conditions for receiving a work permit. An Amnesty International report has welcomed the regulation in that sense, while also drawing attention to its overall discourse, which makes provision of social services conditional on the capabilities of local governorships rather than a responsibility of the state (Amnesty International, 2014).

Work and Life of Migrants in Turkey

Research into the working and living conditions of migrants in Turkey has grown, especially in recent years (see, among others, Akpınar, 2010; İçduygu, 2006; Lordoğlu, 2010; Tanyılmaz and Kurtulmuş-Kıroğlu, 2007). The lives and work of female migrant workers in the domestic and entertainment sectors has been studied more (see, among others, Akalın, 2007; Gülçür and İlkkaracan, 2002; Keough, 2003; Kaşka, 2009) than the conditions of migrant labour in other sectors, such as construction (Akpınar, 2009), textiles (Dağdelen, 2008; Dedeoğlu, 2011) or tourism (Ekiz Gökmen, 2011; Lordoğlu and Parlak, 2008).

A defining characteristic of migrant life and work is the experience of discrimination and exploitation. ⁹ Also, cities with large numbers of Syrian migrants have started to experience xenophobia and violent acts towards migrants on the streets, not least targeting the numerous Syrian migrants (Radikal, 30 July 2014). Migrant labour is concentrated in labour-intensive sectors like domestic care work (children, the sick and the elderly), manufacturing, particularly textiles and garments, and construction. Most migrant women are employed in domestic care work, but also in tourism, the entertainment industry and the sex industry. Male migrant labour, on the other hand, tends to be found in construction, while both men and women are employed in textile and garment workshops or as sales people in textile and garment shops, and in various other service industries, such as hotels and restaurants (Toksöz et al., 2012). Migrant labour is also employed in agriculture in various regions of Turkey. In all these sectors the share of informal work is already large and also includes Turkish citizens. Informality, accordingly, determines the nature of the working and living conditions of migrant workers.

In the first place, informality implies that the migrant labour force remains excluded from any kind of social security system, working for long hours and in jobs where it is already difficult to collectively organize. Child labour is also common in Turkey among migrant workers. A recent study by Amnesty International on Syrian migrants reports that many families are forced to have their children aged between 10 and 17 work, due to poverty that prevents them from meeting their basic needs, such as housing (Amnesty International, 2014: 26). ¹⁰

The precarity of migrant work is marked, in the first place, by low wages, which do not allow migrants to meet even their basic needs like housing (e.g. Toksöz et al., 2012: 93; Akdeniz, 2014: 75, 81). Moreover, Syrian migrants are also reported to be earning less and working longer hours than local workers in similar jobs (Kirişçi, 2014: 30). For example, one Syrian shoemaker in Adana reported that local workers receive 500 TL per week whereas he, as a migrant worker, receives 300 TL for the same job (Akdeniz, 2014: 64). However, the most important problem for Syrian migrant workers is the fact that employers do not pay their wages on time. This pertains, for example, to Syrian migrants working in the contract manufacturing workplaces in the textile sector in the Çağlayan district of Istanbul. They state that their employers either do not pay their wages on time or do not pay them at all (Akdeniz, 2014).

Another aspect of precarity comes with de-qualification. Most migrant workers end up working in jobs that are beneath the formal qualifications obtained in their country of origin. This problem is particularly important for migrants from the former Soviet Republics working in Turkey, as most have university degrees but end up working in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs (Toksöz et al., 2012: 93). De-qualification is frequently experienced among other migrant groups as well. This pertains, for example, to Syrian migrants who used to be university students in Syria, but who now work in the informal sector in unskilled jobs in construction and textiles (Akdeniz, 2014: 49–51, 75–6).

The life of an irregular migrant is determined generally by the nature of his or her work. First, low wages and irregular payment result in poor housing conditions. They generally build their lives in poor districts where they can work and live informally (Toksöz et al., 2012). In most cases irregular migrants cannot afford their rents; a problem that is especially acute for Syrian migrants who live outside refugee camps (Amnesty International, 2014). Irregular migrants are therefore forced to live under extremely taxing conditions and far above the capacity of housing they succeed in renting. Moreover, they face discrimination and xenophobia in the housing market. ¹¹

A further problem is that the children of migrants are barred from receiving education in Turkey. This is an acute problem in particular for children who need elementary school training. Public schools refuse to accept irregular migrants’ children, which means that they cannot continue their education in Turkey. Even if children of migrants are accepted as guest students they cannot receive official diplomas, as they have not been properly registered (although for some migrant groups, church organizations provide education services for their children, such as for Armenian migrants; Toksöz et al., 2012). Serious health problems add to the precarious life situation of migrants, which they are forced to solve by their own means, through informal networks and without being able to benefit from public health care (Toksöz et al., 2012).

Contesting Migrant Precarity

What I have summarized briefly above points towards an inevitable kind of despair taking place under the impact of the precarity in life and work of migrants in Turkey. A further implication is a sense of victimized agency on the part of migrants without obvious opportunities for bringing about a change in their precarious status and livelihoods. However, at the same time, it is important to mention that the literature points at a potential among migrants in similar situations elsewhere to contest their precarious living/working conditions through civil activism. This pertains to a substantial and growing body of research that focuses on movements of contestation among particular irregular migrants, which has implications in terms of a changing political systems in general (for some examples see Chimienti, 2011; Isin, 2009; Laubenthal, 2007; McNevin, 2007; Varsanyi, 2006). One example is McNevin’s studies of the mobilization of irregular migrants for political belonging in the United States, implicating ‘a radical questioning of what it means to belong’ (McNevin, 2007: 656). Similarly, Varsanyi (2006: 240) notes the condition of irregular migrants who remain ‘illegal’ in terms of national state discourse but who are, ‘in many other ways, regular participants in the life of their communities’ – as neighbours, customers, workers and as parents to schoolchildren. Isin, however, argues that ‘it is not the claim to participate in public affairs that constitutes the originality of sans-papiers [irregular/undocumented migrants] but their claims to justice when they did not have the legal capacity to do so’ (2009: 382). That is, they challenge the membership-based understandings of citizenship by ‘usurping the right to claim rights’ (Isin, 2009: 381).

It is rather difficult to comment on the nature of contestations of irregular migrants in Turkey due to the relative novelty of this situation on the political scene, and of the almost total lack of examples of public manifestation of such contestations. Moreover, the venues of collective organization (i.e. trade unions, civil society organizations and social movements) are in general (still) not oriented toward the participation of migrants. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to briefly discuss their present condition in order to start assessing the potential of migrant agency in transforming routinized forms of political participation in Turkey.

Starting with trade unions in Turkey, research shows that they are not generally involved with the conditions of migrant workers. They have almost no activities pertaining to migrant workers and, seemingly, lack an incentive to organize them (Erdoğdu and Şenses, 2015; Gökbayrak and Erdoğdu, 2010; Toksöz et al., 2012). This is, no doubt, related to structural – or institutional – causes relating to the decreasing power of trade unions in general, connected with the upswing of neoliberal policies on labour market issues and industrial relations. Contingent on this, the large informal economy has exacerbated the unions’ incapacity relating to the integration, organization and mobilization of migrant workers, and jeopardizes any effort to act for labour rights of migrants. Thus, judged from available knowledge, established trade unions do not, at present, offer any real forum for the organization of migrant workers, and in particular the undocumented. However, new alternative labour movements with more loose, network-type organizational structures appear to offer a more promising ground for the organization of migrant workers.

Several movements, collectives and networks appear, actually, through their organizing principles, to at least potentially offer a ground for struggles that may incorporate migrant workers as well as domestic workers. One example is the Assembly of Workers Health and Labour Safety (AWHLS) organized to struggle against illnesses and deaths, or, as they call them, ‘murders’, resulting from the lack of workplace safety. Their main activity is to inform the wider public about these ‘murders’ and reveal their links with current relations of production and the precarious situation of workers across a wide spectrum of workplaces. Their website (AWHLS, 2015) has a specific section that provides news (gathered from various sources) on the precarious conditions of migrant workers. This mainly concerns employment-related exploitation and the many human casualties reported when migrants try to reach Europe’s coasts in overcrowded boats. In 2011 the website had three news items relating to migrant workers; in 2013 the number had risen to 13 items and in 2014 there were 33 news items. This may be taken as a signal of a developing interest in the living and working conditions of migrant workers. And, although there is thus far no direct statement concerning the need to organize migrant workers, an organization like AWHLS may well provide potential ground for it.

Another loose collective, the Umut-Sen, which aims to strengthen unionization of precarious workers, boasts an international organizing principle targeted at ‘defending the international solidarity of workers against capitalism, which exploits labour of all workers of the world’ (Umut-Sen, 2015), which may, conceivably, be extended to migrant workers. A third network, the so-called Precariat Movement, provides yet another such potential ground for organizing migrants. In 2011 the movement conducted a workshop on the topic of migrants and migration, focused on similarities and differences between ‘internal’ (within Turkey) and ‘international’ migration and migrants’ differential life experiences. One of the workshop’s conclusions was that the workers need to refrain from using discriminatory distinctions such as ‘citizen versus migrant’ or ‘internal versus international migration’ (Güvencesizler Hareketi, 2011). Apart from networks such as these, which focus on precarious working conditions, there exists a number of similarly loose organizations which, although attentive to matters of work and employment, are also engaged more generally around issues of migrants’ livelihoods and rights. ¹² One such organization is the Migrant Solidarity Network, bearing the motto: ‘a world without borders, without nations, without exile’ (Göçmen Dayanışma Ağı, 2015). However, to summarize, organizing around matters of migration and precarity in Turkish civil society has started to develop only recently and currently operates only on a small scale.

Yet even though the migrant precariat in Turkey is thus far hardly contesting their precarious livelihood and conditions of work through existing formal bodies for collective organization, they can still be seen to carry a transformative potential related to politics of citizenship. Isin’s (2009: 371) discussion of ‘acts of citizenship’ as ‘deeds by which actors constitute themselves (and others) as subjects of right’ is interesting in this respect. Turkey has, so far, hardly been a scene of such manifest ‘acts of citizenship’ in the form of organized collective claims for justice or a migrants’ rights movement, in contrast to the multiple manifestations across the United States, France or elsewhere. However, there have developed protests and awareness-raising activities, especially with respect to the increasing number of Syrian migrants. For example, xenophobic acts towards Syrians have triggered contentious street protests proclaiming, ‘Don’t touch my brother/sister’, organized by leftist parties and pro-migrant civil society organizations (Bianet, 29 August 2014). More importantly, however, as discussed in the previous section, irregular migrants participate in everyday life as workers, tenants, customers, and parents insisting on sending their children to school. While enacting these everyday roles they ‘create’ a precariat ‘scene’ that disturbs the ‘script’ of Turkish citizenship (cf. Isin, 2009: 379). Precarity, as such, is not a novel condition in Turkey, and irregular migrants are not the first to experience it. However, the increasing number of Syrians, their deepening precarity in terms of livelihood and work, and their growing contestations have the potential to disturb and possibly impact on the routinized practices of state agencies, organized labour and, indeed, emerging counter-precarity movements.

Concluding Remarks

This paper adopts a critical look at the theoretical discussions around the concept of precarity, with a particular focus on its relation to migration, and questions this relationship in the Turkish case in order to understand life and work experiences of irregular migrants. In particular, the irregular forms of migration to Turkey cause precarious working and living conditions for migrants. In other words, the character of irregular migrant life and work in Turkey seems indeed to illustrate an ideal type of precarity of status, work and livelihoods. As this is the case, though, the (increasing) presence of precarious migrants in Turkish society also signals possibilities for the development of new forms of contestation of everyday life and citizenship, struggles against precarity, and the dissolving of current forms of collective organization.

The paper’s discussion of migration and precarity in Turkey highlights an important case for reflection with respect to the applicability of the term ‘precarity’ outside of the so-called Global North. Although it is difficult to decide who occupies what position in the prevailing North-South discourse, challenged by an ever-changing global reality, Turkey reflects a picture different than that of the classical North, which first gave birth to the theoretical elaborations on the notion of precarity. Irregular migrants in Turkey not only lack Standing’s (2011) seven forms of labour-related security but they lack any kind of security. Child labour, informal work, low wages, irregular or non-payment of wages, discrimination in the form of unequal pay for equal work, and de-qualification are common to working life experiences of irregular migrants, and these are accompanied by abject conditions of housing or shelter, poor health, poor education, and exposure to general discrimination and xenophobia. Additionally, pursuing more empirical research would surely uncover experiences of ‘anger, anomie, anxiety and alienation’ (Standing, 2011) among the migrants.

Precarity is not just typical of migrants in Turkey but is common for many other segments of Turkish society as well. For example, a local construction worker with an identification card, citizenship status and a somewhat higher – but still low – wage is likely to be found in similar working and living conditions. Nevertheless, migrants, as a group, represent a quintessential form of precarity, which supports the claim that precarity as a generalized condition exhibits a wide variety of forms and degrees. Yet a significant difference between a migrant and a non-migrant is that whereas the latter is formally protected as a citizen, the former lacks, under most circumstances, any such citizenship-based formal protection and is forced to rely on an unclear and ambivalent regime of human rights, generally in the form of international conventions.

Nevertheless, the agency of irregular cross-border migrant workers is politically significant. Politically constructed distinctions, such as ‘internal versus international’ migration and ‘illegal versus legal’ migration, contain the precarious irregular migrant without legal recognition and hence a victim of any kind of labour flexibility. That is, they form the labour pool of the precariat. As Ferguson and McNally point out: ‘Notions of “us” and “them”, of “citizen” and “foreigners”, are deeply inscribed within the ideological relations of nation-states. Genuinely working-class politics requires an opposition to these categories of bourgeois common sense’ (2014: 18). Therefore, social movements targeting precarity may succeed only if they can actually incorporate irregular migrant agency. In other words, although migrants are not the only group experiencing precarious work or ‘precarious citizenship’, they carry the weight of precarity most starkly, and thus their experience could contribute in unique ways to counter-precarity movements (Munck et al., 2011: 258). On the other hand, movements that fail to incorporate migrants will simply preserve Standing’s (2011) ‘shadow reserve army’. Currently, in Turkey, although emerging precarity movements are indeed aware of the existence and plight of a growing migrant precariat, there is a clear lack of organization of migrants into the movements. We see this as related to the existence of Turkey’s large informal economy, which includes not only international migrants but also a large number of unregistered local (non-migrant) workers. Thus, irregular migrant workers simply add to this already large informality. As a result, labour movements have faced the challenge of supporting the rights of both a large group of local workers and increasing numbers of migrant workers, especially since 2011 with the growing influx of Syrian migrants. The central challenge for counter-precarity movements is thus to construct a common ground that can include both the local and migrant precariat.