Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10679/5962

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Now showing 1 - 8 of 8

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Beyond headscarf culture in Turkey's retail sector
(Cambridge University Press, 2016) Birelma, Alpkan; Humanities and Social Sciences; BİRELMA, Alpkan
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Militant minority at work: a successful case of unionisation of garment workers in Istanbul
(Taylor & Francis, 2023-01-02) Birelma, Alpkan; Humanities and Social Sciences; BİRELMA, Alpkan
This article explores a successful unionisation struggle among garment workers in Istanbul. In the last four decades, Turkey has become a global showcase of authoritarian anti-labour neoliberalism and one of the world’s top garment and textile exporters. The latter has come at the cost of worker exploitation and precarity. Such conditions led a group of knitting workers to unionise at the beginning of the 2010s. After five years of struggle, they signed a collective bargaining agreement covering nearly 400 workers. This very rare success rested on two key factors: the efforts of a militant minority and transnational labour solidarity.
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The politics of the welfare state in Turkey: How social movements and elitecompetition created a welfare state
(Wiley, 2024-02) Birelma, Alpkan; Humanities and Social Sciences; BİRELMA, Alpkan
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Some thoughts on class and class struggle as evoked by Durrenberger and Doukas’ article
(Springer Nature, 2018-03) Birelma, Alpkan; Humanities and Social Sciences; BİRELMA, Alpkan
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The stubborn persistence of working-class protest in Turkey in an age of authoritarian neoliberalism
(Taylor & Francis, 2024) Birelma, Alpkan; Işıklı, E.; Sert, H. D.; Humanities and Social Sciences; BİRELMA, Alpkan
Under authoritarian neoliberalism, Turkey has seen the number of legal strikes plummet since the mid-1990s. Alongside deepening authoritarianism, the AKP government banned nearly all legal strikes in the 2010s. How have working-class protests fared against this bleak backdrop? Have workers become pliant victims of a repressive regime of accumulation? Or is there evidence of fight left in the Turkish working class? This article addresses these questions through protest event analysis (PEA) of an original dataset of working-class protests between 2015 and 2019. Workers are found to have managed to maintain a significant protest performance despite the increasingly authoritarian environment.
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Subcontracted employment and the labor movement’s response in turkey
(University Press of Colorado, 2017) Birelma, Alpkan; Humanities and Social Sciences; Durrenberger, E. P.; BİRELMA, Alpkan
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Open Access
When local class unionism meets international solidarity: A case of union revitalisation in Turkey
(McMaster University, 2018) Birelma, Alpkan; Humanities and Social Sciences; BİRELMA, Alpkan
The article concerns the recent transformation and ensuing successes of a Turkish trade union of road transport workers called Tum Tasima Iscileri Sendikasi (TUMTIS). In the mid-2000s, TUMTIS was mainly organised in small-sized freight companies having around 1 500 members with collective contracts. The strategic choice of a new leadership to concentrate on a large-scale, international firm with the support of Global Unions was the turning point. The ensuing United Parcel Service campaign ended with a collective agreement for nearly 2 700 new members in 2011. The union won its second large-scale organising victory at DHL in 2014. At the time of writing, a third large-scale firm is on the verge of recognition. To scrutinise this case, I use the power resources approach in a critical way. To the approach, I add an examination of the subjectivities of union leaders by drawing on the debates about different types of unionisms, importance of the ideology and motivations. I argue that the agency behind this revitalisation can be only explained by taking both its objectivities and subjectivities into account. While the class unionism embraced by TUMTIS leaders explains the subjective side of the story, associational power from below and its meeting with international solidarity play the key role on the objective side.
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Working-class entrepreneurialism: Perceptions, aspirations, and experiences of petty entrepreneurship among male manual workers in Turkey
(Cambridge University Press, 2019-11) Birelma, Alpkan; Humanities and Social Sciences; BİRELMA, Alpkan
This article examines working-class entrepreneurialism in Turkey from a comparative perspective. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a working-class neighborhood of Istanbul, the article focuses on the perceptions, aspirations, and entrepreneurial attempts of manual workers employed in formal jobs. It aims to contribute to the understudied literature on working-class entrepreneurialism, which is often overlooked or underestimated by the critical research on labor and the working class. First, the article demonstrates that the level of entrepreneurialism among manual workers is rather high. Alongside revealing the popularity of aspirations for self-employment and the working-class roots of many self-employed individuals, I present an ethnographic account of five workers' transition from wage work to self-employment. Second, the article finds that a colloquial phrase, "el isi" or "a stranger's business," is widely used to refer to wage work. I argue that this phrase perfectly manifests the popular resentment felt toward wage labor in a social milieu where self-employment seems accessible. Finally, by drawing on a review of a scattered set of studies, I claim that entrepreneurialism among working-class men seems to be quite common, especially in peripheral countries.

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