1 Conceptualizing Labour Unions as Family

Against the assertion that kinship lost its significance with the emergence of modernity, current anthropological research demonstrates the persistence of kinship in modern capitalist societies.⁶ Scholars have shown that kinship continues to play a decisive role in the organization of economic relations, even under neoliberal conditions. Similarly, a fruitful line of research has emerged within the scholarship on the anthropology of labour, which focuses on the intimate relationship between kinship and labour unions. Scholars argue that kinship networks shape labour unions and, relatedly, labour activism. As Kapesea and McNamara argue, in this understanding, collective action “represents a flow from kinship into politics, rather than vice versa, with political action inspired by personal relationships and obligations.”⁷ In other words, how workers and unionists relate to each other is influenced and shaped by their current understanding of personal relationships within the family, community, and workplace.

Scholars have demonstrated how values, morality, and mutual obligations derived from kinship define workers’ collective identity—as expressed through labour unions—in diverse contexts such as Argentina, Spain, and Zambia.⁸ This conceptualization of labour unions is particularly helpful in examining the class solidarity required for collective actions like strikes. Following Edelman, I would like to emphasize solidarity “as a highly variable thicket of obligations and emotional ties, which is deeply rooted in the soil where it springs to life.”⁹ Regarding the success of the Berec strike, my argument is that relations and practices of kinship among workers and union leaders constituted the roots of solidarity and played a role in the strike’s success.

Such an understanding of unionism is productive for examining modern Turkish history. Since its foundation, the Turkish nation-state itself has been characterized by what feminist scholar Nükhet Sirman calls “familial citizenship.”¹⁰ The social order of the Ottoman Empire was identified with the familial order in which “the head of the house is at once the father and the sovereign”¹¹ The mutually constitutive character of politics and kinship continued under the new republican regime, which perceived the family as a site of intervention for establishing a modern order. The new republican order relied on a model that centered on the modern patriarchal nuclear family, which employs “love” as a binding agent, obscuring hierarchies of gender, ethnicity, and age. The universal laws of citizenship can, thus, co-exist with familial citizenship¹² while maintaining the hegemony of the familial order as an organizing principle for social life.

Similarly, the welfare system in Turkey has been categorized with familialist Mediterranean welfare regimes.¹³ Familialism is defined “as a heavy reliance on a gendered and intergenerationally structured family solidarity” that characterizes Southern European welfare regimes.¹⁴ In Turkey, as throughout the Global South, the import-substitute industrialization (isi) model became dominant beginning in the 1950s. With dissolution of the petty commodity production in the rural economy, migration from rural to urban areas accelerated. Such rapid and large-scale urbanization exacerbated the importance of kinship networks for the new rural migrants.¹⁵ In the absence of an adequate state mechanism of social protection, migrants had to rely on kinship networks for their basic needs such as housing, employment, and access to limited social services, including healthcare and education. These networks of assistance and self-help based on kinship and rural ties forged a “culture of solidarity” that can be characterized as “a social encasement for the expression of working-class solidarity, an emergent cultural form embodying the values, practices, and institutional manifestations of mutuality.”¹⁶ This mutuality was evident in working-class communities in Turkey during the 1960s, the peak years of rural-urban migration.

Feminist scholars have noted women’s pivotal role in creating or reinforcing class solidarity through women’s networks that forge community in diverse contexts.¹⁷ Women’s relationships with each other occurring in the neighborhood, outside of productive relations, significantly influence relationships at the workplace. Women’s informal networks and their support for one another create a community that exceeds the limits of formal kinship networks. In the context of Turkey, scholars note a similar pattern where women’s close relationships in working-class neighborhoods contribute to people seeing each other as part of the same community.¹⁸ Women played a significant role in reinforcing this culture of solidarity as they performed unpaid domestic labour that benefited the broader community and not just their own families. Uyar Mura, for example, highlights “women’s network-maintaining role,” as they shouldered the responsibility for hosting overnight guests from rural areas.¹⁹ When new migrants first came to cities, they relied on other women from their hometowns for lodging while searching for jobs and housing. Women’s unpaid labour was central to cementing these intra-household relations and creating a working-class community in the urban context.

In the Turkish case, women’s informal relations continued to be significant when employed in industry. Women utilized their existing ties to organize at the workplace to advocate for the improvement of their salaries and working conditions. Scholars of labour have often overlooked women’s union activism due to women’s low labour force participation and unionization in Turkey. However, women were not entirely absent from the scene. Despite the lack of representation in the leadership of labour unions, working-class women participated in labour activism on the shop floor during the 1960s and 1970s.²⁰ Rather than presuming that women were rarely interested in labour unions, we must understand the conditions under which women workers chose to organize.²¹ In this vein, the Berec strike, which was organized mainly by women, is significant for exploring women’s experiences in labour movements in Turkey. An analysis of the Berec strike highlights the need to look beyond the workplace for sources of discontent and past the male worker as the agent of labour activism. Indeed, if we are to understand women’s labour activism, we must include the family and household in the study of labour politics.

In an early article advocating the need to bridge the gap between household history and labour history, Marcel van der Linden argues that working-class households have four primary survival and improvement strategies that involve asking for help from external sources. Households may ask for the help of their relatives (relations of kinship); they can utilize personal communities that may function like fictitious kinship networks; they may request the assistance of more powerful individuals (patronage), and finally, they can form or participate in social movement organizations (such as trade unions).²² In this chapter, I demonstrate that for Berec workers, joining Petrol-İş was an amalgamation of these different strategies.

Workers had family and kinship networks that extended to the squatter neighborhood and factory. In other words, there was significant overlap between family members, neighbors, fellow workers, and union members. Furthermore, union officials themselves were considered powerful father figures vis-à-vis workers. Therefore, participating in a labour union and enhancing salaries and working conditions through collective agreements did not merely benefit one worker’s status but also helped the entire household and community. Through marriage, the use of kinship terms, expectations of care, and gift-giving, workers (together with their families) and union delegates formed a (fictive) kin group that reinforced mutual commitments and obligations. Therefore, through these acts of kinship, workers and union officials co-constructed the labour union as a family, including the reproduction of gender and age-based hierarchies.

2 Women’s Labour and Labour Union Activism

The Berec Battery Factory was established by two Jewish businessmen in Gaziosmanpaşa (Taşlıtarla) in 1954. Gaziosmanpaşa emerged as a resettlement neighborhood when the Turkish state sponsored the construction of two thousand houses for Bulgarian Turks migrating to Turkey in 1953.²³ Migration from Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and rural parts of Turkey continued in the decades that followed,²⁴ and Gaziosmanpaşa quickly became a gecekondu (built overnight) town. According to one estimate, by 1965, there were thirty thousand houses and almost ninety thousand people living in the neighborhood.²⁵ During the 1950s and 1960s, Gaziosmanpaşa was often described as an underfunded, poverty-ridden neighborhood that lacked infrastructure.²⁶

Given the lack of housing provided by the state during the 1960s and subsequent decades, migrants, with the help of family networks, began to build their own houses on public lands on the peripheries of cities that were close to factories.²⁷ The Turkish state usually tolerated migrants squatting on public land because they were a source of cheap labour for the ongoing industrialization efforts.²⁸ Many workers employed in the Berec Factory resided in Gaziosmanpaşa, and most of them were young migrant women from the Balkans²⁹ and rural areas of Turkey.

Women composed most of the workforce of the Berec Battery Factory despite the falling rates of women’s labour force participation during the 1960s (from 72 percent in 1955, to 56 percent in 1965).³⁰ Women rural-to-urban migrants lost their employment status when they withdrew from agricultural production and moved to urban areas. In other words, in Turkey, as throughout the world, women were excluded from and marginalized in industrial production.³¹

Within this period of marginalization, there was a slight increase in the percentage of women in the workforce in cities with over ten thousand residents: from 7.8 percent in 1960, to 8.8 percent in 1965.³² The chemical industry, which includes battery production, did not employ an exceptionally high number of women workers. For example, in 1957, the percentage of women workers employed in the chemical industry was less than 10 percent.³³ For this reason, women’s overrepresentation in workforce of the Berec Factory requires explanation. First, the concentration of Bulgarian and Yugoslavian migrants in Gaziosmanpaşa could explain the high number of women employees in the Berec Factory. Researchers have noted that migrants from the Balkans were often more open to and eager for women to work outside the home.³⁴ Second, the statistics concerning women’s labour can be misleading and may not represent the full picture of women’s labour force participation in urban areas.³⁵ Some researchers noted that many women in squatter neighborhoods held jobs outside the home. However, men in the household tended to hide this fact due to widespread negative perceptions of women’s employment outside the home, and this tendency resulted in misleading statistics.³⁶

During the early Republican period, the Turkish state encouraged women’s employment in certain professions as part of the modernization project.³⁷ However, women employed in low-skill, working-class jobs did not enjoy the same prestige as their middle-class counterparts. Moreover, the male breadwinner model dominant in Turkey further marginalized women’s employment outside the home. As feminist scholar Ferhunde Özbay argues, during the 1960s, being an urban housewife was considered a status symbol among rural migrant women in cities.³⁸ Consequently, gender discourses surrounding women’s employment attached a stigma to women who worked in factories, which threatened women’s reputation, respectability, and virtue.³⁹ Participation in labour union activism and strike activity further exacerbated these concerns. As I demonstrate below, the women workers of Berec resisted this stigma by strategically cultivating and deploying kinship ties with male workers and union officials.

This period of industrialization and urbanization was marked by the power of labour movements in Turkey.⁴⁰ The right to strike had just become legal in the 1961 constitution, and it was enacted through the Collective Bargaining, Strike, and Lockout Law, no. 275 in 1963, thanks to the pressure workers generated through protests, strikes, and meetings.⁴¹ It was in this context, defined by the newly acquired right to strike and a strong labour movement, that Petrol-İṣ officials began to organize Berec workers in 1964.

Petrol-İş officials noted the low wages and lack of social benefits of workers employed at the Berec factory. As more workers unionized, Petrol-İṣ officially invited the management to begin collective bargaining on 27 March 1964.⁴² However, the management and the union could not agree on terms during the negotiations. Failing to achieve any results, Petrol-İş organized a strike vote by secret ballot on 11 September 1964 and reported that 813 out of 823 participating workers voted in favor of the strike action.⁴³ The union announced that the strike would begin on 7 December 1964, the first strike action that Petrol-İş took since its establishment in 1950.⁴⁴

On another day during the strike, the union co-organized a dance performance by the National Turkish Students Association (Milli Türk Talebe Birliği) Folk Dance Group. Worker’s Post (İşçi Postası) noted that after the dance performance, a group of striking workers from Üsküp (the Turkish name for Skopje) took the stage and performed their folk dance, which cheered up the workers, who clapped along late into the night.⁴⁸

The interviews Yön magazine conducted with striking workers provide valuable insight into the contentious relationship between workers and management, as workers hinted at the reasons for their participation in the strike. For example, a woman worker named Fatma Aydın noted, “My dad was a construction worker. He has lung disease. When he got sick, I went to the manager and requested some money. Because I am in the union, he didn’t give me an advance on my wages.”⁴⁹ Others mentioned the difficulty of their work, its adverse effects on their health and well-being, and their poor living conditions, implicating their low salaries as the culprit. For example, one worker named Hayrettin İçli stated, “I work in the part of the factory near the furnace. The furnace gets very hot, making you sweat like a sausage. One day I got cold when I went outside. I have second-degree tuberculosis. […] I know I should eat meat. Believe me, none of us are able to eat 250 grams of meat a month.”⁵⁰ By sharing these details, workers held the factory management responsible for their experiences of hardship, including poor health, debt, and food insecurity, justifying their decision to strike.

During the Berec strike, women workers’ militancy surprised the public, state, and union officials. For example, when the İstanbul governor Niyazi Akı came to visit the striking workers and the factory management, two women workers were picketing at the gates of the Berec Factory. Women did not let him in as they did not know who he was.⁵¹ Decades later, this was a memory of the strike the union president Hepbir recalled fondly. According to Hepbir, the governor was so impressed with a migrant worker named Fikriye that he called Hepbir and said, “Your workers are very conscientious. A woman worker didn’t let me in.”⁵² Hepbir also mentions that Fikriye became part of the militant group formed during the strike.⁵³ The weekly newspaper published by Petrol-İş confirms this, reporting that Fikriye visited the United States for a six-week transnational union program in 1966.⁵⁴

Sevinç’s self-introduction using her factory identification number and emphasizing her similarity to her father indicates a strong occupational and class-based identity. I believe she was not alone in inheriting a working-class identity and culture of labour activism from her father. During the 1960s and 1970s, working-class women were primarily involved in labour politics through their families. During this period, many women took active roles in strikes, protests, and other forms of labour activism as wives and children. The Kavel Strike organized in 1963 and the Paşabahçe Strike in 1966 are two examples where the spouses and children of workers showed enthusiastic support for the strikes, picketed with the striking workers, and clashed with the police.⁵⁶

Neither scholars nor union officials have recognized the relevance of women’s productive and reproductive work for enhancing the strength of labour politics. While women’s unpaid domestic work contributed to the formation of working-class culture, their participation in strikes and protests as wives, daughters, or workers produced a class consciousness. For example, the wives of Paşabahçe workers threatened to divorce their husbands if they prematurely ended their strike due to pressure from their employer.⁵⁷ For working-class women, the stability of the marriage and household was closely tied to the success of a strike, crystallizing the intimate relationship between labour activism and family. When we understand the family, not the male worker, as the actor in labour politics, we can make better sense of women’s militant labour activism despite the relatively short duration of women’s working lives (as most of them withdrew after getting married or having children); their overall lower levels of labour force participation; and their lack of experience in formal union membership in Turkey.

In the Yön magazine interviews, workers mentioned their inability to plan and prepare for marriage due to intense financial pressures. The prospect of marriage was simply unattainable for some workers. Seventeen-year-old Safiye Sarıoğlu explained her experience: “Our house is forty-five minutes from the factory. I commute with my good friend Sevinç. Sevinç and I make lace on Sundays. We don’t make it for our trousseau, though. We do it for money.”⁵⁸ Safiye’s words demonstrate how some working-class women combined their formal jobs as factory workers with other income-generating activities. In Turkey, young girls were expected to assemble a trousseau that required labour-intensive, elaborate needlework and operated as a status symbol, showcasing their skills and industriousness.⁵⁹ However, the demands of wage labour meant that some women had to give up traditional forms of reproductive labour, such as preparing a trousseau.

This interview highlights the challenges women experienced as expectant mothers and workers. Considering that pregnancy itself is a form of reproductive labour,⁶¹ it is possible to see the difficulty Berec’s women workers had in trying to reconcile their productive and reproductive labour. Furthermore, Münevver shared problems other women experienced at the workplace, which indicates that managers’ practices promoted a collective sense of injustice among women workers. This group identification may have played a role in women’s mobilization in support of collective action.

In addition to Sadık and his wife Necibe, there was another couple who eloped during the strike. Furthermore, other strikes also witnessed workers getting married without their families’ approval while striking. This trend of eloping could be due to the sense of freedom and empowerment that the collective action promoted. Furthermore, for workers who were unable to meet the conditions traditionally required for marriage (e.g., trousseau, bride-wealth, family/parental approval), the support of labour unions and class-based identities might have been meaningful enough to disregard some of these traditions while transforming others.

At the convergence of productive and reproductive labour, working-class women adopted relations and discourses of family in their interactions with union officials. Under the pressure of stigma attached to their workplace identities, women carried marriage and kinship relations from the private sphere of the household into the workplace and onto the picket line. In other words, women workers reconfigured the factory as a space that produced kinship, and they turned to the labour union to help them decrease conflicts and balance the needs of the home and workplace.

3 Marriage and Other Acts of Kinship

Following Lambek, I conceptualize kinship as a relationship that is constituted through specific acts.⁶³ Focusing on the acts of kinship performed during the Berec strike, such as using kin terms to address union officials, getting married during the strike, organizing wedding and circumcision ceremonies, naming practices, gift-giving, and other forms of care, I investigate the nature of the relationship between workers and union delegates. Lambek argues that “kinship does not simply convey meaning as a symbol or set of symbols […] but is also carried out in acts that are meant and that have meaningful consequences.”⁶⁴ Through the performance of these acts, union delegates and workers co-constructed the union as a kin group where all parties submitted to “an order of kinship.”⁶⁵ As Lambek puts it, these “acts produce commitments and inform people with, and of, their commitments to one another, thereby determining not practice itself but the meanings that are attributed to it. In other words, such acts establish kinship as an ethical domain.”⁶⁶ The culture of solidarity that emerged through the Berec strike and other instances of labour activism should be conceptualized within this ethical domain.

One of the most significant themes that emerged from the testimonies of Berec workers published in Yön magazine was marriage. The dual demands of productive and reproductive labour made it difficult for women workers to manage both. The issue of marriage exemplifies the pressures that industrial capitalism placed on all workers. When we pay close attention to the marriage-related issues of workers and the union’s involvement in workers’ private lives, we see a dialectical relationship between kinship and labour politics through which they transform one another. Acts of kinship, specifically those involving marriage, allowed workers and union officials to forge a culture of solidarity during the Berec Strike.

During the Berec strike, seven couples decided to get married and turned to Petrol-İş officials for support. As Lambek argues, marriage is a “ritual enactment of kinship,”⁶⁷ and marrying as an act involves not only those who get married but also “mediators, officiates, and witnesses” that reproduce kinship as a relationship.⁶⁸ Petrol-İş officials acted as mediators and witnesses, supported workers’ decision to get married, and provided financial support for the new couples. For example, union official Mücahit Teoman assumed responsibility when he learned that one of the women workers’ parents did not allow her to marry another worker from the Berec Factory. Teoman visited the woman’s parents and convinced her father to consent to the engagement.

Moreover, union officials were invited to the wedding ceremonies. For example, when Necibe Çeltikçi and Sadık Balaban married during the strike, the wedding witness was one of the union officials. Many workers and union leaders attended the couple’s marriage ceremony at the city hall. The newly married workers refused to go home after the ceremony and instead returned to the picket line,⁶⁹ blending union activism and the celebration of marriage, clearly demonstrating the intersection of the public and private spheres.

President Hepbir promised that the union would organize a collective wedding for all the couples in a sports center and bear the expenses.⁷⁰ Hepbir also declared that the union would help the engaged workers with marriage-related costs (e.g., furniture, domestic appliances). By taking over a responsibility that often falls to the parents, workers may have considered Hepbir as deserving of the nickname of “father.” Hepbir’s wife was also involved in taking up these tasks; İşçi Postası published a photograph showing the newly married workers kissing the hand of Mrs. Hepbir.⁷¹ Hand kissing is considered a sign of respect for elders, and the practice marks significant days and reinforces social ties.

Considering that migrants frequently utilized solidarity networks to find employment, it is plausible that multiple people from the same family, neighborhood, or community worked together in the Berec Factory. Even if most workers had no actual kinship relations, the cultural values and practices of kinship that characterized migrant working-class communities shaped how workers formed relationships with each other and with union officials. As Sirman argues, “relations between strangers in the public sphere are converted into fictive kinship through the use of kinship terms.”⁷² In the absence of any other moral order that regulates relationships in the public arena, kinship imaginaries persist.⁷³ The cultural practices that govern everyday life reflect this point. Strangers with no blood or family ties frequently call each other sister, sister-in-law, brother, niece, aunt, uncle, mother, and father. These kinship terms are especially useful in facilitating social interaction between men and women who are not related to each other, “signaling the sexually neutral character of interactions.”⁷⁴ Women workers addressing the union president Ziya Hepbir as “Ziya Father” and their fellow workers as “brothers” illustrates this point.

Kinship terms were used by workers and unionists alike to evoke emotions, articulate expectations, and (re)produce affection during the strike. In this understanding, unionism is conceptualized through “kinship, where actions are motivated by mutual inter-dependence, within self-defining hierarchies and identity structures.”⁷⁵ Thus, calling Hepbir “father” was not merely a symbolic gesture. Instead, workers expected him and other union officials to help and support them with material concerns and other issues. During an interview, one of the striking workers said, “Ziya Hepbir is such a man that he did more for all of us than our own fathers.”⁷⁶ In other words, care among the unionists and workers shaped the union as a kin-like group.⁷⁷

The naming practices of workers and unionists, and especially the process of collectively naming children, illustrates the construction of labour- and union-centered identity and its transmission to the next generation. On the one hand, when two workers welcomed new babies during the strike, Mrs. Hepbir visited the families in their homes, right across from each other, and gave the newborn babies union’s gold coins with blue beads to protect against the evil eye.⁷⁸ On the other hand, both couples named their newborn children “Grev” (strike) to honor the Berec strike, demonstrating their commitment to labour politics.⁷⁹ Similarly, Hepbir’s son was named “Akar,” referring to the first name of Petrol-İş, İstanbul Akaryakıt İşçileri Sendikası. There was at least one more delegate whose son was named “Türkiş” after the name of the confederation Türk-İş. With regard to both Akar and Türkiş, other union officials proposed these names in the congresses of Petrol-İş and Türk-İş, and they were voted on and officially decided in union meetings.⁸⁰ The naming practices of workers, therefore, took communal forms and unified family and labour identities while strengthening the ties between workers and the union.

The Berec workers expected union officials to care for them if and when they needed it. For example, a woman named Hanife Akarsu was a migrant from Yugoslavia, and when the driver of her employer hit her during the strike, she was hurt. She expressed her frustration with her employers saying that “Even in Yugoslavia, they didn’t do such things to us … Now they want to have me run over by a bus as if I am infidel [gavur].”⁸¹ Hanife was a single mother with six children, so she added, “who would look after my children if I died?” Then, she said, “Well, I am sure our leader Ziya Hepbir and others would look after them.”⁸² These expectations of familial care indicate shared values of family and kinship.

When the factory management dismissed two workers for organizing other workers and inciting discontent during the strike, Petrol-İş immediately hired the union activists. Similar to the networks of kinship that assisted people in finding employment, Petrol-İş took similar responsibility for their members. Furthermore, the substantive strike fund, supplemented by Türk-İş and the ifpcw, generously supported workers with cash and food packages. All these care practices performed by the union drew workers and union delegates closer to each other.

The expectations and demands of workers regarding personal and family issues played a role in unions’ organizational strategies and tactics. Especially in the absence of the right to strike, the union operated similar to a mutual aid society. For example, Petrol-İş decided to establish a “social support fund” as early as 1954, i.e., when strikes were still illegal, as a temporary solution for the arbitrary dismissal of workers. Social support included lending money, providing access to cheap foods items, and direct monetary assistance in case of a death in the family.⁸³ Moreover, the union management was authorized to organize recreational activities such as picnics and circumcision ceremonies for workers’ children.⁸⁴ Intended to gain workers’ loyalty and strengthen bonds among their members, these recreational activities extended to include workers’ children and other family members. Traditional and religious rituals also found a place in the activities of organized labour. For example, when multiple workers died in work accidents, several labour unions pooled their resources for an Islamic memorial to be broadcasted over the radio.⁸⁵

Religion served as another potential grounds for establishing solidarity and producing kinship bonds among workers. Religious identity was especially significant for those who had migrated from the Balkans as they had faced intense pressure to secularize under the communist regimes of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.⁸⁶ However, by the 1960s, the non-Muslim population in Turkey had declined significantly due to a series of violent, ultra-nationalist policies.⁸⁷ For a Sunni Muslim workforce, having non-Muslim employers may have been influential in their mobilization and their exclusion of their employers from their shared understanding of kinship.⁸⁸ There is some evidence supporting this claim, for example, the use of the term gavur by some workers.

Gavur was used by the Ottoman Empire to refer to non-Muslim Ottoman populations, and it had pejorative connotations. Muslim populations in the Balkans used the term derogatorily to refer to the non-Muslim majority. For example, Yugoslavian migrant Hanife mentioned the aggressive incident she had with the driver by saying, “they try to run me over as if I am gavur.”⁸⁹ In another newspaper article discussing the conditions of Berec workers, the author reports that “most of the workers sold all their property to regain their homeland. They [workers] say we escaped from the gavur[’s land] and came to our homeland; we came to our brothers. It is one thing to experience these things in the land of gavur, but we will not accept slavery in our own homeland.”⁹⁰ Hence, migrant workers using the word gavur and emphasizing their own homeland, knowing that their employers were non-Muslims, could be intentional and may suggest religious-nationalist sentiments expressed as class conflict.

All in all, working-class communities participated in labour activism partly because it helped them maintain their traditions, family practices, and reproduce kinship in the public sphere. By looking at all these acts of kinship and the caring practices of the union, it is possible to argue that the function of labour unions far exceeded protecting the rights of workers on the shop floor. These relations are particularly important for understanding women’s labour activism during this period. It was critical for the small group of women who held industrial jobs to find strategies to unify their work identity with their family lives. With the labour union’s assistance, women workers were able to merge social relations of kinship and work, which were otherwise in tension. Acts of kinship (including the popular practice of getting married during the strike) and kin-like relations with their union delegates helped women workers attain respect and maintain the status derived from having a family.

4 Conclusion

The Berec Strike lasted for forty-one days, with almost the full participation of the workforce, resulting in a two-year collective agreement signed on 15 January 1965. In addition to salary increases, Petrol-İş also secured social benefits such as child allowances, a death benefit, and a one-time bonus payment after the birth of each child.⁹¹ The union officials, workers, and media outlets enthusiastically welcomed the contract.

Family metaphors were noticeable in the language of employers as well. One of the employers, Nesim Afumado, gave a speech when the strike ended. He said, “you all are our children who were absent from the factory for forty-one days.”⁹² On the first day back to work after the strike, the employers organized a Ramadan iftar in the factory to celebrate. As workers, union leaders, and employers shared this meal, “labour peace” was restored with the help of commensality.⁹³ Both union leaders and employers emphasized that now was the time to “work in family intimacy.”⁹⁴ Because labour peace meant cooperation between labour and capital, employers were also drawn into practices of solidarity. Petrol-İş and employers agreed to share the expenses of engaged couples. Hepbir announced that Mr. Afumado promised to pay all the marriage-related costs of engaged women, and he (Hepbir) would cover the men’s expenses. Hepbir repeated that the union would organize the wedding for all seven couples, just as it had promised earlier.⁹⁵

The so-called labour peace secured after the strike, however, was short-lived. Berec workers went on strike again in 1975, this time under the leadership of the Petroleum, Chemical and Rubber Industry Workers’ Union of Turkey (Türkiye Petrol Kimya ve Lastik İşçileri Sendikası, Petkim-İş), which was affiliated with the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (Devrimci İşçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu, dİsk). When the police attempted to disperse the strikers, the workers clashed with the police, resulting in the wounding of several police officers and workers and the arrest of sixteen workers.⁹⁶ Workers’ unionization in the rival labour union, which had a more radical and political agenda, indicates the increasing militancy of workers and the collapse of kinship ties between workers and the leaders of Petrol-İş in the 1970s.

The labour politics formed around fictive kinship structures had its limits in terms of improving women’s status in the workplace and/or in society. As gender hierarchies in the household and workplace were subsumed into the bonds of kinship, women workers found limited opportunities for improving gender equality in the workplace. For instance, some of the concerns raised by women workers were not included in the collective agreement signed between Petrol-İş and the Berec management. A woman worker employed in the coal department complained that while men took showers with hot water, women workers had to use cold water.⁹⁷ Although union officials included clauses addressing seemingly minor issues such as the menu offered to workers in the factory canteen, women’s demands for equal working conditions were ignored in negotiations. Similarly, in the subsequent decades, working-class women struggled to make their concerns a priority for labour unions. Even when labour unions added working-class women’s issues to their agenda, such as the demand for childcare centers at the workplace, they failed to make meaningful changes. As I have shown elsewhere, working-class organizations also missed the opportunity to challenge the unequal gendered division of labour at home.⁹⁸ While labour unions eased women’s participation in labour politics and provided informal support through kinship ties, they were unable to effect a broader change in women’s status in Turkey.

The Berec strike was not the only example in which family and labour politics were fused. For instance, after fifty-three couples married during the strike organized in Kula Mensucat Factory, the Textile, Knitting, and Clothing Workers’ Union of Turkey (Türkiye Tekstil Örme ve Giyim Sanayii İşçileri Sendikası, teksİf) formed a committee composed of elderly women workers. Following New Year’s Eve and the religious holiday, the “wedding committee” visited the newlyweds and brought flowers for the brides.⁹⁹ There were many other instances of workers visiting the picket line right after their wedding ceremonies. These examples show that kinship, and specifically marriage, was an integral part of doing labour politics in Turkey during the 1960s.

The Berec strike is significant because it demonstrates women’s presence and militancy within the labour movement of Turkey. My analysis of the Berec strike also provides some insight into the sources of women’s mobilization and the specific form of their labour activism. This chapter has explored the working-class solidarity that developed through kinship relations, as labour politics became an integral part of the household, kin group, and community. Women with rural ties who were recently incorporated into industrial wage labour had a strong desire to marry and start a family. However, for many women, it was challenging to do so. It was in this context women workers employed various strategies to extend the family into the factory through acts of kinship. Marrying fellow workers or eloping during strikes illustrates this relationship. One of the strategies women workers utilized was membership in labour unions, through which they formed kin-like relations with union delegates, whom they could ask for support in matters of marriage. Through labour union officials’ support in matters such as obtaining parental approval, organizing wedding ceremonies, acting as wedding witnesses, gift-giving, and organizing religious rituals, labour union leaders were transformed into father figures. A successful strike action was deemed the achievement of the labour union, which was a family headed by its president. For these reasons, it is understandable that the victory celebration for a strike was blended with the celebration of family, as women workers declared, “long live our father!”