Among all the people who Lilo Linke met during her tour of Turkey in 1935, Bay [Mr] Fazlı was arguably the person who enchanted her most. This “tall, slender man [with] a pair of amazingly blue eyes” looked like a “Herrenmensch” to her, “the type of man which [Germans] always dream of as their master and which they rarely find.” Fazlı Turga was a veteran of the Balkan War, an engineer with a European degree, and a devoted member of the industrialist front in his country. When Linke met him, he was the head of the Kayseri Kombinat as the factory was called referring to the industrial business conglomerations in the Soviet Union. As the largest industrial investment of the period, the factory was regarded as the poster project of state-led industrialisation. Before he was chosen for this most prestigious position, his abilities were put to the test when he was appointed as the director of “an old, almost bankrupt factory in Istanbul.”1 He passed with flying colours. The year before he met Linke, at the opening ceremony of the new building of that old factory, he had received praise from the prime minister for proving that he deserved to be trusted with “the people’s capital.”2
Each worker should think of the most efficient way of using their machine, not only based on knowledge but also on a desire that is like a burning passion. These factories are important for they give a new direction to our economy; they are places for only those who are knowledgeable, hardworking, and eager … Entering through the factory gate on their first day of service, every civil servant and worker should feel this deep in their hearts.4
Having covered the historical and spatial underpinnings of planned state-led industrialisation in the previous three chapters, I now focus on the “traditional” realm of working-class politics: shop-floor industrial relations. In attending to social relations between labour and capital at the point of production, I explore the broad patterns of economic development that existed for working people where they worked and lived.5 In this and the following two chapters, my focus is on the interactions between the “politics in production,” that is, the relations of cooperation and conflict, persuasion, and coercion between capital and labour on the shop floor, and the “politics of production,” that is, the interventions of the state, employers’, and workers’ organisations, as well as third parties such as the International Labour Organization, that influence this balance of power, more or less, from the outside.6
In this experience-near level of analysis, I take issue with the prevailing view of state workers’ working and living conditions in the 1930s and 1940s.
I make three interrelated arguments in this chapter. First, behind the celebrated transformation of this old, rundown Ottoman factory into a modern mass production site lay a failed attempt at rationalisation and a set of repressive shop-floor management practices. Second, behind the regime’s proud presentation of industrial relations lay high labour exploitation. Third, behind the assumed docility and passivity of workers lay isolated and individualised worker resistance.
1 “It Looks Like One of Those Famous American Factories!”
Following the expansion of ideas of scientific management and manufacturing self-sufficiency, the first two decades of the twentieth century witnessed a shift in factory design principles. The physical space of the factory was no longer seen as “a passive shell simply to house machines, tools, and workers”; it was a part of the production technology itself. The purpose-built factory design was expected to respond to the pull of mass production by functioning as an architectural machine that would combat the problems standing in the way of efficiency. Here we see the wooden and brick multi-storey buildings of the nineteenth century give way to single-storey reinforced concrete
Turkish reformers were keeping a close eye on the industrial and engineering achievements of the West. Visuals of industrial architecture and design filled the pages of the journal Sanayii (Industry) in 1918. In the 1930s, futuristic images of factory buildings and machinery adorned the front covers of popular magazines. With the onset of etatism, photographs of Turkish factories gradually replaced the images of Western industrial architecture. The drawings and models of the new factories were featured in the pages of La Turquie Kemaliste (a propaganda periodical published by the internal affairs ministry), the professional journal Arkitekt, and the mainstream newspapers.8 The reconstruction and expansion of the old Ottoman factories resulted in a dramatic transformation in their size, technological structure, and productive capacity. The use of the “latest technology and design principles” in these physical renewal processes were praised as a sign of the republic’s successful efforts to catch up with Western industrial design and technology. Looms featuring the latest technology were installed at Hereke and Feshane, new departments were added to the Beykoz Leather and Shoe Factory, but it was the Bakırköy Factory that was the location for “the first significant step in planned industrialisation.”9
Cover of the official publication La Turquie Kemaliste, late 1930s
courtesy of sİbel bozdoğan
In May 1933, a visiting journalist observed the contrast between the old and rundown factory building and the new machines that had been gradually installed since 1925.10 A couple of months later, the prime minister also was struck by the sight of the brand-new machinery that had been placed in the century-old building. “The young and active director Fazlı Bey,” the reporter covering the visit wrote, had done his best to rejuvenate an old building that looked like “a hunchbacked elderly man.” The volume of production had increased by two-to threefold and the production costs had gone down thanks to his “expertise, effort, and business acumen,” which, as we learn a few lines later, included the introduction of the night shift. Production variety had also expanded: in addition to canvas and plain cotton cloth, the factory
Construction started in the summer of 1933. The coverage of the construction and the opening of the new building, unfortunately, does not detail the plans for the factory premises. There are some bits and pieces of information available on the changes that were made. For example, the old main building was not demolished, but transformed into a dining hall. And the new building had a “dormitory” (yurt) for the female workers’ children, and a shower area for workers. The extended capacity would require the employment of 1,200 workers at the peak of the factory’s production. The factory was now completely modernised, setting an example for all Turkish factories.13
The old factory building at the back and the construction site at the front, 1934
courtesy of emre öncü
Construction of the main production building, 1934
courtesy of emre öncü
Construction site, 1934
courtesy of emre öncü
Bakırköy neighbourhood, 1934
courtesy of emre öncü
The opening ceremony for the new factory building in August 1934 aimed to showcase Turkey’s industrial vision. The new building was hailed as the physical manifestation of the regime’s success in catching up with Western technological modernity. Besides a large group of bureaucrats, English journalists and the Soviet commercial representative were also in attendance. The prime minister arrived on the presidential yacht at the factory pier, where he was met by Mr Fazlı. The director gave him and his entourage a one-and-an-half-hour tour starting from the entrance gate where the workers would go in, taking in each department, and ending at a second gate where the finished goods would come out. The crowd was impressed, as was a later visitor, who described the factory as “a perfectly modern factory on the coast of the beautiful Marmara Sea.” Another visitor spoke for many a reformer with a burning industrial desire when he wrote that the factory “looks like one of those famous American factories which took cows from one end and churned out sausages from the other.”14
The front of the factory overlooking the train tracks, 1940s
courtesy of turgay tuna
The back of the factory, 1949
courtesy of turgay tuna
The construction of the new production building, 1934
courtesy of emre öncü
Workers bringing in new machinery to the new production building, 1934
courtesy of emre öncü
Factory Director explaining the new machinery to Prime Minister, 1933
But old habits die hard. The contrast between the new machinery and the old factory building was not the only, or even the most important, incongruence at work at the factory. Production also was bottlenecked by a curious blend of modern technologies and traditional working methods. At the same time as the latest industrial design and technology were being imported, traditional modes of social organisation continued to exert a powerful hold in the factories. Numerous foreign experts called for urgent measures to reorganise production and to implement scientific labour control methods, as we shall see below, but their suggestions largely fell on deaf ears. Local industrial experts had joined them by the beginning of the 1940s. A report written by the Sümerbank General Directorate for the Ministry of Economy admitted that the holding relied on constructing new buildings and enlarging the existing ones to increase production instead of focusing on rationalising the operation and management of the factories.17 Factory establishment costs were extremely high as a result of the necessary technological and physical investment, claimed the German head advisor to the minister for economic affairs. In both state and private factories, industrial managers relied on the newest technology and design coupled with high mechanisation to compensate for the lack of skilled workers.18 Especially in the early years of state-led industrialisation, another foreign expert argued, Sümerbank increased capital investment in an attempt to bring down production costs rather attending to the problems of
2 Organisational Structure and Managerial Personnel
Although the government was tremendously proud of the new economic policy and its main organ of “rational” implementation, Sümerbank, there were increasing concerns about its organisational structure from the very beginning of the first five-year plan. Writing in the context of growing public disapproval over economic planning in the mid-1950s, A.H. Hanson identified the problem as a lack of “the machinery capable of translating the will to plan into the practice of planning, to train the personnel required for the job, and to give them the freedom of action that they need.”20 His formulation captures the essence of the debates on administrative efficiency, for it encompasses the regulation of relations at different levels between central management and the factories, as well as the competence of the managerial rank and the legal status of factories as financially autonomous, economically integrated production organisations.
It is obvious from the foreign expert reports that the operation of Turkish state factories in the 1930s was trapped between the rock of centralised planning and the hard place of the shop floor. “Turkish planning was a hit-or-miss affair,” wrote Hanson; there was a considerable gap between formal planning and practical execution.21 For the German experts writing on state textile factories, rationalisation in administration was a prerequisite for the full exploitation of technological knowledge in mass production. Accordingly, problems associated with decision-making and implementation were given extensive coverage in the reports by the experts, who all reiterated the need to streamline national economic development and central planning, as well as for
Various reports noted that state factories suffered from a lack of trained clerical staff and, consequently, from a lack of attention to the establishment of systematic financial and production accounting methods. Experts complained bitterly about the inadequacy of financial accounting practices for the task of managing the growing complexity of production. Statistical records were either not kept or not used for shop-floor operational management, financial control was limited to expenditure, data on various costs were not kept or were gathered only irregularly, managers had little economic awareness or profit consciousness, job descriptions were not available, and standards of capacity and faculties were not set, particularly for executive jobs, and the principle of “the right man in the right place” was not followed.
At the Bakırköy Factory, job assignment and task division at the managerial level was a serious problem. The archive and sales department of the factory compared much worse to other state factories, making cost calculations extremely difficult.23 Workshop managers’ lack of interest in reducing waste, given the much-complained-about general overhead costs, struck a foreign expert in 1937. The large amount of waste in the Bakırköy cotton mill, he wrote, remained unaddressed mainly because of accounting errors, the elimination of which he identified as the first step toward a general reorganisation of
Solutions to these problems could not be found at the factory level, however. The overcentralisation of decision-making and the lack of enterprise autonomy presented an impediment to productive efficiency. The excessive level of centralisation and the bureaucratic rigidity left factory managers with little authority, with even the most minor of decisions being made by head office. For example, Sümerbank controlled the hiring and distribution of personnel, even in the lower echelons of factory administration. Von der Porten explained the problem in 1937 as follows: Sümerbank factories did not have a legal entity; they functioned as the branches of the holding without the autonomy to determine their own budgets. The aggregated Sümerbank budget concealed individual factory performance, killed the sensitive gauge of profit and loss, and hindered the development of competitive spirit and ambition. But the same factories found themselves in competition with each other when it came to, for example, the purchasing of raw materials such as cotton. This structure put a heavy burden on factory directors because they had too much responsibility but too little power. The solution was to manage these factories without curbing their business autonomy and to rationalise their management starting from the top level. In practical terms, this meant coordinating the operations of factories across the same sector, and establishing an administrative council at each factory to ease the burden of the factory directors.25
Each state factory was run by a director and an administrative council, composed of the director himself, two assistant directors, and three representatives from among the officials and employees of the factory. The administrative council would prepare the yearly work programmes and send them to the Sümerbank General Directorate for approval. The council would also appoint the departmental superintendents. Factory employees, including minor clerical staff, were hired and dismissed by the central office of the holding company.
What I want more than anything else is a real comradeship, the feeling that we are all one family from the director down to the last apprentice. It ought to be possible since here in Turkey the State is the most important entrepreneur. The few existing capitalists don’t really matter, and in
any case, they, too, are controlled by the State. If we take care from the outset not to create an exploited proletariat, if we make our workers feel that this factory belongs to the state and, therefore, to themselves, and if we really keep all the doors open to them to advance—why shouldn’t we succeed?30
Around the same time as Linke, Webster was visiting the sugar factory in Turhal, whose director, Muammer Tuksavul, another European-educated engineer, challenged the bureaucratic management of state factories. Tuksavul had no tolerance for red tape, Webster wrote; to him, “efficiency is more important than formalities—production than meaningless checks and audits.” But he was also “no worshiper of success in the narrow economic or political sense”; he was more interested in the human by-products of industrialisation, the “civilising” effect of the state factories. Especially in the early years of state-led industrialisation, factory managers impressed their foreign visitors with their agility and self-confidence. Managers were not simply cogs in the machine; when the system was in the process of formation, their behaviour modified the way in which the system operated. In Webster’s words, they typified “the best of the generation next following the innovators of 1908 and 1923,” and they personified “the new optimism of the Devrim (revolution).”31
This optimism and managerial autonomy seem to have been lost in later years as state factories came under increasing scrutiny for their administrative and productive competence. By the end of the 1940s, factory directors and departmental superintendents at state factories worked under “a crippled personnel and wage policy” that undermined scientific labour controls and kept productivity low.32 To contemporary observers, state factory managers had an interest in keeping the wages as low as possible in order to garner favour with the higher echelons of central industrial management. In 1956, an industrial journalist and later a trade unionist praised the then director of the Bakırköy Factory for not following the steps of his predecessors in “trying to get in his superiors’ good books by paying his workers low wages,” and for fully understanding the direct connection between wage rates, promotion rules, and productivity.33
3 Recruiting and Promoting
In almost every worker file I examined, the first document was an employment form (İşe Giriş Çıkış Pusulası) prepared by the personnel department. The form requested a wide range of information, from personal details to qualifications, previous work experience, and preferred job at the factory. While this suggested a careful recruitment process, the forms were rarely filled out completely and often created more confusion than clarity. On most forms, the worker was specified as “new,” meaning they had no previous industrial experience; the job preference section would be left empty, and if it was provided, the specified job would always match the one assigned.
In 1934, a German industrial expert, Bauer, reported that the lack of scientific methodology in worker and foreman selection and task allocation was the primary impediment to rationalisation efforts at the factory. The notes on a conversation between Bauer and the director of the Bakırköy Factory, Fazlı Turga, nicely illustrate the gap between the theories of the central planners and the realities of the men on the shop floor. The two engineers talked enthusiastically about the importance to productivity of well-trained workers. Here, it is interesting to speculate whether, during his talk with the factory director, Bauer mentioned anything about the German debates. Or, perhaps Turga was already following them. Unfortunately for us, the reports are silent on such social transactions and Bauer’s own notes end with reference to a promise
Always in need of labourers, especially skilled ones, state textile factories had a fairly loose recruitment policy. Dismissals were rare and even workers who disappeared without notice were recruited again. There were two main reasons behind the inefficiency of recruitment policy. The first was administrative inefficiency and managerial incompetence. The second hinderance to the development of an efficient recruitment policy was a structural one that could not be easily solved with managerial competence, for it concerned the structure of the labour market itself.
There was a personnel department in charge of the employment policy at each state factory, but they proved to be inefficient in their operations. “Those who direct labour,” an industrial expert wrote, “have usually been preoccupied with technology and rarely know the workers’ jobs.”36 From the foremen to the directors, inspectors reported in 1943, “all supervisors are busy in their offices instead of supervising workers.”37 In the absence of skill evaluations and sufficient vocational training, job were assigned randomly according to the labour needs of the different shops of the factory. To industrial experts, both local and foreign, low productivity was to a large extent a reflection of weak management starting from the point of recruitment.
Historically, the creation of personnel departments was a response to the failure of informal methods of hiring to handle the demands of large firms. The centralisation and standardisation of recruitment meant that employment policy was treated as an end in itself. In many industrial contexts, the
A close examination of the Bakırköy workers’ files reveals that, despite the existence of a personnel department, the foreman had considerable power over recruitment and promotion decisions. In the newly built state factories, the foreman’s control over employment began literally at the factory gates. In the interviews I conducted with workers from Ereğli and Nazilli factories, stories of local children waiting at the factory gates to be chosen for recruitment by the foremen came up repeatedly.39 A 1945 inspection report strongly criticised this practice and cited it as evidence for the urgent need for a national employment bureau.40 State factories were left to their own devices to secure a stable workforce until the second half of the 1940s. In 1947, the Ministry of Labour declared that the Turkish state would deal with the employment problem as a public service.41 The Employment and Recruitment Agency was established in 1946, but skills shortages, which I address in detail below, hampered effective placement services. The mostly unskilled applicants refused to accept factory work because of the low remuneration.42 And those who took it, as we shall see, tended to leave the factories after only a couple of months.
Stories of recruitment and promotion at the Bakırköy Factory portray a chaotic decision-making and execution process. Despite the formal administrative organisation of the factory, the whole system of appointment, remuneration, and promotion was hardly in accordance with the concept of a bureaucratic organisation. The information I gathered from the workers’ files, interviews with workers, and the press coverage of state factories points to what Meyer and Rowan called the “ceremonial façade.” According to this perspective, the highly institutionalised, rationalised, and seemingly impersonal prescriptions create the image of an organisational practice based on objective and legitimate rules that restrict the discretion of any individual participant. But
Despite the pretence of a centralised bureaucratic management, the organisation of work at the Bakırköy Factory depended largely on the local labour market and changed from shop to shop within a given factory depending on the technological and production structure. Data from the workers’ files illustrate that there was no central factory control over wage and labour organisation. Promotion was by seniority and wage levels were also scaled almost exclusively by seniority. But both were characterised by irregularities. Criteria for promotion were vague and, in practice, inequitable. When a worker asked for a pay rise, decision-making went through the foreman to the departmental superintendent, who scribbled brief notes in the margins of their petitions. These notes were impressionistic and vague comments rather than clear and standard rules, and they showed that the foreman’s authority was almost invariably upheld. The absence or ineffectual enforcement of promotion plans strengthened further the foreman’s authority. When a former worker was rehired, his accumulated seniority was often erased, a practice that adversely affected pay levels since a pay rise was formally tied to an unbroken service record. The worker needed the foreman’s support in proving their seniority. The inclusion of prior service was one of the main demands made by workers to the Ministry of Labour shortly after it was established in 1945.44
As noted in Chapter 3, the industrial labour market of the 1930s and 1940s was a market of movement characterised by high rates of mobility. Throughout the period, a permanent and skilled industrial labour force was conspicuously lacking and high rates of labour turnover were of great concern to industrialists. Since workers changed jobs easily and frequently, market pressures played a decisive role in shaping employers’ strategies and practices with regard to the utilisation of labour power. As we have seen in the story of Hidayet Usta, the ceremony at which the factory director recognised an aged employee’s years of faithful service was poignant precisely because it was so unusual. While there was no shortage of unskilled labour in Istanbul, scarcities appeared quickly and progressively as one went up the scale. Skilled workers were hard to find and to keep. This situation continued into the 1940s and was exacerbated by
There were a lot of women; a lot at the spinnery, not that many at the weavery, only a few, [but] the spinners were mostly women. In the dressing [department] there were no women, [they were] all men. In the warp [department] there were women, I mean those who bring the thread back when it is broken, and you tie it to the warp beam, and it keeps going again. Later it got automatic, it stopped when it [the thread] broke, and you find the tip and tie it.47
A comparison of spinning and weaving by a German industrial expert offers a glimpse into how such stereotyping worked on the Turkish shop floor. Spinning is much easier than operating weaving looms, von der Porten wrote; in fact, it was so easy that virtually anybody could master it. More to the point, if spinning were to be mechanised, all preparatory work would be done automatically, which would leave no room for mistakes. The only skill needed would then be to tie the ends of the broken yarn as quickly as possible and with the minimum loss of material. Apart from that, the productivity of the spinning workshop depended on the availability and quality of raw materials, the quality of the spinning machines, the spindle gauge, and the technical knowledge of the managing engineer. Echoing the dominant gender stereotyping of jobs in Germany, von der Porten concluded that since the task required no intellect, women—or better still, girls—should be employed in the spinning shop. By contrast, he claimed, both the quality of cloth and productivity depended on the weaver’s skill.48 Unsurprisingly, therefore, weaving
Women at the spindlers at the Bakırköy Factory, 1950s
iish kemal sülker papers, bg a63/94
In 1945, there were 291 women working at the weavery of the Bakırköy Factory. They made up thirty-five per cent of the weavery workforce, and worked mainly in the preparation process and as weavers’ helpers. In the spinnery, 225 out of 377 workers were women or girls. As a whole, woman made up thirty-eight per cent of the 1,500 workers at the factory.49 During his 1934 visit to the factory, the prime minister was impressed by the number of women on the shop floor. He referred to the oft-cited “nimble female fingers” and the “refined female taste” tropes to explain why female labour was so important for the textile industry.50 In 1940, an engineer from the Bakırköy Factory proudly claimed
The picture was the opposite for child labour. In 1945, workers under eighteen made up thirty per cent of the workforce at state textile factories. The percentage of children under fourteen was six per cent. Factory inspectors noted the unfavourable comparison between the use of child labour in the Turkish textile industry with the Western European and American textile industries, and cited the high Turkish figure as one of the reasons behind labour instability and low skill levels in the state textile industry.54
The lack of skilled labour resulted in labour hoarding at the Bakırköy and other state textile factories. According to a 1945 inspection report, the actual size of the Bakırköy workforce was fifty-one per cent higher than a normal workforce of one thousand workers. Two years later, the factory director complained that the fourfold increase in the factory’s workforce after Sümerbank had taken over did not bring a corresponding increase in production. In the face of high labour costs in production, the practice came under increasing criticism, but it was inevitable according to an inspection report from 1942. Lack of skills and a high level of absenteeism obliged state factories to employ backup workers.55 In 1939, a German industrial expert compared the performance of Turkish and German weavers: “There are factories [in Germany] where a weaver attends sixteen looms; we would be happy if a weaver attended eight looms because today, on average, a weaver attends only six. Both the volume and quality of production at every stage of weaving depends on the weaver.”56 To state inspectors, labour hoarding was normal because of “the infancy of [the Turkish] industry.” As late as 1971, only 9.7 per cent of all textile workers employed in large enterprises in Istanbul were skilled.57
4 Wages: Policy, Payment Systems, and Valorisation
Experts writing on industrial workers in Turkey in the 1930s and 1940s were in unanimous agreement on two points: wages were low, and labour costs in production were high. The rates of remuneration across the country were a reflection of the country’s poverty, reported the International Labour Organization in 1949. Most workers lived at a bare subsistence level, and many below it. Any increase in wage rates was swallowed up by the increase in the cost of living; money wages were far too low even to cover a minimum standard of living.59 It is perhaps partly due to this overall bleak picture that several historians argued that state workers were privileged in terms of their wage levels.60 All other
Criticism over Sümerbank’s lack of a consistent wage policy started as early as 1936. The absence of a clear and accessible system of remuneration hindered the formation of a stable labour force. The incompetence in bookkeeping and the inability to present a clear structure of wage rates created dramatically different results, not only among state factories but within a single factory as well. As a result, significant wage discrepancies both within and across factories abounded. In 1945, there was a more than two hundred per cent difference between the average hourly wages in the Isparta and Defterdar factories.61 A parliamentary discussion in 1943 problematised inconsistent wage scales at state textiles for causing unfair wage differences between unskilled and skilled workers that favoured the former group.62 By the end of the decade, because they did not have a consistent and effort-based wage policy, state factories were increasingly losing their workers to private factories, where task assignment based on skill evaluation and vocational training was gaining ground.63 A contemporary sociologist put it succinctly in 1954 that “until very recently” wage levels at state factories were determined on the basis of “social justice and moral deliberation.”64
The wage scales were inflexible and not updated according to changes in the workforce. When a worker was transferred from one state textile factory to another to work in the exact same role, they suffered a wage cut if the corresponding wage scale was not available. Having been transferred from Nazilli to Bakırköy in 1951, Ahmet lost fifteen per cent of his hourly wage, for example.65 Kamil also suffered from a loss of wages after starting to work at Bakırköy. His salary at Bakırköy in 1947 was sixteen per cent lower than his previous salary at another state textile factory in 1944. İbrahim, a highly skilled worker, had earned seventy-five piasters an hour at the Ereğli Factory. When he started working at the Bakırköy Factory in 1949, he was given a starting hourly wage of fifty-five piasters during his six-month trial period. He confronted the factory director after the six months had passed. His wage was not raised and he demanded to be tested again.66
In his 2007 book on workers in the early republican period, Ahmet Makal made a set of wage calculations comparing state and private factories, and concluded that state workers had not distinctly suffered from the torments of industrialisation.67 My findings show otherwise. First, the data on wages at the Bakırköy Factory in inspection reports show that the average daily wage at Bakırköy was seventeen per cent lower than Makal’s figure for state textile factories in Istanbul.68 Second, data from the worker files also show lower wages.
After ten years at the factory, a weaver, Mehmet, was earning twenty-five piasters an hour in 1947, which, he wrote, was “not enough even for one person, let alone a family.” In 1942, his monthly wage had been 140 liras; five years later, he was making only fifty-two liras per month. He decided to file a petition after having to sell furniture to buy food for his family. Mehmet’s file reveals a very important point regarding the way that wage data was kept. Mehmet actually earned twenty-five piasters an hour, but his hourly wage was recorded as thirty-five piasters. The factory wage cards did not break down the wage figures, but we can safely assume that the higher figure was his wage before taxation, and that Mehmet was paying twenty-eight per cent tax. A 1945 report gave the average hourly wages in the Bakırköy weavery and spinnery as 37.7 piasters and 33.3 piasters.69 In their petitions, workers claimed to earn around twenty per cent less than these figures.
Later in this chapter and in the next two chapters, I introduce a variety of cases where Bakırköy workers describe their extremely hard living conditions. In most cases, their demands for a wage increase are rejected because they are found not to meet the necessary conditions. These conditions, however, are never clearly defined and, in many cases, workers work for the same wage for years.
Given the low remuneration, the high labour costs in production could be attributed to low labour productivity. The German industrial experts writing on state textile factories in the 1930s had two main solutions to this, namely, vocational training and the piece-work system. The second was already being
At state factories, carefully determined and implemented piece-rate schemes were rare, while examples of faulty calculations and inconsistencies abound in the reports. For example, at Bakırköy, the ten per cent difference between planned and actual labour costs in 1937 was partly due to mistakes in the determination of wage norms.71 Sources are curiously silent on norm determination except for a 1939 inspection report, which mentions that the piece rates at cotton textile factories were fixed by Sümerbank based on the “characteristics” of each factory. What these characteristics were, or how they played out for the Bakırköy Factory, we cannot know.72 The factory’s weaving shop operated under “best practice” rules, with workers paid according to the number of shuttles they made instead of the weight or length of the fabric weaved, for that would have led to unfairly higher wages for those weaving coarser yarn or wider wefts.
Best practice in the spinning shop, however, was an entirely different matter, and two German experts were surprised by the situation they found there
In a piece-rate system, you are paid as much as you work. If you don’t work at all, you get nothing. But there is something else, you see, when you do more than the rate, they do not pay you accordingly, because it would be a lot of money. Then you are actually not paid accordingly when you work hard … If you work hard, [later] you get fifty per cent of what you normally earn. So, I slowed down the job … For example, how much did I use to earn? [his wife interrupts: one hundred and twenty liras] They were supposed to pay one hundred and eighty liras, they never
paid that much. I mean there is the foreman who follows you, he keeps an eye on you, but we were all alert. We slowed down the pace, the foreman could not tell. He never paid me the right amount, why would I wear myself out? Others did the same.75
Workers controlled their production to take advantage of the progressive income tax as well. Daily wages below eighty piasters were not taxed, between eighty and 120 piasters, workers were taxed on the forty piasters only. Above 120 piasters a day, the full amount was taxed. A 1939 inspection report on state cotton factories reported that workers manipulated the piece rate accordingly.76 But this did not diminish the faith in the piece-rate system. Inspection reports from later years complained of the slow and problematic implementation of piece-rate payments in spinning compared with weaving shops, suggesting that gender continued to play an important role in skill evaluation and labour remuneration.
In 1939, for example, of the 7,789 workers at four cotton textile factories (Nazilli, Kayseri, Ereğli, and Bakırköy), 4,303 were paid piece rates and worked mostly in weaving preparation and weaving shops.77 While many spinners at the Kayseri Factory were earning hourly wages, all weavers were on piece rate.78 In 1943, 583 out of 869 weavers at Bakırköy were on piece rate.79 In 1945, 821 workers, that is, fifty-four per cent of the workforce at Bakırköy, worked on piece rate.80
A group of employees, however, happily remained untouched by the piece rate until 1949. In a petition addressed to the municipal branch of the Republican People’s Party in July 1949, thirty-two foremen and head foremen from the Bakırköy Factory protested the implementation of the piece rate wage system.81 “We have devoted our lives to the factory,” they wrote, “we expected
5 Wages and the Working Day during the War
The earliest information on the length and organisation of the working day at the Bakırköy Factory is found in a critical report by von der Porten in 1936 on the two work shifts of eleven hours each. The factory engineers seemed to him to be either unaware of, or indifferent to, the low work efficiency during the night shift. Due to a lack of labour controls, it was extremely difficult to measure the amount of work being done, and so he based his calculations on electricity consumption. The figures he arrived at were indeed striking. While electricity consumption at night should have represented twenty-seven per cent of the month’s consumption, it was only eleven per cent. The figure was even lower for the month of August, when efficiency was at its lowest. Despite these calculations, the factory engineers refused to shorten the working day, for the factory was under great pressure to meet the work programme. A reduction in production could not be risked. Von der Porten insisted that implementing two work shifts of eight hours instead of eleven would not damage production. In the end, he managed to convince the engineers to experiment with a few looms and compare the results.82
The practice did not last long. The enactment of the National Defence Act on 18 January 1940 overturned the 1936 Labour Code’s protective provisions.87 Maximum hours of work were prolonged from eight to eleven in the day.88 The eleven-hour working day was still common by the end of the 1940s.89 When
At the Bakırköy Factory, the war conditions exacerbated problems of production integration between shops. In 1942, because the spinnery could not keep up with the weavery, the factory had to buy yarn from the Kayseri and Nazilli factories.92 Workers at the spinnery worked day and night to supply enough yarn to the weavers and to end the factory’s dependence on other state textile factories.93 In 1942, the prime minister explained the cotton supply crisis as follows: “The handlooms are increasing at a surprising rate. Those who possess four looms in their homes easily become rich … They can live very well by reselling the yarn they buy from the state at a low price [and sell] to people at four or five times the original price.”94 Cotton yarn shortages and the low-quality yarn bought from state factories decreased the productivity of prominent private factories as well.95 At the four state-owned cotton factories, the lower quality warp yarn, which would break easily, reduced automatic loom productivity to the extent that even the best weaver could attend to fewer than eight looms. Production efficiency in these factories was barely above ffity per cent in 1940.96 Labour hoarding was further increasing the labour costs in production, but, as discussed above, at this point it was considered inevitable.
First, the work programmes had been prepared in such a way as to allow for low levels of production efficiency. The figures may have matched up, but this did not mean that state factories were operating at “normal productivity levels.”98 The increase in production was actually the result of work intensification. From 1942 to 1943, increase in productivity lagged behind the increase in the utilisation rate. For example, the weavery had an almost one hundred per cent rate of use, but only sixty-eight per cent productivity was achieved. Second, average wages increased at the factory but so did the total hours of work. The increase in production was thus a direct result of work intensification, and it was achieved at the expense of wearing down the workers. Having been forced to work on holidays, many workers left the factory due to exhaustion, he noted. Together, labour scarcity and poor machine maintenance accounted for more than ninety per cent of the unproductive time on the shop floor.99
To put a human face to all these figures, let us now hear from Asım on his experience of this work intensification. When he mentioned in passing during our conversation that he was called to work on religious holidays, I confronted him for not refusing, and he got angry: “One cannot say I am not coming. It just does not work, you have to deal with the head foreman, it does not work … We had to go. There is no such thing as a religious festivity for you [i.e., the worker] … you go to the factory on the religious festival and get paid according to the output leve.” I then asked him whether work on official holidays was remunerated extra, and got yet another agitated response: “What overtime pay are you talking about? … Who cares about your rest time? The guys tell you to
The weavers worked hard and long, and they did everything in their power to make it bearable. Their structural bargaining power helped them to an extent, but they, and the other Bakırköy workers, had a strong adversary on the shop floor.
6 Labour Discipline
Following the managerial revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the work of “the skilled engineer … as pacemaker and technical supervisor” rendered the foreman’s determination of job tasks, skill levels, and appropriate pay redundant.100 The foreign expert reports on Turkish state textile factories were written by these very engineers, and their calls for technical control fell on deaf ears except for one aspect: the gradual replacement of time-based payment with incentive payment systems. Apart from that, labour control was “simple” or “hierarchical,” meaning that workers were under the direct supervision of the foreman. The slow and problematic implementation of incentive wage systems coupled with the failure to adopt bureaucratic and technical forms of control was to a large extent compensated by disciplinary measures and foreman pressure.
But who were the foremen at the state textile factories? What kind of authority did they have and how did they use it? The foreman’s discretionary power was at work to a large extent in the allocation of tasks and determination of the skill levels required to realize those tasks. He assigned skill levels and tasks to workers, ensured that the appropriate equipment was in working order,
We do not have records on the background and mobility of foremen or the process by which they were recruited. In the 1930s, there was no formal specialised education: at Kayseri, Linke remarked on the hasty training of two dozen foremen “who had just reached the first stage of manhood.”102 The anecdotal evidence from Istanbul factories suggest that it took at least some years of practice on the shop floor to become a foreman. They were mainly “yesterday’s workers,” as Lewis Siegelbaum termed the Soviet foremen of the 1930s, who commanded respect on the shop floor mainly through their skill, experience, and age.103 In 1943, Hösli held the foremen at the Bakırköy Factory responsible for the poor technical conditions of production. Because the foremen are not trained properly, he wrote, labour control is inadequate. The foremen employed rule-of-thumb methods to use machines and train workers. Sümerbank tried to organise in-service training for its foremen in the following years, but by the end of the decade, foreman training was still insufficient.104
Although the foreman was essential to the maintenance of discipline on the shop floor, he was not part of the management. The collar line was a significant boundary on the shop floor. The reader will remember Hidayet Usta’s surprise and delight at eating at the same table with the engineers and managers. At the Kayseri Factory, Turga embarked on what Linke called “an experiment in democracy” by instituting a weekly tea party to enable the foremen
An incident at the Bakırköy Factory that was reported in the trade union newspaper reveals the extent of this disconnect between the foreman and engineer. When the operations superintendent scolded the head foreman for some broken windows in the weavery, the head foreman reminded him of the workers’ multiple requests to open the windows. The weavery was unbearably hot and humid, the head foreman explained, and because the management did nothing, some workers resorted to purposefully breaking the windows. He agreed to pay for them from his pocket. But the superintendent was not content; he called the police on the head foreman and the vice foreman, and humiliated the two men. Within the same week, a second incident on the shop floor set another foreman in direct conflict with an engineer. The engineer of the repair workshop had made a habit of taking spare parts for his car from the factory. When the foreman warned him that upper management was aware of the situation but refused to help him, the engineer slapped and swore at the foreman.106
We can see that the foremen were clearly distinguished from the management, but they were also not perceived as one of their own by the workers. Hüseyin and İsmail explain why. Decisions on wage increases were made by the head foreman, although, as I mentioned above, any raise would also have to be approved by the upper echelons of the factory management. Skill, and consequently wage, valorisation is an intrinsic mechanism of labour control and the foremen at Bakırköy made extensive use of this mechanism. The wages were paid by the head foreman with the assistance of the other foremen, we learn from a weaver’s file.107 To Hüseyin, the head foreman of his department was an employer who had “contempt for the workers.” In the twenty-six years they worked together, Hüseyin did not once hear him say “you are doing well.” On the shop floor, he never greeted the workers, which Hüseyin interpreted as a sign of their different social status. Both he and İsmail told me that the majority of the workers supported the worker representative candidates who
The factory was run by the iron hand and arbitrary justice of the foreman, who continued to be the prime regulator of work efforts on the shop floor. The foreman applied elements of the “drive system,” such as close supervision, abuse, profanity, and threats, to maintain or increase effort levels.109 Physical violence also took place. A rare petition by a female worker, Emine, sheds light on the misconduct by foremen at the Bakırköy Factory. When she showed up late to work due to familial responsibilities, the foreman furiously shouted at her. Unable to decipher his words, Emine asked him to repeat what he had said. The incident escalated quickly, with the foreman raising his hand to hit her, only to be stopped by the head foreman. “I am a married woman with children,” Emine wrote, “I come to work to feed my children, not to be beaten by the foremen!”110 Hüseyin also reported verbal and physical abuse by his head foreman.
Workers were fined for violating disciplinary rules, with the personnel department deducting the specified amount from their paycheques. I have found a total of 117 receipts for fines dating from 1941 to 1951 just in the sample of workers’ files that I had access to. Based on my interviews and the foreign expert reports, it would not be unreasonable to assume that the absence of receipts for fines prior to 1941 is merely down to poor record keeping. Another interesting point about the distribution of fines over time lends further support to this speculation. Fines increased considerably after 1947, that is, when trade unionism started, suggesting that the factory management felt the need for more accurate record keeping at this time.
Violations over labour discipline covered a wide variety of offences, such as lateness, absenteeism, the misuse of equipment, slackened effort, and insubordination. Together, lateness and absenteeism made up for more than half of the fines imposed. The second most common reason for a fine was poor performance, which is defined as “neglect” or “doing the job wrong” in the receipts, and made up almost forty per cent of all fines. Insubordination ranks third in the list. Finally, two workers were fined for damaging machinery. The gender composition of the fines presents an interesting picture, in that, although women did not even make up one quarter of the sample, they
But widespread fines and strict foreman authority did not solve the problem of unproductive time; the shop floor remained a disorganised mess. Tighter and continuous control were the sole remedy, wrote state inspectors in 1945; foreign experts were also calling for technical control. As von der Porten put it, state factories needed to adopt the principle of the rational organisation of the labour process, that is, work should drive the worker, and not the other way around.111 But there was another major impediment to higher productivity: workers’ technical illiteracy and poor machine maintenance.
7 Technical Relations and Workers’ Skills
When Fazlı Turga was proudly showing his new factory machinery to the prime minister in 1934, his enthusiasm was met with concern. “I asked him about worker training and machine maintenance,” the prime minister told the crowd that had gathered for the opening of the new factory building, because “worker training is an important part of our new industrial life.”112 Perhaps he had read the inspection report on the Bakırköy Factory written the same year by Bauer, who had bitterly complained about the lack of control over machine maintenance and cleaning. His report was exceptionally technical in that he mainly focused on machine cleaning, maintenance, and workshop ventilation and how this affected yarn quality. He made simple suggestions to eliminate production stoppages resulting from technical failures, such as placing a signboard with instructions on the machines for the foremen to follow when changing the bobbins. In the end, technical reorganisation is no more than a partial solution, he wrote; the real answer to the many problems can be found in the establishment of a control mechanism to compare the productivity of each machine and worker.
In the following years, both foreign experts and Sümerbank inspectors exhaustively cover the reasons and solutions for the “technological idiosyncrasies” of the production process, giving detailed information on the state of the
During his time as director of the Kayseri Factory, Fazlı Turga had a conversation with Webster over machine breakages. The problem was so severe that the replacement of broken parts made up twenty per cent of annual first costs. Although a shocking figure for foreign observers, it was seen as normal by the director, whose biggest concern was the rate of labour turnover. But the two problems were directly related. Machine maintenance was a problem because practically the entire workforce were novices, with even half-trained workers leaving the large factories for more skilled operations and better paying jobs at lower-level plants.116
In 1943, Hösli attributed the extremely poor condition of the machines in the Bakırköy spinnery to a lack of labour control. The managerial mentality,
Von der Porten advised setting up a factory school for foreign textile technicians to teach young workers how to maintain and repair the machinery. If workers could keep their own machines running, they would not be dependent on technicians, which, in turn, meant they would be encouraged to work harder thanks to the wage incentive.121 In fact, a vocational training plan had already been put together in 1934, the first year of the first five-year plan. The plan provided for apprentice courses and schools for technicians and engineers. In 1938, vocational training courses at industrial enterprises and mines employing more than a hundred workers on a daily basis were made compulsory by law. But, although workers were fined to the amount of half of their daily wage for missing a session and fired after five missed days in a month, attendance remained low and graduation rates remained under fifty per cent throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s for three reasons. First, classes were held after working hours. In 1949, the Bakırköy management fined Cemil one fifth of his daily wage for not attending the foreman training course. The receipt for the fine took an exceptional tone, in that the writer explicitly expressed
8 Unweaving Leaving
The better records available for the 1930s and 1940s show continuing high levels of turnover in the state textile sector. But the aggregate figures on labour turnover concealed the specific reasons for workers not showing up on the shop floor.124 Relying mainly on state-produced documents, several labour historians approached the labour turnover question from the perspective of the employer, leaving the workers’ perspective out of the analysis. The dominant explanation in the literature is the persistence of workers’ rural ties, that is, an incomplete proletarianisation, which has been termed variously an “obstructed transitional stage,” a “[lack of] classical types of class divisions,” a “class formation as an incomplete process,” and an “underdeveloped class structure.”125 I argue that there were two other equally, if not more, important factors behind the high turnover rates: the wage policy and the repressive shop floor industrial relations at state textile factories.
A 1945 report on the Sümerbank workers’ conditions confirms the first impressions I had when examining the workers’ files. The turnover resulting from low remuneration or unjust wage setting may not have been attributed in the statistics to poor management of labour or the lack of a consistent wage policy, but the official reasons for leaving given by workers did reveal a problem of poor labour discipline. The inspectors found that a reason for leaving was not specified in more than eighty per cent of a total number of 17,243 cases in the state textile sector. In the remainder of the cases, the most commonly cited reason was agricultural labour duties, at 9.2 per cent. Wage-related complaints ranked second and made up 4.4 per cent of all cases. A lack of housing and military conscription each made up 2.5 per cent of the total cases. The authors were of the opinion that reasons other than agricultural labour were in fact more common than these figures suggested.126
Some years later, another expert disputed the singling out of workers’ continuing rural ties as the main reason behind the unstable and low-skilled labour force by referring to other factors such as low renumeration and workers’ distaste for repetitious, monotonous jobs and being confined indoors all day. Workers tended to leave factories mostly in the summer, a fact that factory managers usually attributed to the agricultural work cycle. But this was only part of the reason, the expert claimed; workers were also making use of seasonal jobs, such as in construction, to compensate for the low wages offered by factories. They did not care for the stability of factory work, because they needed to secure the livelihood of their families first and foremost.127 A number of expert reports pointed to low remuneration, housing problems, and a lack of
In 1945, Sümerbank inspectors broke down the data on turnover at state textile factories into several categories including sex, marital status, age, origin of birth, and seniority.129 They used the following findings to make recommendations on worker recruitment and retention policies. The turnover rate for women was proportionate with their percentage make-up of the workforce; in other words, the data did not support the claim that women were particularly transient workers who tended to leave employment after a few years of service.130 Supporting evidence for this would come in later reports, and in 1948, recruiting more women was cited as one possible solution to the labour turnover problem.131 Married workers were far more stable than unmarried workers; the message was clear, the authors concluded: married workers should be prioritised in recruitment and single workers should be encouraged to marry. Children made up twenty-six per cent of the state textile workforce but accounted for more than fifty per cent of the turnover, which caused a major backlash in terms of worker training. The second age category with the highest turnover rate was workers aged between nineteen and thirty, at over twenty-five per cent. As would be expected, labour migration played an important role in turnover, and the rate was higher among non-local workers. The data confirmed the need to recruit from the local labour market.
The vast majority of all switching occurred during the first year of employment. Almost seventy per cent were workers with less than one year of seniority. A scientific approach in recruitment was a must, concluded the inspectors; psychotechnical methods and skill assessments were badly needed. Because skill levels were not classified, the inspectors used wages as a proxy to divide
Notwithstanding the data problems, this report represents the most detailed analysis of the dynamics of labour turnover that was available in the state textile industry at the time. The breakdown of the data adds nuance to a much-discussed but little-understood phenomenon. Still, because the inspectors were relying on aggregate data from all textile factories, they could not differentiate between the old Istanbul and the new Anatolian factories. In 1947, the Ministry of Labour reported that temporary industrial labour migration was much higher at the newly constructed inland factories.132
Among the cotton mills, the Bakırköy Factory came after Adana, Nazilli, and Kayseri in terms of labour turnover, but it still had a ninety-two per cent turnover rate. The main difference was that, in Istanbul, the high turnover rate did not translate into labour shortages, while the Anatolian factories were finding it extremely difficult to recruit new workers to replace those leaving. In 1945, only the Bakırköy spinnery and the Bünyan Factory had enough workers to operate on three daily shifts, while at the Kayseri Factory, for example, labour shortages had left six hundred looms lying idle. The inspectors claimed that, in the majority of the cases, workers were leaving one state factory for another, lending further justification to the criticism that Sümerbank’s wage policy displayed great inconsistency among state textile factories. Striking proof of this can be found in the stark contrast between the two big state textile factories in Istanbul. Compared with the ninety-two per cent turnover rate at Bakırköy, the rate was only fifty-eight per cent at the Defterdar Factory. We would, then, not be surprised to learn that the Defterdar Factory paid the highest hourly wage. While the average hourly wage at state textile factories was between thirty and thirty-five piasters in 1945, it was thirty-eight piasters at Bakırköy and forty-four piasters at Defterdar.133
9 How Long Does the Harvest Season Last?
Before we delve into the reasons given by the Bakırköy workers for leaving during the harvest season, we should understand that agricultural labour duties were seen as a legitimate reason for leaving by the factory management and factory inspectors. Murat’s case is a good example. He requested to quit in 1944, that is, when labour turnover was at its highest due to the war, because he had received a letter “saying that my family is sick and my harvest is left unattended on the field.” As usual, the petition went through the head foreman, who, in this case, supported Murat, for he was “a very hardworking worker but has to leave to go to his village.” Murat left in August, and came back seven months later. In May 1948, Süleyman filed a similar petition. This was the second time that he had requested leave. In 1944, he had quit due to low pay. After four years as a construction worker in Istanbul, he had returned to the factory by the end of 1947, but five months later, he requested leave again: “I respectfully ask your permission and orders to terminate my contract since I will go to my village for the harvest.” Once again, the note by the head foreman was supportive: “Since he has no family in the village, it is okay for him to leave.” It was not until almost three years later that he would come back for the third time, and he would work at the factory until his retirement in 1969.
do not follow the rhythms of the agricultural season. Third, the support for their request shows that agricultural duties were seen as a legitimate reason for leaving the factory. All of this suggests that workers used agricultural duties as an excuse to take extended periods of unpaid leave. Both workers were re-employed without problem, even when returning three years after leaving to take care of the yearly harvest. İsmail, for example, also received the same treatment when he asked for temporary leave of twenty days in June 1948 to attend the harvest, and came back to the factory afterward.136
Workers would quit for family responsibilities too. Yakup, for example, found his family in a desperate state in a remote northern Anatolian village while he was on leave, and did not return to the factory in spite of eleven years of service. He filed a petition in 1950 to demand an indemnity payment for his service, a few months after the labour code had been amended to the effect that workers with more than three years of service would be paid fifteen days of wages for every year they worked.137 Şükriye sought termination of her employment to take care of her sick mother in her village, but she came back to work a month later. The following year, she left for her village again, and came back seven months later. She left and returned a third time without filing a petition. The interesting thing was that each time she returned, she would submit a request to be moved from the maintenance department, where she worked on an hourly wage, to another department. Upon her final return, her demand was accepted. She was finally working on piece rate and stayed at the factory until her retirement.
Ali also left twice to attend to his sick parents. Ali had worked at the factory since 1940 with many interruptions. The first time he left after a fight with his foreman, and we will read more on this in the next chapter. He returned seven years later before being asked to leave only four months later. A further four months later, he was re-employed, and he worked seven months before being asked to leave again. A month later, he was back for yet another time, asking to be recruited to his old job at the weft machines. His prior indiscipline was
These stories of Yakup, Şükriye, and Ali show that workers’ decisions to leave were not always economically motivated; they were also due to social expectations and family responsibilities. The persistence of their rural ties did not always imply continuing agricultural activity, as is too easily assumed. It did, however, imply a burden of reproductive and care labour in a context where the state failed to provide for the sick and elderly. It has also been argued in a separate context that such visits had a social function. “The phenomenon of absenteeism—the visit back home—was not only economically necessary for the workers’ survival,” Chitra Joshi wrote with respect to Kanpur textile workers; “it was the only relief from the drudgery of work and unhealthy conditions of city life and an occasion for family reunion, enjoyment and participation in festivities.”138 The difficulty associated with becoming permanent urban residents, both financially and psychologically, could have played a role in workers’ choosing to keep their family ties intact.
10 The Reasons Behind Discontinuity
I could not come to work about a month ago. Suddenly, by coincidence, I ran into a relative of mine from my hometown. Since he was very sick, I had to go all the way to Manisa with him. I had planned to come back immediately to start working. But I had to deal with housing matters.
I spent fifteen days thinking I would come back either today or tomorrow. I respectfully ask your forgiveness for my mistake and your high orders and guidance to let me return to my job.
Aslan signed the petition: “laborious weaver at your factory, Aslan.” Both his foreman and the weavery superintendent opposed his re-employment, according to the notes they added to his petition. Aslan did win in the end, and he was re-employed, only to be fired for absenteeism a month later. Six months later, he was back at Bakırköy. Aslan’s story shows us two things. First, as a skilled weaver, Aslan did not even bother to give a legitimate excuse for his absence; unemployment was not a threat for him. Second, during the six months he was away, Aslan worked at the other state textile factory in Istanbul, Defterdar, despite his troubled employment history at Bakırköy.
Aslan did not give his true motive for leaving and coming back in his petition, but information from a 1943 inspection suggests a possible explanation. The inspectors compared the wages at the Bakırköy and Defterdar factories in 1940 and found that average wages were the same at that time. The following year, the average wage at Bakırköy slightly decreased, while it increased almost eight per cent at Defterdar. By 1943, Bakırköy workers were earning thirteen per cent less than Defterdar workers.139 Cemil’s employment history at Bakırköy resembles Aslan’s in that he was also fired for absenteeism multiple times. In 1945, he wrote that he had to leave due to family responsibilities. When he came back almost two years later, it became clear that he had been working at a private glassware factory in Istanbul. Aslan and Cemil exemplified what factory inspectors had observed in 1943: whenever the opportunity to work elsewhere arose, state workers did not hesitate to leave their factories. Workers on piece rate left because they could not reach the output rates due to low-quality raw materials and damaged machinery. Unable to save on their low wages, factory work lost its appeal for many state workers.140
The employment histories I have cited were by no means exceptional. Work on the shop floor was highly casual; voluntary quitting or firing for absenteeism was usually followed by re-employment. Rates of persistence were quite low. In 1942, only thirteen per cent of the workers had worked at the factory more than five years.141 Engineers in administrative positions within the factories
What does this newly found evidence teach us about labour turnover at Bakırköy? High turnover rates in the West, where there was an established industrial workforce, Makal argues, were a result of harsh working conditions. By contrast, in early republican Turkey, he attributes this mainly to continuing rural ties. If labour turnover was a response to working conditions, it should have been eliminated by the industrial welfare provisions.143 The employment histories of Bakırköy workers and the factory reports by industrial experts, however, prove that quitting was a form of resistance to the rigours of factory life.
Industrial experts were increasingly pointing to the arduous working conditions and the inadequacy of material incentives offered to workers as the main reasons behind the high labour turnover. In the absence of worker organisation or the craft control of the labour process, Bakırköy workers seeking better wages or better working conditions had no alternative but to quit. By way of comparison, in his analysis of the extraordinarily high labour turnover in American industry in the 1910s, Sanford M. Jabocy cited two contemporaries, Samuel Gompers, a cigar maker and a key figure in American labour history, and a government official, both of whom used the word “strike” to define the situation. A “vast striking back of individuals in desperation,” said Gompers, “a vast disorganized protest”; the official went for the term “individualistic strike.”144 The suspiciously long harvest seasons, the sequential ordering of wage demands and quitting, the negotiations on task and wage allocation upon return, and working at other industrial establishments during leave; these are all fragments from the lives of Bakırköy workers, fragments showing that turnover was a direct response to many of the problems they faced in their day-to-day operations such as close supervision, foreman abuse, and wretched working conditions. “Voting with their feet,” as Wally Seccombe termed it, was the only available option for them in the face of growing intensity of work, poor remuneration, lack of training and promotion opportunities, as well as bullying in the workplace.145
In the factory reports of the 1940s, productivity and scientific management increasingly sought to address turnover. Industrial experts were concerned
11 Industrial Welfare Policy
The interwar period witnessed the emergence of a management ethos that increasingly focused on the human aspect of labour. Having mastered the direct connection between greater control over labour and maximisation of profit under the American influences of Taylorism and Fordism, a growing number of industrial experts believed that they would have to take more positive steps if they were to win workers’ cooperation and loyalty.147 In the United States, the Hawthorne studies conducted by Elton Mayo and colleagues at Western Electric’s plant in Chicago between 1924 and 1932 demonstrated the importance of social incentives and management intervention in employee motivation. In the United Kingdom, the “management movement” took a turn for welfarist inflection and underlined the obligation to care for their workers’ wellbeing.148 The German scientific management tradition diverged from Taylorist practices
Industrial welfare provision has been one of the most popular topics among labour, economic, and political historians writing on early republican Turkey. As with other contexts of late and state-led industrialisation, historians have tended to view such policies as instruments in a broader policy of co-option or incorporation and repression of labour. The political conclusion in these analyses is obvious: By providing social benefits, the state managed to hinder the development of working-class consciousness.151 Recent historiography on social welfare, however, has challenged this reductionist view by analysing social welfare as a process shaped by diverse national and broader transnational forces.152 In his analysis of the Beveridge Plan, which had a powerful effect on postwar Turkish labour policy as we shall see in the next chapter, Göran Therborn warns against the treatment of state welfare policies as the manifestation of a clear and static political strategy. These policies are neither “an expression of supra-class benevolence nor a shrewd ruse of the ruling class [but] a manifestation of the inevitably contradictory and conflictual character of class rule.”153 The case in hand perfectly illustrates this complexity.
Despite extreme work intensification during the war years, labour costs in textile production stayed substantially higher than the norm. While total labour expenditure at state textile factories was thirty per cent more than the European average, labour productivity was only between thirty to sixty per cent of that at European textile factories.154 In his report on the Bakırköy Factory, after documenting the “extremely high labour cost,” Hösli proposed that hourly wages should be kept under thirty piasters and that the factory should increase non-monetary wages as well as welfare spending.
In fact, this was already the trend. Between 1941 and 1943, monthly monetary wages per worker increased from 29.43 liras to 61.32 liras, while non-monetary wages increased by more than ten times and amounted to 10.86 liras, that is, one sixth of the corresponding monetary wages. At Bakırköy, non-monetary wages comprised food and clothing only; housing and sales of cheaper food items (ucuz gıda maddeleri) were not provided. Welfare costs per worker also increased from 1.10 to 1.79 liras, and they included factory dispensary and medical treatment costs, sickness and work accident payments, and sports facilities. Overall, the monthly expenditure per worker increased by almost 2.5 times during 1943.155
Today, it is a must to provide the Turkish workers with not only material but also intellectual and moral sustenance; to endow them with the spiritual foundations and goals that the society and the regime are based on. And this can only be achieved by establishing institutions of moral education (such as schools, conferences, theatre, educational, and disciplinary institutions) that would transform workers into efficient and civilised members of society.158
The response of the economic affairs minister to these suggestions was absolutely positive. Boosting workers’ morale was now a priority, and recreational facilities would be used to trigger the “joy of work” among state workers.159 A prominent economics journal defined the joy of work as a prerequisite for a stable workforce and worker productivity the following year, and praised the
12 Industrial Welfare Provision during the War
The wellbeing of workers was now directly linked to business results, and nutrition in the workplace became one of the cornerstones of this renewed emphasis on the social standard of industrial workers. The first effort to systematise social provisions involved food provision in 1941. Worker malnutrition had been a widely reported problem, which the war further exacerbated.161 But in the face of soaring labour turnover, food provision was more a business urgency than a sense of social responsibility. As James Vernon has demonstrated, engineers had declared the industrial canteen “a sound business method of increasing the efficiency and productivity of the worker,” for it improved the health and physical condition of the workers and reduced absences, broken time, and the tendency to alcoholism. The canteens also gradually emerged as tools of vital importance in producing sociable citizens by conferring a set of values, such as respectability, sobriety, punctuality, and cleanliness through their architecture, furnishings, and service.162 The factory canteens functioned “as a prism of overlapping discourses and practices that connect work and home, individual productivity and social welfare, profit and health.”163
In the 1930s, workers had been left to their own devices, a 1940 inspection report on the social organisation of state factories claimed. As a result, state workers had developed some peculiar eating habits. Some had to get by on
In practice, hot meal provision varied enormously across state factories. Inspection reports reveal a great diversity of approaches taken by factories in providing for the nutrition of their workers. On average, the caloric value of the hot meal was between 1,000 and 1,500 calories—well below the limit then believed to be apt for an industrial worker, which was four thousand calories—and worker complaints on the quality of the food abounded.167 The wage cap was lifted in March 1945, and the food quality was improved to 1,500 to 1,800 calories, including 450 grammes of bread. The differential practices in food provision were also having a negative effect on workers’ morale and
Food provision at state factories gave rise to further heated debates in parliament on the social character of the state. A member of parliament lamented that the factories were turning into alms houses; others advocated the implementation of factory social services because Turkish state factories needed to be “places of compassion” to secure worker commitment. The disagreement spilled over into other realms of social welfare, such as educational opportunities for working-class children. At stake was not only the material wellbeing of the working classes; parliament feared the infiltration of socialist ideas. The minister for economic affairs assured his parliamentary colleagues that food provision addressed both productivity concerns and political fears; Turkish workers were slowly becoming “knowledgeable and alert about matters that interest them,” and “they are acquiring their rights.”169
At the Bakırköy Factory, the category table d’hôte made its first appearance in the remuneration tables in 1938. Referring to a meal offered at a fixed price and with few if any choices, the word suggests that all workers had to pay for food on the shop floor until 1941. In September 1938, Mehmet earned 17.39 liras a month before taxes, 1.52 liras of which he spent on the table d’hôte. In other words, 8.74 per cent per cent of his earnings before taxes were spent on food consumed at the factory.170 Earning almost thirty per cent less than Mehmet, Yakup paid 1.68 liras for his factory-provided food in January 1940. Although his earnings fell over the course of the year, his food expenses went up, bringing the percentage of his income spent on food to fifteen per cent.171 An analysis of the remuneration tables of different workers shows that, despite the differences in wage levels, the cost of food as a percentage of monthly earnings was never below eight per cent.
After 1941, food expenses were increasingly met by the factory. Canteen spending per worker at the Bakırköy Factory increased from 0.77 liras in 1941 to 3.16 liras in 1942, and to 9.90 liras in 1943.172 The threefold increase between 1942
At the 1941 meeting, Sümerbank also decided to provide clothing for its workers in two different forms. The first was the provision of work clothes. Between June 1941 and 1942, 14,114 pieces of protective gear, including wooden sabots and gloves, were given to workers whose work involved acidic and high temperature materials. The second form was selling materials produced at Sümerbank factories to workers at production cost. These included shoes, garments, undershirts, woollen socks, leather shirts, and underwear. In June 1941, the “Local Products Bazaar,” the sales agent of Sümerbank, started selling these materials to workers’ families at a low cost.175 The “clothing policy,” as it was termed by the Ministry of Economy, followed an eligibility rule known as “continuous service” to reduce labour turnover. For example, three criteria were assigned to the sale of cheap fabric: marital status, work discipline, and length of service. Married workers were given priority to meet the clothing needs of their household members. Workers without a record of absenteeism could buy a variety of fabrics to make both clothing and household textiles. At the Bakırköy Factory, careful records were kept and notes on absenteeism were jotted down. Workers with six months of service were given enough fabric to make one garment, those with one year of service received forty metres of fabric, those with three years of service received enough fabric for a coat, and those with six years of service were given a blanket.176 Yet, three years after the launch of the clothing provisions, the workers’ clothing situation had barely improved. Workers lacked work gear such as boots, protective glasses, and gloves; some were so poor that they came to work barefoot and suffered from lice.177
The social expenses at the factory were composed mainly of the hot meal, clothing, sports facilities, and medical treatment. The first two categories made up more than seventy per cent of total social expenses in 1942; the following year, their share increased to more than eighty-five per cent. Sickness was quite common among workers; medical treatment expenses made more than ten per cent of the total. Sickness pay was the bare minimum. And lastly, the sports facilities amounted to one to two per cent of total social expenses. That was it, Hösli wrote; workers’ social needs were far from being adequately addressed.179
Despite the high-minded rhetoric that accompanied social provision, the amount spent was hardly enough to have a widespread effect on workers’ loyalty or economic security. Through industrial welfare provision, the state aimed to achieve labour stability, with the ultimate goal of solving the productivity crisis at state textile factories. Three years in, factory inspectors admitted that social provision was proving insufficient in terms of labour retention.180 Besides the widening recognition of the direct connection between meeting the social and material needs of workers and productivity, industrial welfare provision was also a response to the reality of the low-wage labour market. Especially during the war years, wage rates lagged behind the increase in the cost of living.
With these allowances in kind, the state aimed to mitigate the decline in levels of remuneration.181 Industrial welfare provision in early republican Turkey should be understood as part of the historical increase in the cost of labour power since the mid-nineteenth century that took the form of benefits and services provided by the state. The trend is endemic to capitalism, as Seccombe argues, “due to the radical deficiencies of the wage form as a means of funding
13 Working-Class Housing in Early Republican Istanbul
When Gerhard Kessler, an exiled German economist and social policy expert arrived in Istanbul in 1933, he could not help but compare the housing conditions in the city with various European cities including London, Berlin, Vienna, Riga, and Bucharest. “I have seen no other city,” he wrote, “with such poor housing conditions.”183 In her memoirs, tobacco worker and later trade unionist Zehra Kosova gives as much space to the dreadful housing problem as to the extreme precarity and wretchedly hazardous working conditions. Terrified of the long commute to the factory, Nazlı, the main protagonist in the prominent journalist and political activist Suat Derviş’s 1936 social realist novel This is the Novel of Things that Actually Happen, compares her shaking body and knocking knees to Jesus carrying the cross on his way to his crucifixion.184
The situation was aggravated with the onset of the war, and especially after 1942 with the slowing down of the construction sector. By the end of the 1940s, there were estimated to be fifty thousand people without accommodation in Istanbul. In other words, one out of every sixteen people living in Istanbul did not have a proper home. Kessler estimated that half of them were sharing rundown houses with other families and lived in overcrowded dwellings under the threat of tuberculosis. A local social policy expert attributed the fifty thousand annual deaths from tuberculosis to poor sanitary conditions and overcrowding in working-class homes. The other half were forced to take the matter in their own hands by building their own dwellings, the gecekondu (lit., night-built).
A street with rundown houses in Bakırköy, 1930s
Already at the beginning of planned industrialisation, the housing problem was on the state’s agenda. By 1939, all new factories were providing some level and form of housing for their workers; a useful first step, the inspectors wrote, but nowhere near enough. At the Nazilli and Kayseri factories, the problem
In 1947, the Ministry of Labour labelled the government’s effort to solve the housing problem an “attempt to have a skilled workforce.” Writing in a trade union publication the following year, the head of the chp’s Workers Bureau, a department designed to control the trade union movement, lamented over the waste of precious work time and worker energy during long commutes. His chosen example was a Bakırköy worker living in Eyüp.187 Various authors in the labour press agreed that solving the problem of workers’ accommodation would not only push the wages down, it would also boost worker morale and, in turn, work effort.188
The aggregate data on housing hid yet another important difference: the difference between housing provision for the old and the new textile factories. In the same way as the emergence of company towns in other industrial contexts, geographical isolation was a factor determining the extent and content of welfare provision. Housing provision was born out of the economic necessity of attracting labour to undeveloped areas.189 In 1939, reports began to
In 1945, four inspectors, including the former director of the Bakırköy Factory, Fazlı Turga, estimated the number of houses that were urgently needed for each textile factory. They calculated that civil servants and workers at Bakırköy needed 153 and 750 houses, respectively. In addition, a barracks to accommodate fifty single workers was needed. The numbers, the inspectors warned, were based on the number of workers in work programmes, which was eight hundred workers for Bakırköy in 1945. The actual number of workers, however, was almost double. The situation was dire because compared with the seven per cent in Europe, Turkish workers spent twenty-five per cent of their monthly income on housing expenses.193 The following years did not see the construction of these houses, while reports continued to advise an expansionary housing policy. An International Labour Organization report on Turkey at the end of the decade describes the housing conditions as “universally recognised to be deplorable.” It underlined the close connection between decent and healthy housing, and the attainment of labour stability and efficiency.194 Left to their own devices during the time between these two reports,
14 The Move to Gecekondus
Workers’ housing in Istanbul had been a problem since the beginning of state-led industrialisation. During his 1933 visit to the Bakırköy Factory, the prime minister specifically asked Bay Fazlı if the factory had lodgings for female workers who commuted long distances.195 In 1934, the emergence of new working-class neighbourhoods in Yedikule and Zeytinburnu received press attention. Populated by factory workers as well as small business owners, the narrow and muddy streets and the dark and sunless houses of these neighbourhoods were under constant threat of fire and plague.196 By the 1940s, rents were increasing faster than wages, pushing the working poor to find their own solution to the housing problem.197 In the meantime, the population of Zeytinburnu was growing at a higher rate than other parts of the city. By the end of the decade, Zeytinburnu was the largest and most densely populated gecekondu area of Istanbul, and its residents established the first gecekondu dwellers’ organisation in 1948.198 By the beginning of the 1960s, there were five gecekondu neighbourhoods in Zeytinburnu, with more than forty per cent of residents working at factories.199
The connection between housing and public health, as well as working-class morality, was being increasingly viewed as both a medical and political issue in the scholarly surveys, unpublished official reports, and newspapers of the decade. Growing discontent with the government brought worker housing to the agenda of the 1947 party convention, at the end of which the provision
They call it the Light Palace, but it is lit by a gas lamp
On the door it reads “The Palace of Abundance,” but it is only beans cooking inside
The rooms of this “Spacious Palace” are but the size of a coffin
Faces sulk and tuberculosis abound in this “Joyful Palace of Health”203
The application form to work at the Bakırköy Factory asked for the address and the ownership status of workers’ houses. Until the mid-1940s, the majority of
“The majority of workers live in gecekondus,” claimed the head workers’ representative of the factory in 1951 during a conflict with a wood dealer. The representatives had come to an agreement to buy wood for the factory workers, but the delivery was delayed by more than a month. Winter was at the door, which meant transportation would be almost impossible due to the road situation in the squatter settlements, he explained.207 But the lack of infrastructure was hardly the only problem in the neighbourhood. Hüseyin told me why he and his wife had decided to stay away from the gecekondu settlement in 1949, preferring to share accommodation with his brother in Osmaniye. Throughout our conversation, he repeated how difficult it was to live on his wage. When I asked him if they had difficulty paying the rent, he responded: “Of course we did. The maximum I earned, including the bonuses, was forty-nine liras a month; calculate it, seven and a half hours a day [on hourly wage of thirty-eight piasters], and I paid twenty liras for rent … It did not even have a toilet inside. I paid half of my earnings on rent.” When asked if there was a housing shortage, he immediately notes the gecekondu area: “There was. Everywhere
For Ali, living in a gecekondu was not a matter of brevity. On the contrary, it was a matter of desperation. In 1950, Ali asked for the factory director’s permission to take half of his hot meal to his eight children. “We live in a gecekondu,” he said, “I can’t eat knowing that they don’t have enough.” The director refused, claiming that the main purpose of the hot meal was to increase the work effort.209 It would be hard to find any other archival evidence to better summarise the managerial perspective on industrial welfare measures.
15 Conclusion
The decision to renovate the Bakırköy Factory was taken in 1933, the decennial year of the Republic of Turkey. The enthusiasm around the new factory building enhanced the celebratory and proud tone of the times in three different ways. First, as the first step in centrally planned industrialisation, the project signified the beginning of a new developmental paradigm. Second, the new factory building fulfilled the industrial imagery that portrayed large factories as markers of national greatness and the advance of civilisation. True, the new factories constructed in the later years were larger in size, but as the comparison with the American slaughterhouse—the industrial workplace that Henry Ford argues the idea of the assembly line was taken from—suggests, the renovated textile plant realised the ideal of the factory as a huge, integrated machine. Finally, the new, large factory materialised the ideal of rebuilding the country’s physical and human infrastructure. Together with the nationalised
Through a micro-level study of industrial relations, I have shown that behind the ceremonial façade of a scientifically managed, worker-friendly industry, there hides a strictly authoritarian world of labour. Despite claims to a rationalisation of labour through more efficient organisation and modern work techniques, the internal organisation of the factory was a long way from bureaucratised protections and procedures such as standardised job requirements, promotion ladders, merit-rating systems, and rules concerning discipline and dismissal. These protections would emerge slowly but steadily after the 1950s, and have been projected backward onto the 1930s and 1940s by historians and the general public alike. In the 1930s and 1940s, productivity was sought mainly through technological investment and work intensification. An atmosphere of humiliation, harassment, and individual beatings suffused the worksite. Worker effort was maintained through close supervision and pressure.
In Istanbul, the main problem for factory directors was not so much the inadequacy of the labour supply but the problem of labour retention. Labour turnover was a response to inequitable payment systems and low remuneration, on the one hand, and harsh and arbitrary discipline, on the other. When the maintenance of effort and discipline was further obstructed because of wartime labour shortages, carrots were introduced in addition to sticks. Industrial welfare schemes gradually expanded after 1941, partly in line with transnational responses to the rise of the social and the labour question. Their workplace-level implementation, however, fostered various inequalities within and between factories. For state workers in Istanbul, the main line of distinction was housing. As state-led industrialisation turned Istanbul to a city of cramped housing conditions, state workers were left completely to their own devices. They became the first dwellers of gecekondus, the most visible manifestations of the structural transformations Turkey went through in the post-wwii period.
The momentum gained by industrial production during the war years did not improve the working and living conditions of state workers. By the end of the war, discontent with the chp’s economic policies was growing at the same time as the global winds of change were signalling a bigger role for the state in industrial relations. The chp quickly responded through institutional and legal arrangements, hoping to secure the support of the working classes.
Lilo Linke, Allah Dethroned: A Journey Through Modern Turkey (London: Constable and Co., 1937).
“Büyük Kaybımız: Fazlı Turga,” Feshane Mensucat Meslek Dergisi, no. 7 (1954), 1–2; “Bakırköy Bez Fabrikasının Yeni Daireleri Dün Açıldı,” Akşam, 14 August 1934.
Bilsay Kuruç, Belgelerle Türkiye İktisat Politikası, 1933–1935, vol. 2 (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1993), 269.
“Başvekil Hz. Sümer Bank Fabrikalarını Tetkik Ettiler,” Cumhuriyet, 22 November 1933; “Yeni Daireleri,” Akşam; Istanbul Ansiklopedisi, vol. 4 (Istanbul: Koçu Yayınları, 1960), 1,904.
Ira Katznelson, “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons,” in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, eds. Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 15–7.
Michael Burawoy, “Between the Labor Process and the State: The Changing Face of Factory Regimes under Advanced Capitalism,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 5 (1983), 587; Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism (London: Verso, 1985), 7–8.
Lindy Biggs, The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology and Work in America’s Age of Mass Production (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 2; Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 139; Gillian Darley, Factory (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 118.
Sibel Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 115–124.
“1,5 Milyon Metreden 5,5 Milyon Metreye,” Haber Akşam Postası, 5 July 1934; “Paşabahçedeki Fabrika Modern bir Hale Getiriliyor,” Cumhuriyet, 11 May 1936; “Sanayi Planının Tahakkukuna Doğru,” Milliyet, 14 August 1934.
“Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası,” Cumhuriyet, 13 May 1933.
“Başvekil Hz. Sümer Bank Fabrikalarını Tetkik Ettiler,” Cumhuriyet, 22 November 1933.
“Fabrikalarımız,” Haber Akşam Postası, 14 February 1934; “Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası,” Haber Akşam Postası, 11 May 1936; “Yeni Daireleri,” Akşam; Hans Landau, Kayseri, Ereğli, Nazilli, Merinos Fabrikaları Hakkında (n.p., 1938), 12; Sümerbank 1939 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu (Ankara: Titaş Basımevi, 1940), 5, Archival Collection of the Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Supreme Audit Board. Amb./Db.No: k.a./ 255.07.02.01.06.3227; “Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası,” Cumhuriyet, 13 May 1933; “Başvekil Hz.,” Cumhuriyet.
“Bez Fabrikası,” Haber Akşam Postası, 2 August 1934; “Yeni Daireleri,” Akşam; “Sanayileşme Yolunda Yeni Bir Adım,” Cumhuriyet, 14 August 1934.
Abidin Daver, “Devlet Fabrikalarında Sosyal Yardımlar,” Türk İşçisi, 12 Nisan 1947; Salahattin Güngör, “97 Yıl Önce Kurulan Bir Fabrika,” Türk İşçisi, 22 February 1947.
Selim Cavid, “Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası,” İktisadi Yürüyüş, no. 3 (1940), 12; Istanbul Ansiklopedisi 4, 1905; “Yakın ve Orta Doğu Bölge Toplantısına Sunulan Türk Raporu,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 24 (1947), 76; Fazlı Turga, “Bizde ve Dışarda Pamuk ve Pamuklu Sanayi xi,” Feshane Mensucat Dergisi, no. 3 (1949), 45.
Abdülkadir Gözen, “Bizde Devletçilik ve Devlet Endüstrisi,” Feshane Mensucat Meslek Dergisi, no. 1 (1949), 11.
Sümerbank Genel Umumi Müdürlük, “İktisat Vekâleti Yüksek Makamına,” Sümerbank Genel Müdürlüğü Personel Servisi Genel Müdürlük Kadroları, 1933–1940 (Sümer Holding Archives), 17 April 1940, 1.
Max von der Porten, “Devlet ve Hususi Sınai İşletmelerin Kontrolü ve Islahı,” 1939, Register k.a./ 255.07.02.01.06.1056.
James M. Barker, The Economy of Turkey: An Analysis and Recommendations for A Development Program (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1951), 115, 153.
“Sümerbank Sanayiimizin Hamisi ve Pişdarıdır,” Cumhuriyet, 29 July 1933; A. H. Hanson, The Structure and Control of State Enterprises in Turkey (Ankara: Public Administration Institute for Turkey and The Middle East, 1954), 13.
A. H. Hanson, Public Enterprise and Economic Development (London: Routledge, 1959), 121.
Richard Coopey and Alan McKinlay, “Power Without Knowledge? Foucault and Fordism, c. 1900–50,” Labor History 51, no. 1 (2010), 107, 114, 125; M. Rose & B. Jones, “Managerial Strategy and Trade Union Responses to Work Reorganisation Schemes at Establishment Level,” in Job Redesign: Critical Perspectives on the Labour Process, eds. David Knights, Hugh Willmott, and David Collinson (Brookfield: Gower, 1985), 99.
Hösli, Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor, 1943. Archival Collection of the Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Supreme Audit Board. Amb./Db.No: k.a./255.07.02.01.06.1241.
Ewald Sachsenberg, “Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Organizasyonu Hakkında,” 1937, Register k.a./255.07.02.01.06.1139.
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, The Development of Manufacturing Industry in Egypt, Israel and Turkey (New York, 1958), 55; Von der Porten, “Devlet ve Hususi Sınai İşletmelerin Kontrolü ve Islahı”; “Denizyollarile Akay ve Fabrikalar Nizamnamesi,” Haber Akşam Postası, 20 November 1935; Max von der Porten, Devlet Sermayeli Müesseseler Raporu, 1937. Archival Collection of the Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Supreme Audit Board. Amb./Db.No: k.a./255.07.02.01.06.1125; Barker, The Economy of Turkey, 153.
Hanson, Structure, 20–26; Barker, The Economy of Turkey, 153–156; Osman Okyar, “The Concept of Etatism,” The Economic Journal 75, no. 297 (1965), 101–102; Max Weston Thornburg, Graham Spry, and George Soule, Turkey: An Economic Appraisal (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1949), 203.
Sümerbank 1939 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu, 7; “Sümerbank İplik ve Dokuma Fabrikaları Müessesesi 1941 Yılı Raporu,” 1941 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Sümerbank Raporu (Ankara: Alaaddin Kıral Basımevi, 1942), 5–6; “Sümerbank Bakırköy Sanayii Müessesesinin 1949 Yılı Raporu,” Başbakanlık Umumi Murakebe Heyeti 1949 Yılı Raporları (Ankara: Başbakanlık Devlet Matbaası, 1950), 1–2; “Sümerbank İplik ve Dokuma Fabrikaları Müessesesi 1948 Yılı Raporu,” Sümerbank 1948 Senesi Faaliyet ve Hesap Devresine Ait İdare Meclisi Raporu, Bilanço, Kâr ve Zarar Hesabı (Izmit: Selüloz Basımevi, 1949), 4.
Hanson, Structure, 23–24; Barker, The Economy of Turkey, 156; “Sümerbank İşletmelerinde İşletmede İnsan ve İşçi Meseleleri,” Sümerbank 1945 Senesi Faaliyet ve Hesap Devresine Ait İdare Meclisi Raporu, Bilanço, Kâr ve Zarar Hesabı (Ankara: Başbakanlık Devlet Matbaası, 1946), 5.
Linke, Allah Dethroned, 309; Darina Martykanova, Reconstructing Ottoman Engineers: Archaeology of a Profession (1789–1914) (Lungarno Pacinotti: Pisa University Press, 2012), 97, 167; Selim Cavid, “Feshane Fabrikasında Bir Tedkik,” İktisadi Yürüyüş, no. 1 (1939), 9; Selim Cavid, “Fabrikalarımız: Izmit Kağıt Fabrikası,” İktisadi Yürüyüş, no. 6 (1940), 7, 21; “Büyük Kaybımız,” Mensucat, 1–2.
Linke, Allah Dethroned, 307–8.
Donald Everett Webster, The Turkey of Atatürk: Social Process in the Turkish Reformation (Philadelphia: The American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1939), 143–4.
Ahmet Ali Özeken, “Türkiye’de Sanayi İşçileri,” Sosyal Siyaset Konferansları Dergisi, no. 1 (1949), 64; Thornburg et al., Economic Appraisal, 130.
Kemal Sülker, “Fabrika Müdürleri Arasında Yerleşmeye Başlayan Zihniyet,” Gece Postası, 3 April 1956.
Muzaffer Daysal, “Bakırköy Bez Fabrikasında,” Hürbilek, 7 April 1950.
Bauer, Bakırköy Fabrikası İğleri Hakkında, (n.p., 1934); Sadi Irmak, “Yeni Kanunlarımız,” Çalışma Dergisi 1, no. 3 (1946), 1–2; “Türk Raporu,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 62; “Prodüktivite ve Memleketimizde Prodüktiviteyi Artırmağa Matuf Tedbirler,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi 1, no. 2 (1953), 6, 38–50.
Barker, The Economy of Turkey, 117.
W.O. Wegenstein and G.W. Käser, “Management and Organisation of the Turkish State Monopolies,” Başvekalet Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Kitaplığı, no. 222 (1958), 4, 20–1; Sümerbank 1943 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu (Ankara: Başbakanlık Devlet Matbaası, 1944).
Sanford M. Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in the 20th Century (London: Routledge, 1985), 5–6.
Sebahat Yürekli, interview by the author, 4 June 2019.
“İşletmede İnsan,” 17.
“Yurdun En Büyük İşçi Sendikası Kömür Havzasında Kuruldu,” Türk İşçisi, 12 April 1947.
Sait Kesler, “Çalışma Bakanlığının Büyük Hizmeti: Kalifiye İşçi Kursları,” Türk İşçisi, 28 June 1947.
John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutionalized Organisations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 2 (1977), 341–343.
Şefik Ungun, “Hayat Pahalılığı Karşısında Devlet İşletmelerinde İşçi Ücretleri ve Sosyal Yardımlar,” Feshane Mensucat Meslek Dergisi 2, no. 6 (1949), 94; “İş ve İşçi Hayatı Bakımından Önemli Toplantılar,” Türk İşçisi, 3 May 1947.
Raufi Manyas, “İş, İşçi, İşsizlik,” İktisadi Yürüyüş no. 2 (1940), 9; “Türk Raporu,” 61.
Thornburg et. Al., Economic Appraisal, 129–30.
Asım Kocabaş, interview by the author, 3 August 2009.
Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernisation of Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 96; Max von der Porten, “Kayseri Fabrikası İplik ve Dokuma Daireleri Hakkında,” 1939, Register k.a./255.07.02.01.06.1114.
Sümerbank Genel Müdürlük Yüksek Katına, “Fabrikalarımızın 1945 Senesi Faaliyetleri, Neticeleri ve Tahlilleri,” 9 February 1946, file 730 05 01 ek 1–11 16–111, Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry General Directory of State Archives, 29.
Kuruç, Belgelerle, vol. 2, 227.
Cavid, “Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası,” 12.
“İşletmede İnsan,” 8–10.
Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 24 (1947), 88.
“İşletmede İnsan,” 10.
Sümerbank Genel Müdürlük Yüksek Katına, “Fabrikalarımızın,” 29; “97 Yıl Önce Kurulan Fabrika,” Türk İşçisi (1947); “Sümerbank 1942 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu,” Sümerbank 1942 Senesi Faaliyet ve Hesap Devresine Ait İdare Meclisi Raporu, Bilanço, Kâr ve Zarar Hesabı (Ankara, 1943), 160, Amb./Db.No: k.a./230.1/338.4, Prime Ministry Supreme Auditory Board Archives.
Von der Porten, “Kayseri Fabrikası İplik ve Dokuma Daireleri Hakkında”.
“İşletmede İnsan,” 4; Sabahaddin Zaim, Bölge ve Şehir Planlaması Yönünden Istanbul Sanayi Bölgeleri (Istanbul: Istanbul Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1971), 269.
Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles: The Crisis in Global Fordism (New York: Verso, 1987), 61.
International Labour Office, “Labour Problems in Turkey,” Report of a Mission of the International Labour Office (Geneva: ILO, 1950), 16; Thornburg et. al., Economic Appraisal, 130.
Korkut Boratav, 100 Soruda Gelir Dağılımı (Istanbul: Gerçek Yayınları, 1969), 162; Ahmet İnsel, Düzen ve Kalkınma Kıskacında Türkiye, Kalkınma Sürecinde Devletin Rolü (Istanbul: Ayrıntı Yayınları, 1996), 228–229; Ahmet İnsel, “Devletçiliğin Anatomisi,” Cumhuriyet Dönemi Türkiye Ansiklopedisi, vol. 2 (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1984), 422; Yıldırım Koç, Türkiye’de İşçi Sınıfı ve Sendikacılık Tarihi: Olaylar-Değerlendirmeler (Ankara: Türkiye Yol-İş Sendikası Yayınları, 1996), 30; M. Şehmuz Güzel, “1940’larda İşgücünün (İşçilerin) Özellikleri,” Mülkiyeliler Birliği Dergisi, no. 119 (1940), 18–22.
Bereznitsky, Kayseri Bez Fabrikası Hakkında (n.p., 1936); “Sümerbank Birleşik Pamuk İpliği ve Dokuma Fabrikaları Müessesesi 1939 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu, 37,” Sümerbank 1939 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu (Ankara: Titaş Basımevi, 1940), 39, Amb./Db.No: k.a./ 255.07.02.01.06.3227, Prime Ministry Supreme Auditory Board Archives; Hösli, Ereğli Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor (n.p., 1940); Hösli, Nazilli Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor; Hösli, Merinos Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor (n.p., 1943); “Sümerbank 1942 Senesi Faaliyet ve Hesap Devresine Ait İdare Meclisi Raporu, Bilanço, Kâr ve Zarar Hesabı,” Sümerbank 1942 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu (Ankara: Başvekalet Devlet Matbaası, 1943), 23; Sümerbank Genel Müdürlük Yüksek Katına, “Fabrikalarımızın,” 31; Sabahaddin Zaim, “Türkiye Mensucat Sanayiinde Ücretler,” Sosyal Siyaset Konferansları, Sekizinci Kitap (1956), 37–8; “Sümerbank İplik ve Dokuma Fabrikaları Müessesesi 1948 Yılı Raporu,” 33–4.
3460 Sayılı Kanuna Bağlı Devlet Ekonomi Kurumlarının 1943 Yılı İşlemleriyle Bilanço ve Kâr ve Zarar Hesaplarını İnceleyen Genel Kurul Tutanağı (Ankara: Başbakanlık Devlet Matbaası, 1945).
Suat Aray, “İktisadi Devlet Teşekkülleri Ücret Rejimi,” 1951, Register k.a./255.07.02.01.06.1119, Prime Ministry Supreme Auditory Board Archives.
Ziyaeddin Fahri Fındıkoğlu, “Türkiye’de Sınai Sosyoloji Araştırmaları 1-Defterdar Fabrikası,” Feshane Mensucat Meslek Dergisi 2, no. 12 (1954), 393.
Personnel file of Ahmet Ergün.
Personnel files of Ahmet Cansızoğlu and Kamil Uygun; Daysal, “Bakırköy Bez Fabrikasında.”
Ahmet Makal, Ameleden İşçiye: Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemi Emek Tarihi Çalışmaları (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2007), 159.
“Sümerbank İplik ve Dokuma Fabrikaları Müessesesi 1945 Yılı Raporu,” Sümerbank 1945 Senesi Faaliyet ve Hesap Devresine Ait İdare Meclisi Raporu, Bilanço, Kâr ve Zarar Hesabı (Ankara: Başbakanlık Devlet Matbaası, 1946), 32; Ahmet Makal, Ameleden İşçiye, 132–133; Makal based his calculations on the wage data published by Zaim in 1956. See: Sabahaddin Zaim, Istanbul Mensucat Sanayiinin Bünyesi ve Ücretler (Istanbul: Istanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Yayını, 1956).
Sümerbank Genel Müdürlük Yüksek Katına, “Fabrikalarımızın,” 30. The lira contains 100 piasters.
Von der Porten, “Feshane ve Hereke Fabrikaları Tetkiklerine Dair,” 1936, Register k.a./255.07.02.01.06.1285; Hösli, Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor; Klopfer, Sümerbank Memur ve Amelelerine Prim ve İkramiye Esasları hak, (n.p., 1941).
Sachsenberg, “Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Organizasyonu Hakkında”.
“Sümerbank Birleşik Pamuk İpliği ve Dokuma Fabrikaları Müessesesi 1939 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu,” 37.
Sachsenberg, “Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Organizasyonu Hakkında”; Max von der Porten, “Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında,” 1936, Register k.a./255.07.02.01.06.1285.
Burawoy, Politics of Production, 131.
Kocabaş, interview.
“Sümerbank Birleşik Pamuk İpliği ve Dokuma Fabrikaları Müessesesi 1939 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu,” 39.
“Sümerbank Birleşik Pamuk İpliği ve Dokuma Fabrikaları Müessesesi 1939 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu,” 37.
Von der Porten, “Kayseri Fabrikası İplik ve Dokuma Daireleri Hakkında.”
“Sümerbank 1942 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu,” 162.
“Fabrikalarımızın 1945 Senesi Faaliyetleri, Neticeleri ve Tahlilleri,” 9 February 1946, file 730 05 01 ek 1–11 16–111, Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry General Directory of State Archives, 29.
“c.h.p. İlçe İdare Kurulu Başkanlığına,” Correspondence between 22 July 1949 and 10 March 1950, file 490.01.1444.23.1, Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry General Directory of State Archives.
Max von der Porten, “Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında.”
I have written elsewhere about the transfer of the German version of scientific management, Rationalisierung, to Turkish state factories in the 1930s and how it lost its emphasis on the “humanisation” of work during this transfer. See: “Experts, Exiles, and Textiles: German ‘Rationalisierung’ on 1930s Turkish Shop Floor,” International Review of Social History 66, no. 2 (2021).
Sait Dilik, “Atatürk Döneminde Sosyal Politika,” Ankara Üniversitesi sbf Dergisi 40, no. 1 (1985), 97.
Von der Porten, “Kayseri Fabrikası İplik ve Dokuma Daireleri Hakkında.”
Personnel file of Mustafa Arap.
Nusret Ekin, “Türkiye’de Endüstri İlișkilerinin Gelişimi ve 1936 İş Kanunu,” Sosyal Siyaset Konferansları Dergisi, no. 35–36 (1986), 33–51.
Makal, Ameleden İşçiye, 196.
Rebi Barkın, “Heder Olan İş Saatleri,” Hürbilek, 19 June 1948; ILO, “Labour Problems in Turkey,” 18.
Kocabaş, interview.
Interview with Ahmet Cansızoğlu by Yıldırım Koç, 1988, video recording V1/51, Trade Union Movement in Turkey Oral History Collection.
Hösli, Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor, 6.
Sümerbank Genel Müdürlük Yüksek Katına, “Fabrikalarımızın,” 12.
Cited in Kemal H. Karpat, Turkey’s Politics: The Transition to a Multi-Party System (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2016), 90.
İktisadi Yürüyüş, no. 4 (1940), 16.
“Sümerbank Birleşik Pamuk İpliği ve Dokuma Fabrikaları Müessesesi 1940 Yılı Raporu,” Sümerbank 1940 Senesi Faaliyet ve Hesap Devresine Ait İdare Meclisi Raporu, Bilanço, Kâr ve Zarar Hesabı, 17, 25.
United Nations, Egypt, Israel and Turkey, 17–18; United Nations, Review of Economic Conditions in the Middle East 1951–1952 (New York, 1953), 36.
Hösli, Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor, 2, 16; “Fabrikalarımızın 1945 Senesi Faaliyetleri, Neticeleri ve Tahlilleri,” 9 February 1946, file 730 05 01 ek 1–11 16–111, Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry General Directory of State Archives.
Hösli, Bakırköy, 10–19.
John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London: Routledge, 1974), 227. For the change in the foreman’s role and status, see especially the following contemporary publications: “Foremen and superintendents,” Scientific American 22, no. 6 (1870); Allen Rogers, “The Technically Trained Foreman,” Scientific American 105, no. 12 (1911); Hollis Godfrey, “The Foreman,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 85 (1919); Benjamin E. Mallary, “The Foreman-His Training and Education,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 91 (1920); Louis Ruthenburg, “Training the foremen of a manufacturing organisation,” sae Transactions 20 (1925); William F. Whyte and Burleigh B. Gardner, “Facing the foreman’s problems,” Applied Anthropology 4, no. 2 (1945); Kenneth K. Kolker, “The Changing Status of the Foreman,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 22, no. 3 (1948); Donald E. Wray, “Marginal Men of Industry: The Foremen,” American Journal of Sociology 54, no. 4 (1949); Sidney C. Sufrin, “Foremen and Their Social Adjustment,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 4, no. 3 (1951); Robert G. Scigliano, “Trade-Unionism and the Industrial Foreman,” The Journal of Business 27, no. 4 (1954).
Personnel files of Mehmet Hetman and Ahmet Çelenoğlu.
Linke, Allah Dethroned, 306.
Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Masters of the Shop Floor: Foremen and Soviet Industrialisation,” in Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath, eds. Nick Lampert and Gábor T. Rittersporn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), 176.
Sümerbank Genel Müdürlük, “Sümerbank Sanayiinin İhtiyacı Olan Elemanı Yetiştirme Planı Hakkında,” 26 February 1946, file 730 05 01 ek 1–11 16–111, Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry General Directory of State Archives; Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 24 (1947), 70; Barker, The Economy of Turkey, 116–7.
Linke, Allah Dethroned, 309.
“Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Basit Bir Hadiseyi Ne Maksatla Polise Aksettirdi?” and “Bir Hadise Daha,” Hürbilek, 19 June 1948.
Personnel file of Ahmet Çelenoğlu.
Hüseyin Yılmaz, interview by the author, 4 August 2009.
Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy, 17.
“Gece Postası Gazetesi Yazı İşleri Müdürlüğü Yüksek Makamına,” 10 July 1955, Kemal Sülker Papers, Folder no. 402, iish.
“Fabrikalarımızın 1945 Senesi Faaliyetleri, Neticeleri ve Tahlilleri,” 9 February 1946, file 730 05 01 ek 1–11 16–111, Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry General Directory of State Archives; Max von der Porten, “Beykoz Deri ve Kundura Fabrikasında Memur ve Ameleden Ne Gibi Tasarruflar Yapılabileceği Hakkında,” 1939, Register k.a./ 255.07.02.01.06.1075.
“Sanayileşme Yolunda,” Cumhuriyet.
Chris Ward, “Languages of Trade or a Language of Class? Work Culture in Russian Cotton Mills in the 1920s,” in Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity, eds. Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Gregory Suny (New York: İthaca, 1994), 194–219.
Max Von der Porten, Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında (n.p., 1936).
Von der Porten, Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında; “Sümerbank Birleşik Pamuk İpliği ve Dokuma Fabrikaları Müessesesi 1940 Yılı Raporu,” 17–27; Samet Ağaoğlu, “İş İstatistikleri ıv,” İktisadi Yürüyüş, no. 65 (1942), 14; Samet Ağaoğlu, “İş İstatistikleri v,” İktisadi Yürüyüş, no. 66–67 (1942), 42.
Webster, The Turkey of Atatürk, 250; Thornburg et al., Economic Appraisal, 129–130.
Hösli, Bakırköy, 19.
“Sümerbank İplik ve Dokuma Fabrikaları Müessesesi 1945 Yılı Raporu.”
Salahattin Güngör, “97 Yıl Önce.”
Sümerbank Genel Müdürlük Yüksek Katına, “Fabrikalarımızın,” 30–35; Hiroaki Kuromiya, “The Commander and the Rank and File: Managing the Soviet Coal-Mining Industry, 1928–33,” in Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialisation, eds. William G. Rosenberg and Lewis H. Siegelbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 152.
Von der Porten, “Feshane ve Hereke Fabrikaları Tetkiklerine Dair.”
Personnel file of Cemil Kotman.
“Produktivite ve Memleketimizde Produktiviteyi Artırmağa Matuf Tedbirler,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi 1, no. 2 (1953), 38–50.
Nusret Ekin, “Memleketimizde İşçi Devri Mevzuunda Yapılan Araștırmalar ve Ortaya Koydukları Neticeler,” Sosyal Siyaset Konferansları Dokuzuncu, Onuncu, Onbirinci Kitap (Istanbul, 1960), 123–192.
Walker Hines et al., Türkiye”nin İktisadi Bakımdan Umumi Bir Tetkiki, 1933–1934 (Ankara: Mehmed İhsan Matbaası, 1936), 238; Makal, Ameleden İşçiye, 121; Oya Silier, Türkiye’de Tarımsal Yapının Gelişimi (1923–1938) (Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi İdari Bilimler Fakültesi Yayınları, 1981), 95; Kazgan, on the other hand, argues that from the mid-1930s onward, the process of impoverishment started in the countryside, giving way to loosening ties with the land: Gülten Kazgan, Tarım ve Gelișme (Istanbul: Fakülteler Matbaası, 1977), 273; Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, “Introduction,” in India’s Labouring Poor: Historical Studies c.1600–2000, eds. Rana Behal and Marcel van der Linden (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press India, 2007), 18.
“İşletmede İnsan,” 19.
Suat Aray, “Sanayi İşletmelerinde İşçi Hareketleri ve Bunların Zirai Sebeplerle İlgileri,” 1950, Register k.a./255.07.02.01.06.1153, Prime Ministry Supreme Auditory Board Archives.
“Sümerbank 1942 Senesi Faaliyet ve Hesap Devresine Ait İdare Meclisi Raporu, Bilanço, Kâr ve Zarar Hesabı,” Sümerbank 1942 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu (Ankara: Başvekalet Devlet Matbaası, 1943), 23; Bereznitsky, Kayseri Bez Fabrikası Hakkında; Hösli, Nazilli Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor; Hösli, Merinos Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor (n.p., 1943); ILO, “Labour Problems in Turkey,” 216.
“İşletmede İnsan,” 14–8.
For example, Yüksel Akkaya argues: “Women worked until they got married. Since they married at an early age, their length of employment was relatively short and this hindered the development of class consciousness.” See: Yüksel Akkaya, “Türkiye’de İşçi Sınıfı ve Sendikacılık 1 (Kısa özet),” Praksis, no. 5 (2002), 135.
“Sümerbank İplik ve Dokuma Fabrikaları Müessesesi 1948 Yılı Raporu,” Sümerbank 1948 Senesi Faaliyet ve Hesap Devresine Ait İdare Meclisi Raporu, Bilanço, Kâr ve Zarar Hesabı (Izmit: Selüloz Basımevi, 1949), Archival Collection of the Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Supreme Audit Board. Amb./Db. No: k.a./ 255.07.02.01.06.3272, 30–1.
Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 24 (1947), 64.
Sümerbank Genel Müdürlük Yüksek Katına, “Fabrikalarımızı,” 30.
Hösli, Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor, 12.
Hösli, Nazilli Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor (1943), n.p.
Personnel files of Murat Özcan, Süleyman Yapıcı, and İsmail Menenlioğlu.
Düstur 3, Tertip, v. 31, November 1949-October 1950. Ankara: Bașbakanlık Devlet Matbaası, 1950, 713.
Chitra Joshi, “Kanpur Textile Labour: Some Structural Features of Formative Years,” Economic and Political Weekly 16, no. 44/46 (1981), 1,823.
“Sümerbank 1942 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu,” 34.
“Sümerbank 1943 Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu,” Archival Collection of the Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Supreme Audit Board. Amb./Db. No: k.a./255.07.02.01.06.3246, 49.
Hösli, Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor, 13.
Aray, “Sanayi İșletmelerinde İșçi Hareketleri ve Bunların Zirai Sebeplerle İlgileri,” 14.
Makal, Ameleden İşçiye, 53.
Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy, 24, 90.
Wally Seccombe, Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline (London: Verso, 1995), 92.
Hösli, Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor; Özeken, “Sanayi İşçileri,” 64.
Mayo, E., The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilisation (New York: MacMillan, 1933); Mayo, E., The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilisation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949).
Daniel Ussishkin, “The ‘Will to Work’: Industrial Management and the Question of Conduct in Inter-war Britain,” in Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-building in Britain between the Wars, eds. Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas (London: University of London Press, 2011), 91–108, 93.
Karsten Uhl, Humane Rationalisierung? Die Raumordnung der Fabrik im Fordistischen Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Transkript Verlag, 2014), 149-50; Nolan, Visions of Modernity, 84; Mary Nolan, “Das Deutsche Institut für Technische Arbeitsschulung und die Schaffung des: Neuen Arbeiters,” in Rationale Beziehungen? Geschlechterverhältnisse im Rationalisierungsprozess, eds. Dagmar Reese, Eve Rosenhaft, Carola Sachse, and Tilla Siegel (Frankfurt am Main: Sührkamp, 1993), 189–221.
Stephen Kotkin, “Modern Times: The Soviet Union and The Interwar Conjunction,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2, no. 1 (2001), 146–7.
Koç, Olaylar-Değerlendirmeler, 30; Boratav, Gelir Dağılımı, 162.
Paulo Drinot, The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race, and the Making of the Peruvian State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 193–196; Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation (Oakland: University of California Press, 1997), 19–20; Yiğit Akın, “Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemi Emek Tarihçiliğine Katkı: Yeni Yaklaşımlar, Yeni Kaynaklar,” Tarih ve Toplum, no. 2 (2005), 73–111; Can Nacar, “Working Class in Turkey during the World War ii Period: Between Social Policies and Everyday Experiences” (master’s thesis, Boğaziçi University, 2004); Murat Metinsoy, İkinci Dünya Savaşı’nda Türkiye: Savaş ve Gündelik Yaşam (Istanbul: Homer, 2007), 273–58.
Göran Therborn, What does the Ruling Class do When it Rules? State Apparatuses and State Power under Feudalism, Capitalism and Socialism? (London: New Left Books, 1978), 240.
Hösli, Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor, 15; Özeken, “Sanayi İşçileri,” 62.
Hösli, Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor, 14.
Turan Yazgan, Türkiye’de Sosyal Güvenlik Sistemi (Istanbul: İktisadi Araştırmalar Vakfı, 1969), 15.
Şevket Süreyya Aydemir, İkinci Adam Birinci Cilt, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Remzi Yayınevi, 1984), 447; “Sümerbank Birleşik Pamuk İpliği ve Dokuma Fabrikaları Müessesesi 1939 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu.”
“Sümerbank Fabrikaları İçtimai Teşkilat 1940 Yılı Raporu,” Sümerbank 1940 Senesi Faaliyet ve Hesap Devresine Ait İdare Meclisi Raporu, Bilanço, Kâr ve Zarar Hesabı (Ankara: tbmm Matbaası, 1941), 27–8.
Sümerbank’ın 1940 yılı Muamelatile Bilanço, Kâr ve Zarar Hesaplarının Tetkikine Dair Olan Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu Hakkında İktisat Vekâleti Mütaelası, 10.
“Endüstri Hayatında Mühim Bir Dava: İşçi ve İçtimai Teşkilat,” İktisadi Yürüyüş Sümerbank Fevkalade Sayısı, no. 61–2, (1942), 11–2.
Ungun, “Hayat Pahalılığı,” 94.
James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 160–80.
Frank Trentmann, “Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption,” Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 3 (2004), 373–401; Rory Archer and Goran Musić, “Not All Canteens Are Created Equal: Food Provision for Yugoslav Blue-Collar Workers in Late Socialism,” in Brotherhood and Unity at the Kitchen Table? Cooking, Cuisine and Food Culture in Socialist Yugoslavia, eds. Ruža Fotiadis, Vladimir Ivanović, and Radina Vučetić (Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2020), 75–95.
“Sümerbank Fabrikaları İçtimai Teşkilat 1940 Yılı Raporu,” 22–3; Sümerbank Fabrikalarının İşçi Meseleleri ve İçtimai Teşkilatı Hakkında Rapor (1941), 38. Archival Collection of the Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Supreme Audit Board. Amb./Db.No: k.a./255.07.02.01.06.3236.
“Sümerbank Fabrikaları İçtimai Teşkilat 1940 Yılı Raporu,” 22–3; “Sümerbank’ın 1940 yılı Muamelatile Bilanço, Kâr ve Zarar Hesaplarının Tetkikine Dair Olan Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu Hakkında İktisat Vekâleti Mütaelası,” 1941 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Sümerbank Raporu (Ankara: Alaaddin Kıral Basımevi, 1942), 9.
“1941 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Sümerbank Raporu,” 29; “Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Sümerbank Fabrikalarının İşçi Meseleleri ve İçtimai Teşkilatı 1941 Yılı Raporu Hakkında Mütalaalar,” 1941 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Sümerbank Raporu (Ankara: Alaaddin Kıral Basımevi, 1942), 26; Sümerbank Fabrikalarının İşçi Meseleleri ve İçtimai Teşkilatı Hakkında Rapor (1941), 39–41.
Sümerbank Fabrikalarının İşçi Meseleleri ve İçtimai Teşkilatı Hakkında Rapor (1941), 39–41; Can Nacar, “Our Lives were not as Valuable as an Animal: Workers in State-Run Industries in World War-ii Turkey,” International Review of Social History 54, no. 17 (2009), 157–8.
Sümerbank 1944 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu (Ankara: Başbakanlık Devlet Matbaası, 1945), 6, 41.
3460 Sayılı Kanuna Bağlı İktisadi Teşekküllerin 1940 Yılı Bilançoları ile Kâr ve Zarar Hesaplarını Tetkik Eden Umumi Murakebe Heyet Zaptı, vol. 3 (Ankara: tbmm Matbaası, 1942), 137–43.
Personnel file of Mehmet Ak.
Personnel file of Yakup Davulcu.
Hösli, Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor.
Hösli, Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor, 44.
“İplik ve Dokuma Fabrikaları Müessesi 1944 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu,” Sümerbank 1944 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu.
1941 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Sümerbank Raporu, 29–30.
“Endüstri Hayatında,” İktisadi Yürüyüş; 1941 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Sümerbank Raporu, 30.
Sümerbank 1944 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu, 40.
Hösli, Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor.
Hösli, Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası Hakkında Rapor, 44.
Sümerbank 1944 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu, 45.
International Labour Office, “Labour Problems in Turkey,” Report of a Mission of the International Labour Office (Geneva: ILO, 1950), 16; Thornburg et. Al., Economic Appraisal, 131.
Seccombe, Weathering The Storm, 16–7.
Gerhard Kessler, “Istanbul’da Mesken Darlığı, Mesken Sefaleti, Mesken İnşaatı,” Arkitekt 18, no. 209 (1949), 131–133.
Zehra Kosova, Ben İşçiyim (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1996); Suat Derviş, Bu Roman Olan Şeylerin Romanıdır (Istanbul: İthaki, 1936), 33.
Gerhard Kessler, “Istanbul’da Mesken Darlığı,” 133; Cahit Talas, “Mesken Davamız,” Ankara Üniversitesi sbf Dergisi 10, no. 1 (1955), 2; İlhan Tekeli, Türkiye’de Yaşamda ve Yazında Konut Sorununun Gelişimi (Ankara: t.c. Başbakanlık Toplu Konut İdaresi Başkanlığı, 1996), 45; Halit Ünal, “Mesken Davası,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi 1, no. 3 (1953), 25–33; “Gecekondular,” Nuh’un Gemisi, no. 6 (1949), 3.
Sümerbank Birleşik Pamuk İpliği ve Dokuma Fabrikaları Müessesesi 1939 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu, 42; “Sümerbank Fabrikaları İçtimai Teşkilat 1940 Yılı Raporu,” 20; Sümerbank 1944 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu, 40–2; Aydemir, Ş. Süreyya, Bülent Büktaş, Fazlı Turga, and Turgut Akkaş, Devlet Endüstrisinde Çalışan Personelin İşletmeler Civarına Yerleştirme Şekilleri Hakkında (1945), Archival Collection of the Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Supreme Audit Board. Amb./Db.No: k.a./255.07.02.01.06.1163.
Barkın, “Heder Olan İş Saatleri.”
“Yurdun En Büyük İşçi Sendikası Kömür Havzasında Kuruldu,” Türk İşçisi, 12 April 1947; Rahmi Alp “İşçi Teminati,” Türk İşçisi, 5 July 1947; Koyulhisarlioğlu, “Mesken Meselesi,” Türk İşçisi, 16 August 1947.
Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy, 40.
Sümerbank 1939 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu, 18; Sümerbank 1941 Yılı Umumi Murakebe Heyeti Raporu, 4, Archival Collection of the Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Supreme Audit Board. Amb./Db.No: k.a./255.07.02.01.06.3236.
“Endüstri Hayatında,” İktisadi Yürüyüş.
Gerhard Kessler, “Zonguldak ve Karabükteki Çalışma Şartları,” Istanbul Üniversitesi İktisat ve İçtimaiyat Enstitüsü ayrı bası, no. 11 (Istanbul: Kenan Matbası, 1949), 31–2.
Aydemir et al., “Devlet Endüstrisinde.”
ILO, Labour Problems in Turkey, 16.
“Başvekil Hz.,” Cumhuriyet.
“İşçi Mahallesi,” Haber Akşam Postası, 20 March 1934.
Necip T. Tesal, Milli Korunma Mevzuatı ve Kiralar Hakkında (1952), Archival Collection of the Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Supreme Audit Board. Amb./Db.No:k.a./255.07.02.01.06.1287.
“Zeytinburnu Çimento Fabrikasında Toplulukla İş Uyuşmazlığı Kesin Olarak Kotarıldı,” Türk İşçisi, 16 August 1947; Charles W. M. Hart, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bölgesi, trans. Nephan Saran (Istanbul: Istanbul Ticaret Odası Yayınları, 1969); Ruşen Keleş, Urbanisation in Turkey (New York: Ford Foundation, 1971), 84; İlhan Tekeli, Türkiye’de Yaşamda ve Yazında Konut Sorununun Gelişimi (Ankara: t.c. Başbakanlık Toplu Konut İdaresi Başkanlığı, 1996), 45.
Hart, Zeytinburnu, 67: Kemal Sülker, “Valinin 35000 Gecekondu Arasında Yaptığı Tetkikler,” Gece Postası, 3 November 1949.
Barış Alp Özden, “Health, Morality and Housing: The Politics of Working-Class Housing in Turkey,” New Perspectives on Turkey 49 (2013), 91–120.
Rebi Barkın, “Gecekonduların Durumu,” Hürbilek, 17 April 1948.
“Partimizin Meslek Teşekkülleriyle Münasebet ve Temasları Hakkında Umumi Mütalaa,” in “chp Genel İdare Kurulu’nun İşçi Raporunun Divan’da Görüşüleceği,” file 490.453.1867.6, Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry General Directory of State Archives, 5.
Munip Koçoğlu, “Gecekondunun Sefaletini Bir Sarayın Rehaverinde Dile Getirmek İmkansızdır,” İşçi Hakkı, 15 November 1951, 2.
Although the name was already in use in the late 1940s, it was not the official name of the neighbourhood until the 1950s. Sümer Neighbourhood should not be confused with the Sümer Houses (Sümer Evleri), which were two-storey houses built by the workers’ cooperatives later in the 1950s in Kartaltepe.
İbrahim Sevme, telephone interview by the author, 1 March 2009; Faik Akçay, Zeytinburnu: Gerçek Yönleriyle Bir Gecekondu Kenti (Istanbul: Çelikcilt Matbaası, 1974), 13.
Personnel file of Hayri Önen.
“Bakırköy İşçileri,” İşçi Hakkı, 11 October 1951.
Ergin Aygöl (Ahmet’s son), interview by the author, online, 15 February 2022.
Daysal, “Bakırköy Bez Fabrikasında.”
“Türk Raporu,” 60.