[T]he historian who encounters such letters as these, and then turns back to the licensed press or to the papers of the great, has a sense of double vision. On the surface all is consensus, deference, accommodation; the dependants petition abjectly for favour; every hind is touching his forelock … Then, from an anonymous and obscure level, there leaps to view for a moment violent Jacobite or Levelling abuse. We should take neither the obeisances nor the imprecations as indications of final truth; both could flow from the would now seem, Richard Cobb tells us, that half the valets of pre-Revolutionary Paris, who followed the nobility servilely through the suave salons, were nourishing in their reveries anticipations of the guillotine falling upon the white and powdered necks about them. But, if the guillotine had never been set up, the reveries of these valets would remain unknown. And historians would be able to write of the deference, or even consensus, of the ancien régime.1
The state, in its own factories, takes care of the health and wellbeing of its workers and civil servants; it takes care of their nutrition, social education, and recreation. In one word, the state provides the workers with all the necessities of a civilised life and thus precludes class war, which has turned the Western world upside down. The reigning mentality [in state factories] is not to exploit but to prosper the workers. [That is why] the worker finds a heaven at [state] factories, not hell, and thus commits to them.2
Two discourses, one national and the other global, overlap in this celebratory portrayal published a few months after the war ended. The first, and by now familiar, is the Kemalist developmentalist discourse, which presented state factories as spaces of national modernity. The second, a strengthening global discourse, points at industrial welfare as the most effective weapon against class struggle, after the upheavals of the war pushed the “social question” to the forefront and increasingly brought the state into the lives of labour.
Readers looking at the front page of the same newspaper must have been puzzled by what happened at another state factory that very same day. As the celebrations continued at Bakırköy, some ten kilometres away, angry workers were storming the canteen of the tobacco warehouse in Beşiktaş. The incident started with a worker complaining about the quality of the food, and it quickly escalated when the factory director slapped the worker, causing turmoil in the canteen. The director pulled out his gun, kicked another worker who tried to grab it, and ran away to lock himself in his office. The situation escalated further to the point that the police, when they arrived, decided to fire gunshots in the air to clear the factory entrance. The police detained all three hundred and fifty workers, arresting eight of them in the end.3
There could hardly be a better example of the contrast between the official presentation of industrial relations and the actual restlessness on the shop floor than these two pieces of news. The immediate postwar period emerged as a catalytic moment in the history of labour in Turkey. It was shaped by the interplay between the crisis of the one-party regime and the rise of the international welfare discourse that transformed the labour question into a social question. A new labour regime emerged from the interactions between the two. In this chapter, I examine the rise and development of this labour regime at two levels: at the level of political and legal changes, and at the level of
My main source material for this chapter will be the petitions filed by the Bakırköy workers. In social history, petitions have been accepted as a peculiarly rich kind of documentary source. Two factors render them even more precious for the study of industrial relations in 1940s Turkey. First, in a context characterised by the absence of either trade unions (until 1946) or an effective and independent arbitration system, petitioning emerged as the predominant form of industrial bargaining. Second, in the absence of historical material left behind by workers, their petitions offer precious insights into workers’ aspirations and the ideological categories through which they interpreted their own experiences and formulated their goals. As a major mechanism for grievance redressal, petitions are a window into the workers’ acquiescence in and compliance with workplace rules, as well as their attempts to modify these rules in order to constrain the exercise of managerial control.
But it was not only workers who penned petitions at the factory. Managers also petitioned, and often scribbled notes on workers’ petitions, revealing various kinds of exchanges on the shop floor. These documents voice rank-and-file workers’ and managers’ experiences in that they document their lives on the shop floor as well as their visions of a just world of industrial relations. Their conversational aspects allow us to reconstruct the procedures of mediation, repression, acceptance, and resistance in operation on the shop floor. In certain cases, correspondence between factory management and the higher authorities brings the state into the picture, exposing the wider interactions among the industrial policymakers, management, and workers.
In treating workers’ petitions as representations of “actions in structured situations,” I argue that Bakırköy workers quickly seized the opportunities presented by the changes in the external regulation of labour.4 My close reading of the petitions compiled by workers in the 1940s reveals that their self-perception and self-representation changed dramatically over time. Despite the repressive nature of industrial relations, workers turned the shop floor into a bargaining ground and devised strategies to resist managerial attempts to
In the course of the 1940s, petitions increasingly came to rely on certain principles of legitimisation derived from elements of class consciousness. They displayed a heightened sense of worker identity, as workers became aware of their role in the production process as well as their rights as citizens, identifying themselves positively as workers belonging to the broader labouring community. The development of a culture that asserted ideas of workers’ rights within society at large and within the workplace in particular would become discernible by the end of the decade.
1 The War at the Workplace
Despite her vital strategic location, Turkey managed to remain neutral during the greater part of the Second World War.5 The country was thus saved from physical destruction but not from economic devastation. Between 1940 and 1945, Turkey’s gross domestic product (gdp) decreased by an average of 6.9 per cent per annum. By the end of the war, gdp was down to its 1934 level, with gdp per capita thirty-eight per cent below the 1939 figure.6 In 1944, a special party commission on the cost of living and profiteering compared the twenty-five per cent increase in the cost of living in some war-waging countries with the almost five hundred per cent increase seen in Turkey, blaming the wholesalers and those whose “only connection to the homeland is through their stomach.”7 The war left in its wake a poverty-stricken peasantry and industrial working class alongside a bourgeoisie that had reinforced its ranks by profiteering under wartime policies. In the face of the ever-rising prices and the spread of hoarding, wrote the then head of the provincial treasury of Istanbul,
In the absence of trade unions or a worker-based political party, industrial workers had no lobbying power. The war aggravated working conditions by extending the working day and bringing real wages down by fifty-five per cent between 1938 and 1945.10 The ad hoc, piecemeal benefits under wartime exigencies were nowhere near enough to prevent the pauperisation of industrial workers. Consumer prices tripled between 1938 and 1946, while wages increased by only twenty-five per cent.11 In Istanbul, where the cost-of-living index had increased by 3.5 times between 1938 and 1943, the decrease in real wages in the textile sector was around fifty per cent overall.12 In the two state-owned textile factories, Bakırköy and Defterdar, where wages fared slightly better than those in the private sector, workers demanded better wage. In 1942, the Defterdar Factory management reported worker complaints to Sümerbank and argued that state workers should also benefit from the wartime wage protections that civil servants were receiving. The General Directorate agreed and wages at the factory increased between ten and sixty per cent.13
This person in destitution has worked at the Bakırköy Cloth Factory for seven years and dared to take refuge in your Higher Office as a worker who has always gained the approval of his superiors. [While] many of my friends benefited from wage increases, this destitute labourer did not. I am in extreme poverty; especially the latest increase in the cost of living has suffocated me. I kindly ask you, with my eternal respect, to order those concerned to give me an increase and prevent me from being damnified.
[Your] servant is one of your workers who worked for five years. Eleven months ago, I went to the military to carry out my national duty and have recently been discharged. I beg with respect for the sake of humanity that your servant, who has a wife and children, is re-hired so that I am not aggrieved on this winter day and saved from extreme poverty.
Although the state guaranteed that workers would be rehired after military service, the note on Mehmet’s petition from the personnel department stated that he had to wait until there was an opening. Two facts make this brief remark rather curious. First, Mehmet was a worker with an extraordinary length of experience in a highly mobile labour market. Second, the war had aggravated the already high labour turnover rates. The year Mehmet came back from his military service, the Bakırköy Factory management was searching for workers in Izmir, an Aegaen city some five hundred kilometres away from Istanbul.14 But, again the same year, a weaver, also named Mehmet, was laid off a few days after he was rehired upon his return from the military, despite his superiors’ favourable opinion of him. If it were not for this second weaver leaving the factory, Mehmet would have joined Istanbul’s army of unemployed. In 1943, due to the extension, the factory needed new recruits, especially weavers, but even increased wages and benefits could not attract skilled workers.15 Job advertisements claimed that a hardworking weaver could earn up to seven hundred piasters a day with the additional benefits of a free hot meal and a
What does this paradoxical information imply? First, the lack of coordination in the national labour market had given way to the contradictory co-existence of labourers moving around the country in search of employment, with factories searching for labour far away from their location. During the parliamentary discussions on the establishment of the Employment and Recruitment Agency in 1946, industrial policymakers acknowledged the delay in labour market regulation, documenting the high cost of non-intervention.18 Second, the ensuing problems of high labour turnover, coupled with the lack of vocational training, created a labour market in which experienced and skilled workers were scarce, while unskilled workers abounded. Third, state factories were recruiting and laying off workers in response to wartime fluctuations in production caused by a lack of raw materials and variations in demand. By the end of the war, labour hoarding was a serious problem at state factories. News of possible layoffs were already circulating by the end of 1945.19 But the layoffs at state factories had to end the following year because the continuing shortage of imported textile raw materials was aggravating unemployment.20 In 1947, Sümerbank came up with another solution, the details of which we will read from the workers’ petitions below.
Having found himself in this chaotic labour market after his return from the military in January 1942, Mehmet the dye worker had to beg to be rehired at fifteen piasters an hour. His wage was less than one quarter of the weaver’s wage proclaimed by factory management and roughly seventy per cent of the average wage at an Istanbul state textile factory cited by a prominent historian of industrial relations.21 Ten months later, he received a twenty per cent increase, but as we have seen in his 1943 petition quoted above, this did not improve his situation, which he described as “extreme poverty.”
Mehmet’s account of wage determination points to the tensions between the allegedly bureaucratic industrial relations structure and the piecemeal and informal regimes of labour control on the shop floor. That he petitioned the Sümerbank General Directorate suggests that he was both aware of and perturbed by the “ceremonial façade” at the factory.22 In its reply to the General Directorate, the factory management defended its supposed bureaucratic organisation by referring to formal rules of wage determination. Mehmet had already received a wage increase within the last six months, it was reported; he would have to wait. Neither the previous delay in his wage promotion nor his complaint on wage differentials got a mention. The management had fended off Mehmet’s bargaining effort without much difficulty.
Although I used to work as a weaver for ten years at your factory, I was assigned to the electricity department on a low wage upon my return from the military and five months ago I got my old position. At present, I receive a daily wage of two liras, which is not enough for one person, let alone an entire family. In the last round of [biweekly] payments, a cleaner got thirty-five liras, whereas I got only twenty-five liras. In 1942, I used to earn 140 liras on average a month whereas now I only earn fifty-two liras. I have endured the situation and have kept working [at this wage] although I had to sell some furniture. I expect from your high conscience to increase my wage in accordance with my expertise and to save me from this terrible financial situation before I am obliged to sell the bed I sleep on.
Similar to Mehmet the dyer, Mehmet the weaver’s first reference was to his qualities as a hardworking and disciplined worker. He cited his immediate return to the factory after military service and his acceptance of lower pay as twofold proof of his commitment to the factory. The similarities continue with the comparison in wages with other workers. From this point on, however, a remarkable difference emerges. In contrast to Mehmet the dyer, Mehmet the weaver is not begging, neither is he referring to himself as “this person in destitution” or “your servant.” Instead, he refers to his expertise, which, he claims, should be taken into consideration in determining his wage level. Aware that his wage did not reflect his experience and skills, his tone was one of exasperation. Finally, in the final sentence, where he clearly formulated his demand, Mehmet presented himself as a worker who “expects” rather than “dared to take refuge in.”
I have worked at the bobbin department as an assistant foreman for ten years. My hourly wage is thirty piasters. Although on 10 June 1947, both the production unit and the management ordered an increase in my wage, I did not see any results. Since it is impossible for me to support my family of four with fifty-two liras a month, I kindly request your permission to close my account.
To understand what Mehmet meant by it being impossible to support his family, it would suffice to say that in 1946, Mehmet would have had to spend 34.6 per cent of his monthly wage to buy two loaves of bread a day.23 Once again, his department chief noted that Mehmet was indeed a hardworking and disciplined worker and should therefore be given an increase of five piasters an hour. The management approved the raise almost a month later but registered it as a consequence of Mehmet’s hard work. Mehmet’s struggle disappeared forever into the official records that were presented to the state inspectors.
Grievances over wages were also erased in another way. Employment histories of Süleyman and Cemil demonstrate how official records distorted workers’ reasons for leaving. Only three months after he started working at the dyeing department in December 1943, Süleyman was ready to leave even though he had a one-year-old child. In his petition to the chief of his department, Süleyman requested the termination of his employment due to increasing financial difficulties caused by the rising cost of living. To his foreman, Süleyman was one of those disposable workers, of which “no inconvenience would be caused by his immediate leave.” Three years later, in 1947, Süleyman was back in the factory. But this time, he was hired as a construction worker on a lower wage than he had earned in 1943. In the absence of any institutionalised social protection or workers’ self-help organisation, Süleyman had no choice but to accept this demotion. Five months later, he left the factory again, claiming he needed to attend the harvest in his village. But two years later, he was back in the factory for the last and final time.
In 1941, Cemil’s employment as an apprentice weaver was terminated because of absenteeism after only three months. During his second time at the factory in 1945, he resigned after five months of employment to go back to his village for family reasons. When he returned in July 1947, however, he submitted an employment certificate showing that he had been working at a private glassware factory. He, like Süleyman, was demoted to a wage that was less than what he had been earning in 1945. After four months of work, he wrote: “I am
The employment histories of these two “disposable workers” raises questions about the validity of the commonplace assumption that high labour turnover resulted from workers’ strong rural ties. Both workers cited agricultural work as their reason for leaving. But when we follow up on their work histories, it turns out that they actually left in search of better-paying factory jobs. But because agricultural duties were considered a legitimate reason—managers often noted remarks such as “he may leave because he needs to do the harvest”—and because employees were able to return to their jobs at state factories if they had left for such duties, workers also used it in official correspondence.
The petitions I have cited so far are fragments taken from an industrial world that is quite different from the one portrayed in state documents and media. In a context where the working classes lacked the tools to either make their voices heard at the time of their struggle or to archive it for historians to learn in posterity, workers adopted a powerless and deferential language in their petitions. If taken out of context, they could read more like petitions by subjects to a sovereign ruler. The deferential third-person self-references such as “this person in destitution” or “your servant,” the emphasis on poverty and desperation, and the appeal to the management’s benevolence, which echoes the idea of the state as a “benevolent father” (devlet baba), all suggest that a strictly hierarchical structure of labour-management relations prevailed at the factory. In their use of words such as “benevolence” and “despair,” the workers mostly stayed away from the discourse of rights and obligations. But things would not stay like this for long. An undercurrent of change that would challenge both industrial policymakers and managers was on the way.
2 Postwar Changes in the External Regulation of Labour
“Istanbul is honoured to host this conference,” wrote the first labour minister of the Republic of Turkey, Sadi Irmak, in November 1947, referring to the first International Labour Organization Regional Meeting for the Near and Middle East.24 Originally planned to take place in Cairo, the meeting was relocated to Istanbul after Egypt was hit by a cholera outbreak in September. The timing
At the national level, the period when the party-state was less exposed to democratic pressures and in less immediate need of a legitimising authority had ended. In the first two decades of its rule, the chp had mainly resorted to repression as a way of mediating the exploitation and domination of the working class.27 The broader transnational social politics of the immediate postwar years, however, dictated the handling of the labour question in more hegemonic terms. Simple repression was becoming an inadequate solution and had to be supplemented by active government efforts to secure the consent of the masses. “The worker of our time does not want charity but rights,” wrote a prominent sociologist who also worked as a consultant for the Ministry of Labour, “we should provide these rights [before workers] demand them peacefully or through strikes.”28 At the heart of the change in governmental labour policies
At the global level, the debate on industrial welfare emerged as a political issue in the context of the postwar crisis. Global trends in social politics had already begun to influence debates on labour protections during the war years, but it was the postwar political crisis that created the conditions for legislation. In 1943, two years before becoming the first labour minister, Sadi Irmak had introduced the British government-commissioned 1942 Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services, better known as the Beveridge Report, to a Turkish audience. Irmak aptly summarised the spirit of the age in this piece by writing that the war had moved social solidarity from the realm of philanthropy to the realm of the state’s duties.30 During the visit of a British mission to the newly established Ministry of Labour in 1945, he openly cited British social policy as the example the Turkish state sought to follow.31 A collection of Beveridge’s wartime essays and addresses was translated into Turkish accompanied by a strongly worded preface claiming that liberalism’s time was over and that all nations now needed to jump on the wagon of state involvement in the economy.32 The
But it was not only the narrative of the good example that energised these changes. Preoccupied with industrial progress but distrustful of the disruptive power of organised labour, Turkish industrial policymakers turned to an expansion of social intervention and labour regulation in order to increase industrial productivity and secure working-class cooperation. In their presentation of the new legislation, they linked social security to the scientific management of industrial work. In the discussions on the social insurance bill, the chair of the chp’s labour department underlined that social insurance was not a philanthropic act but a measure to increase productivity.35 “Protecting workers against risk,” wrote the labour minister, is a prerequisite for improved work rhythm and efficiency.36 In 1947, a journalist praised the harmony between the workers and the machines at the Bakırköy Factory. Behind the labour discipline at this model factory, he wrote, was not managerial supervision but workers’ love for their jobs because “the management took care of all their needs.”37 The factory director also attributed increasing productivity to industrial welfare measures, citing the shrinkage in the workforce from 1,600 in 1944 to 1,090 in 1947.38
Ground-breaking ceremony for the new social buildings of the Bakırköy Factory, c. 1948
courtesy of ergİn aygöl
The reader will recall the dire conditions produced by the combination of transnational and national dynamics at the beginning of the 1930s. The situation the chp found itself in by the end of the war was similar, in that it had to simultaneously handle a regime crisis at home while repositioning the country within the new international order. In the face of the eroded legitimacy of single-party rule at home and efforts to build a stronger alliance with the West, the bureaucratic elite hoped that the transition to multi-party politics would deflect any threats to their rule.44 At the same time, internal divisions within
3 Questions of Distribution: Mümin versus Management
[Your] servant has been working at the factory for nine years and nine months (nine years in the yarn department and nine months in the maintenance department as assistant foreman). Although I have been working for such a [long] time, I have received only five piasters increase. My family of four suffers in poverty because the money I am earning is not enough to live on. My counterparts, even the apprentices I teach, earn fifty piasters. Because of the high cost of living, I respectfully ask your high office to stop my suffering by taking into consideration that I have been working for so many years non-stop and paying me the same wage as my friends.
Similar to the earlier examples I cited, Mümin begins his petition by drawing upon meritocratic discourses, but he then presents a different logic of claims-making. While previous petitioners had addressed questions of distribution between worker and employer, in this first petition as well as his later petitions, Mümin addresses questions of distribution between worker and worker.47 And he was not the only one. Wage differentials among state workers were so large that, a few months after Mümin’s petition, the government announced plans to standardise wages based on job and skill categories.48 We will come back to this point below, but for now let us follow the fate of his first petition.
Although his foreman and the maintenance department chief supported Mümin, the increase would not come until six months later, in February 1947. By September of the same year, Mümin’s wage increase was again delayed. His economic situation further deteriorated that year, when state factories stopped wartime overtime work and began operating three shifts of eight hours.49 In November 1947, he petitioned again and managed to get a rise. Seven months later, in May 1948, another rise followed. But Mümin was not satisfied. He petitioned once again, but this time he failed to secure the support of his supervisors. Mümin was in a relatively good position, the chief of his department wrote, since “his counterparts have not received an increase in the last one and
The general elections in May 1950 ended the chp’s twenty-seven years of uninterrupted rule. By June, the new government had already begun transferring ownership of state factories to private capital to end “the unfair competition” suffered by private business under etatism. Mismanagement, corruption, and low productivity plagued state enterprises, government representatives claimed.50 In this tense atmosphere surrounding state factories, Mümin wrote a petition to an unprecedented addressee: the prime minister. His petition made its entry into this inflammable situation like a drop of nitroglycerine.
Negotiations in shop-floor industrial relations do not take place in isolation from the wider political context. Subaltern petitioners often resort to exploiting perceived fissures within the ruling classes and appeal to a higher, central authority to advance their case against their immediate superiors.51 In Mümin’s example, addressing the prime minister was a strategy to bypass the factory and Sümerbank bureaucracy and demand justice directly from the top power-holder, a move for which he would pay dearly later on. His file unfortunately did not include this petition, but it did include a one-of-a-kind, almost theatrical document that presents the workplace as “a stage on which the cross-currents of interests, supported by varying degrees of power, are mediated by appeals to value systems and moral perspectives.”52 Entitled “The Transcript of the Investigation of the Petition,” this document registered a seemingly unmediated dialogue between worker and manager, revealing the former’s perception of managerial authority and the latter’s exercise of disciplinary rhetoric.
4 The Investigation
Mümin [M. from here on]:No, I am not.f.a.:Who is your apprentice getting a higher wage than you?m.:No, I meant to say friends. And they are those operators who are my counterparts.f.a.:Let me transfer you to the operations department then as well, shall I?m.:I do not want it.f.a.:You spoke of a mistake in your petition, explain.m.:There is no mistake. What I intended to mean was a comparison with my friends in the operations department.f.a.:I do not know any apprentice who earns eighty piasters an hour [as you suggested] in the factory. You tell me if there is any.m.:I did not say apprentice; it was written wrong.f.a.:Is the signature on the stamp yours?m.:Yes, it is minef.a.:Are there any apprentices earning seventy-one piasters an hour among the ones you supervise?m.:No, there are not any.f.a.:Do you think sixty-seven piasters an hour is a low wage?m.:I am entitled to ten more piasters.f.a.:You are an assistant foreman, aren’t you?m.:Yes. f.a.:You know all the things that an assistant foreman is supposed to know. Tell me, how do you measure an area?m.:I don’t know how to take measurements.f.a.:Can you use the measuring stick–the calliper?m.:No.f.a.:Describe a joint. Can you find a screw based on a description? (Holding a sample in his hand)m.:(He did not answer)f.a.:How is a screw described?m.:We measure it.(He was given a calliper.)m.:I do not know the calliper and I cannot measure.f.a.:How many types of screws are there?m.:One is finger type and the other one is millimetric.f.a.:What is a finger screw?m.:I don’t know.f.a.:What type is the head of the screw in your hand?m.:It is bone-shaped.f.a.:Şükrü, you define the screw in Mümin’s hand. [Şükrü Yalçın, assistant foreman at the maintenance department, s.y. from now on]s.y.:It is a 5/16, round-headed screw.f.a.:Tell me now. Do you really deserve the wage you demand?m.:I have not gone to school, sir.f.a.:You said you have been working here for fourteen years, how come you do not know this?m.:Sir, I have been working for fourteen years, but I do not know this screw.f.a.:Do you really deserve this money?m.:I am also illiterate; I leave [the decision] to your conscience.f.a.:Does your friend deserve a higher wage, Şükrü, what do you think?s.y.:You’d know it better.f.a.:You say Aziz. [Aziz Ӧz was an assistant foreman at the maintenance department]a.ö.:He cannot work on his own, but he can work under a foreman.Has been read and jointly signed.
The transcript can be divided roughly into three parts. In the first part, addressing Mümin by the informal, second-person singular pronoun “sen,” the director explains the reason for the meeting and introduces those present. He
Mümin’s main legitimising arguments had not changed since his first petition back in 1946: seniority-based wages and fair distribution among workers. These arguments proved difficult for Mümin to maintain in the actual confrontation with the manager, who, in turn, also appealed strongly to principles of equity and fairness to defend managerial decision-making. He repeatedly asked Mümin to name the apprentices earning more than the assistant foreman, for example, to disprove his accusation of random wage determination. Rule adherence constituted the legitimate bargaining ground for both parties, rendering the outright dismissal of Mümin’s complaint impossible.
If operators earned more, would Mümin then want to be transferred to a production department? His answer was a clear no. But why? There are two archival documents that could possibly answer this question. The first, an excerpt from an anonymous handwritten document on the working conditions in different departments of the factory, describes the conditions in the weaving and dyeing departments.53 The weavery sounded like “cats screeching during a fight,” the author writes; the noise was so loud that “the roaring in our ears was still continuing [long after we left].” A weaver attended to twenty-four looms, they noted with disbelief. The dyeing department was extremely damp; a foreman told the author that the factory “took very good care of the workers here” by giving them half a litre of milk every day and new work clothes and boots every year. Their social insurance premiums were also higher than workers in other departments. Signed by a textile worker, who would go on to become a trade unionist, the second document argues for the acceptance of arthritis, tuberculosis, and eye and kidney problems as occupational illnesses, especially for spinnery workers.54 After more than thirteen years at the factory, Mümin must have been well aware of these harsh working conditions. He did want a higher wage, but he was not willing to work in one of these departments.
The director then moved on to his next point, that is, whether Mümin actually deserved a higher wage. Did Mümin really think that sixty-seven piasters an hour is low? In 1951, the director of the Bakırköy Factory, Şefkati Türkekul, calculated the daily subsistence wage for a worker with two children—like
Head foremen with technicians and engineers in the factory garden, c. 1950
courtesy of turgay tuna
In the previous chapter, I showed that, in the absence of skill evaluation and vocational training, management assigned jobs randomly at the factory. The director’s on-the-spot skill evaluation reveals that the problem still persisted at the beginning of the 1950s. To discredit Mümin’s claims, the director turns to the two other assistant foremen, Mümin’s famous “counterparts,” who were present at the investigation to witness the restoration of the negotiated order of the workplace. With the air of a schoolboy caught smoking in the lavatory, Mümin’s demand rapidly crumbles after that point. The director’s final blow comes in the form of a rhetorical question that turns wage bargaining into a moral deliberation: “Do you really deserve the wage you demand?” In response,
The case was thus closed. The factory wrote to the Sümerbank General Directorate that Mümin’s claims had been investigated and found to be groundless, reassuring the central industrial authority, once again, that factory management followed the formal rules and regulations on promotion and wage increases. Insulted and humiliated, Mümin fell into silence, at least according to his file. He would continue working at the factory for years to come. But there was a second worker, who started petitioning around the same time, who would refuse to bow his head.
5 Questions of Dignity: Mustafa versus Management
Mustafa’s first appearance on the shop floor was in 1944, and evidently it was short. His record was erased due to absenteeism within the same year, as we learn from later-dated correspondence. He was rehired in January 1945 with a rather unusual note on his contract: he would be fired if he should engage in undisciplined behaviour. His file remains silent until a work accident in September 1946, which sets off a long and tense conflict between Mustafa and the factory management.
Mustafa lost part of his index finger and the last nodal of his middle finger on his right hand in a sizing machine. If there was one good thing about this terrible accident, it was the timing. After a ten-year delay, work injury insurance had come into force two months before Mustafa lost parts of his fingers. The 1936 Labour Code had stipulated the establishment of an insurance corporation to handle accidents and employment hazards, maternity, old age, unemployment, illness, and death benefits within one year of the code’s entry into force.56 In 1939, the International Labour Organization assisted the Turkish government in drawing up a plan of legislative and technical action for a workers’ insurance body.57 But the establishment of the social insurance system had
Mustafa’s case was one of the 4,091 cases of work accidents and occupational diseases submitted to the insurance institution in the latter half of 1946.60 The accident report concluded that he had lost fifteen per cent of his general bodily strength and could not work for forty days. His return date was 29 October, but although his wound had still not healed, he started a day earlier because he needed the money. The law stipulated that unskilled and semi-skilled workers would receive half wages, whereas skilled workers and foremen would receive full wages during their accident leave.61 But, Mustafa’s daily accident allowance was almost one third of his daily wage in 1945, and Mustafa had not been able to make ends meet even before the accident. He had worked his yearly seven-day holiday for extra pay, meaning that by the time of the accident, he had been working non-stop for at least one full year.62
While I was working eleven hours a day three months ago, I now work on average for eight hours a day and I am in a terrible situation. I was promised an increase, [but] I have waited for a long time and I have been victimised. I kindly request with utmost respect that my hourly wage is increased in light of my situation.
I have been working as a [machine oiler] in different departments of the factory for the last four years. During this period, I have not abstained from doing all the work of different departments with my conscience and efforts. I have not fallen behind in the job. It is because of the care I have given to my duty lately that I got caught in the cogwheel and have lost my future. But I still do the same job in the weavery. I have been deceived by my foreman, my superintendent, and the chief of operations with wage increase promises for the last two or three months. At my last attempt, they told me that I will get a raise when the time comes and showed me the way out in a threatening way. They pointed [the responsibility for the delay] to [the Sümerbank General Directorate in] Ankara, then the chief of operations, and finally said the factory director did not approve [the raise]. I have been waiting for you. I have been waiting amid all these doubts hoping that [the increase] would come at any time. I have become obliged to write this petition upon Your Worship’s return from leave. I present [the situation to you] and request that the concerned offices are ordered to give me a raise.
[During the three years I worked at the factory] I have not been absent even for one day. This one time, I became drunk in Istanbul, and was imprisoned for fifteen days. [I have heard that] they confiscated my card because I was absent. Since it is impossible that such a case will happen again, I kindly ask for my card to be returned.
An investigation followed, the result of which did not support Mustafa’s claims to being a good worker. Both his foreman and his fellow workers confirmed that Mustafa “has a rebellious character” but worked well. Mustafa was hired once again on the same condition: he would be fired on the first incidence of disobedience. Through his repeated attempts to secure a raise in 1948, it was likely that Mustafa was a well-known worker in the management offices.
An increase was not given to Mustafa Arap, a worker in the maintenance department, because he has not been working. On 11 September 1948, he came to the machine engineering department and demanded a raise. He was told that he should first work, and he could get an increase after he is appreciated by his foreman and engineers; he had to go back to his work. He refused, uttered threats, and shouted: “Tell me the person refusing to give me the raise.” Although he was once again advised in a calm way to go back to work, he was seen waiting in the corridor two hours later. He was warned that he would get a wage cut because although he punched his card, he had not been at work since the morning. He again threatened and said: “Fine me two days’ wages if you wish, I am not leaving.” We report
that this worker, who does not work, does not obey orders, and who dares to threaten even the engineers, cannot work at our department.
I have been working at the factory for the last four years. Due to my superiors’ approval, I have received a wage raise three times so far. Thank you, but this last time I again applied for an increase. Unfortunately, our chief put me off and threatened me multiple times. Finally, today he treated me inhumanely, put me in a bad position by making accusations against me, and refused to give a raise. I kindly ask you to protect my right.
Senior engineers at the factory clubhouse, 1950
courtesy of ergİn aygöl
After this series of petitions in September 1948, things seemed to have calmed down for about nine months. In June 1949, Mustafa was fined to the amount of his day wage for disobeying the foreman. Here, Mustafa acted in another unprecedented way and refused to sign the wage deduction notice. Was this a protest against the foreman with whom Mustafa was already cross? Or did he think he could avoid legal sanctions by not signing? Later events would reveal that this was a conscious move. In the closing scene of Mustafa versus management, an important actor of the shop floor enters the picture: the workers’ representative.
The 1936 Labour Code outlawed strikes and lockouts and created a new means of managing class conflict through formalised negotiation procedures. The government adopted compulsory arbitration as the national labour relations policy and, thereby, appeared as a third principal party in all industrial disputes until the legalisation of strikes in 1963.64 By 1939, the Labour Department had received almost five thousand labour dispute cases.65 The government then promulgated the Charter of Reconciliation and Arbitration of Labour Disputes in 1939, and built a system to represent employees’ interests around workers’ representatives.66 Representatives would be selected by workers at each enterprise, the number varying according to the size of the establishment. As the first step in the compulsory arbitration procedure,
Because the code did not offer adequate provisions designed to protect representatives from discharge or other discriminatory treatment, representatives were often reluctant to take action. In February 1947, a worker representative at the Bakırköy Factory claimed that workers did not have any complaints, but in his next sentence, he mentioned that a few workers had demanded a wage rise. “They did not know that the management was about to increase the wages,” he added; “now everyone is happy.”67 The election mechanism did not offer much protection for workers’ representatives either. Candidates needed the approval of their employer and workers had to sign the ballot paper.68 These representatives continued to represent workers independently of the trade union after the enactment of the Trade Union Act in 1947 because the unions did not have the right to represent their members in negotiations. Under such cramped conditions, the arbitration mechanism remained mostly on paper until the 1950s; between 1939 and 1950, only forty-one industrial dispute cases were submitted to the High Board of Arbitration.69 By the end of the 1940s, workers were increasingly complaining of the pressures on workers’ representatives and demanded their legal protection.70 In January 1950, four
6 A Reverse Order: from İşçi to Amele
I was imprisoned for twenty-seven days because of a minor incident I was involved in on 6 March 1950 outside [the factory]. I kindly request you to take the required procedure to avoid the termination of my employment.
I was working as an oiler in the weavery when I was sent to court for drunkenness and sentenced to a 150-lira fine and one month in prison. I notified the personnel department in a petition via the workers’ representative. Although I applied to resume my job after having finished my prison sentence, they keep saying “leave today and come back tomorrow” and are not giving me my job back. I am working as an amele for three liras a day in the garden. Since it is extremely difficult to live on this low wage, I kindly request to be assigned to my previous job.
Two weeks later, he was back to being an industrial worker again. But not exactly the kind he wanted. Despite his missing fingertips, Mustafa was rehired as a carrier in the roving department, and he revolted. On 11 May 1950, Mustafa “punched his card but did not do the task he was assigned to and walked around in other departments,” the chief of operations wrote, asking for him to be given a warning. A note on this petition suggests that management were alert to Mustafa’s attempts to endanger formal procedures: “Make sure he receives a written warning each time.” According to the chief of operations, the management rehired Mustafa because he could not find a job elsewhere.
By the end of summer 1949, unemployment was soaring in Istanbul due to drought-induced migration from Anatolia. Between August and September, the number of jobseekers in the city increased from twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand.74 One month before Mustafa’s petition, the Istanbul office of the Ministry of Labour had shortened the working day in textile factories and increased the workforce in order to curb unemployment.75 Pressures under the threat of unemployment resulted in a violent accident at the factory during the time of Mustafa’s imprisonment. Abdülkadir, a carpenter foreman, had been fired for beating a young female worker. He first threatened the head foreman, Ahmet, who turned to inserting a piece of metal under his overalls to protect himself from a potential attack.76 Abdülkadir then showed up with his
But even the increasingly depressing textile labour market trends did not deter Mustafa from adopting a new form of resistance: task bargaining. In his taxonomy of worker responses, Robin Cohen cites task and time bargaining as a hidden worker response directed against managerial control of the labour process, and defines it as workers’ efforts to “reduce [their] exploitation by adhering overstrictly to job specifications and rules detailing [their] work.”78 In Mustafa’s case, this hidden response escalated into a final and overt conflict on the shop floor.
7 From the Logic of Escape to the Logic of Control
I have been notified about the management’s decision, dated 1 June 1950 and based on the labour law, about my dismissal effective from 15 June 1950 on the grounds that I have not regularly attended my job during work hours, I disobeyed my superiors’ orders to return to my post, and I did not improve my behaviour despite numerous verbal and written warnings. I kindly ask your permission to state that I have never shown such undisciplined behaviour or received a warning from my superiors to return to my post.
1) I have never disobeyed orders on the shop floor during the eight years I have worked at the factory. Nor have I been warned or scolded by the departmental chiefs. If I had received, as it was claimed, multiple warnings and reprimands, in this considerably long period of employment, based on the charter of internal regulations, there should exist written records of them.
2) I have recently had the misfortune of being imprisoned for a month because of a strife outside the enterprise and the working hours. Upon my return to the factory, I was rehired, without any explanation, as a carrier, a task that has no similarity with my original job and I am totally unfamiliar with it. I formally objected with a petition and asked to be given my old job. It is unacceptable to consider the objection of a worker—who served the factory for eight years and had the misfortune to lose his fingers—to being employed as a carrier and his demand to return to his old job as a crime that defies the labour law. It is obvious that [illegible] is merciless and unfair and causes me unjust suffering.
Let us pause here and compare Mustafa’s reaction with those of three other workers who found themselves in similar situations. The first example concerns two brothers, Ali, a “weaver candidate” as his foreman called him, and his older brother, who worked as a weaver. In 1941, the two brothers teamed up against the foreman when he ordered Ali to clean his loom and take the woven cloth to the control department. The brothers confronted the foreman, stating that Ali would not do this because these were not his tasks. The furious foreman immediately wrote a petition, demanding that the two brothers be punished for violating the authority of the foreman and the discipline of the factory. This was a must, he added, in order not to set a bad example on the shop floor. The chief of weavery responded quickly and fined Ali a week’s wages, an outrageous amount for such an act of disobedience. Ali had worked at the factory for more than a year before the incident without any problems,
An engineer and head foreman in conversation, c. 1950s
kemal sülker papers, bg a63/89, iish
The second example involves a now-familiar worker, Süleyman. Above, we read that he left the factory in 1944, after only three months because he could not make ends meet. Three years later, however, he returned to work for an even lower wage in another position. He worked for another five months and disappeared once again. Cemil, our third example, wrote in 1945 that he had to go back to his hometown after only five months of employment. When he returned in March 1947, he submitted a document indicating that he had been working at a private factory. His subsequent period of employment was short-lived and he resigned after only four months as mentioned above.
3) Unless official documents on the allegations I refuted in the first point above are presented, I cannot be convinced that I have received a fair treatment based on the charter of internal regulations and the labour law. Thus, I kindly ask to be returned to my old job.
Although the Labour Code gives the employer the right to terminate the labour contract [on the basis of these documentation], our factory acted out of conscience and tried to protect you from falling into hunger on the streets. The final decision about you had to be made in light of your intolerable behaviour.
With this last document in his file, the factory gate closed forever on Mustafa. Despite his assertiveness and decisiveness, and his knowledge of his legislative rights as a worker, he was bound to fail in a repressive industrial environment that discouraged workplace bargaining and crippled collective bargaining. Still, the fact that a state worker was deploying such a self-conscious language
8 Conclusion
If one were to choose a single word to describe the atmosphere in postwar Turkey in most general terms, that word would be “tension.” The second half of the 1940s was a prolonged period of simmering tensions, both in state politics and in the workplace, and this had direct implications for the long-term structure of industrial relations. Combined with the international postwar rise of the labour welfare discourse, the regime’s need to maintain some semblance of popular consensus resulted in new industrial legislation. As the state moved explicitly toward an extension of its role in industrial relations, the resulting process of legal and political change was a key factor in the extension of shop-floor bargaining.
Against the background of the changing socio-political dynamics, a close reading of the historico-social vocabulary that was available to the Bakırköy workers enabled me to set out two arguments in this chapter. The first built on the material I presented earlier in Chapter 4. Wage rises were slower and in smaller increments, and informal bargaining was a chief determinant of wage differentials on the shop floor. Dissonances between management practices and state policy resulted in opportunities for workers to intervene in management authority over labour processes. Second, state workers were not the docile, content labour force that they were often portrayed to be in the contemporary print media or scholarly literature. They closely followed developments in the external regulation of labour and utilised any leverage these changes created to bargain not only for economic gain, but also for respect on the shop floor. In their petitions, workers were showing increasing commitment to the defence of shop-floor earnings and conditions. They also questioned the legitimacy of managerial discourses by raising notions of fairness and legitimising principles that are central to the process of workplace rule-making. By the late 1940s, a Turkish state factory was as much a contested terrain as any other industrial workplace, despite the seemingly bureaucratic organisational structures and the populist ideology behind etatism.
But what layed beyond these particularistic and private bargaining strategies? The careful reader will have noticed something important missing from the petitions analysed in this chapter. The Bakırköy workers made
Edward Palmer Thompson, “The Crime of Anonymity,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, eds. Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow (London: Verso, 2011), 306–307.
Abidin Daver, “Bakırköy Fabrikasında,” Cumhuriyet, 19 November 1945.
“350 İşçinin Çıkardığı Bir Hadise,” Cumhuriyet, 19 November 1945.
Carola Lipp and Lothar Krempel, “Petitions and the Social Context of Political Mobilisation in the Revolution of 1848/49: A Microhistorical Actor-Centred Network Analysis,” International Review of Social History 46, no. S9 (2001), 153.
Turkey was obliged to declare war on Germany and Japan on 23 February 1945 in order to secure a seat at the Conference on World Organisation.
William Hale, “Ideology and Economic Development in Turkey 1930–1945,” Bulletin British Society for Middle Eastern Studies 7 (1980), 109.
Cited in Korkut Boratav, Türkiye’de Devletçilik (Ankara: İmge Kitabevi, 2017), 296–297.
Faik Ökte, Varlık Vergisi Faciası (Istanbul: Nebioğlu Yayınevi, 1951), 38.
Gürel Tüzün, ed., Vehbi Koç Anlatıyor: Bir Derleme (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi, 2018), 88.
Korkut Boratav, Türkiye İktisat Tarihi 1908–1985 (Ankara: İmge Kitabevi, 2003), 88–90.
“Hayat Pahalılığı ve Dar Gelirliler,” Cumhuriyet, 31 July 1946.
Sabahaddin Zaim, Istanbul Mensucat Sanayiinin Bünyesi ve Ücretler (Istanbul: Istanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Yayını, 1956), 279–282.
Ziyaeddin Fahri Fındıkoğlu, “Türkiye’de Sınai Sosyoloji Araştırmaları 1-Defterdar Fabrikası,” Feshane Mensucat Meslek Dergisi 2, no. 12 (1954), 26.
Can Nacar, “Our Lives Were Not as Valuable as an Animal: Workers in State-Run Industries in WorldWar-ii Turkey,” International Review of Social History 54, no. 17 (2009), 151.
“İşçi Buhranı: Tecrübeli Dokumacı Aranıyor,” Haber-Akşam Postası, 28 September 1943.
“Dokuma İşçisi Aranıyor,” Cumhuriyet, 27 September 1943.
“İş ve İşçi Arayanlar,” Haber-Akşam Postası, 29 March 1943; “İş Bulma Yurdu: İş İçin Yurda Yüzlerce Genç Müracaat Etti,” Cumhuriyet, 26 May 1942.
“Çalışma Bakanlığının Hazırladığı Kanunlar,” Cumhuriyet, 15 January 1946.
“Sümerbank Fabrikalarındaki İşçilerin Durumu,” Cumhuriyet, 30 November 1945.
“İş Kazaları ve Analık Sigortalarının Tatbikatı,” Cumhuriyet, 1 July 1946; “Memlekette İşsizlik Gittikçe Artıyor mu?” Cumhuriyet, 22 August 1946.
Ahmet Makal, Ameleden İşçiye: Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemi Emek Tarihi Çalışmaları (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2007), 132.
I have written on this in detail in chapter 4. The concept denotes the discrepancy between the image created by the seemingly highly institutionalised, rationalised, and impersonal prescriptions and the actual operating activities based on managers’ discrete power. See: John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutionalized Organisations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 2 (1977), 341–343.
Haluk Yılmaz, “Hayat Pahalılığı ve Dar Gelirliler,” Cumhuriyet, 31 July 1946.
The piece was first published in a newspaper and then republished in the official Ministry of Labour journal: Sadi Irmak, “Istanbul Çalışma Konferansı,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 24 (1947), 91–92. Irmak had stepped down from his ministerial position in September 1947.
Orhan Tuna, “Türkiye’de Sendikacılık ve Sendikalarımız,” Sosyal Siyaset Konferansları Dergisi, no. 20 (1969), 256; M. Şehmus Güzel, “Çalışma Bakanlığının Kuruluşu-Çalışma Hayatında İngiliz Etkisi,” Tarih ve Toplum 9, no. 50 (1988), 53; Cahit Talas, Türkiye’nin Açıklamalı Sosyal Politika Tarihi (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1992), 125; Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey (New York: Routledge, 1993), 105.
The postwar years were marked by parliamentary ratifications of the International Labour Organization Conventions. By the end of the war, Turkey had ratified only one ilo convention (the Underground Work (Women) Convention of 1935) during the time of her membership since 1932. Within the first year of the ministry’s establishment, the government ratified three ilo conventions: The Weekly Rest Convention of 1921, the Fee-Charging Employment Agencies Convention of 1933, and the Workmen’s Compensation (Occupational Diseases) Convention of 1934. See: “Çalışma Meclisi Raporu,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 17 (1947), 64–81; “Milletlerarası Çalışma Konferansında Başdelegemiz Türk Görüşün Açıkladı,” Türk İşçisi, 5 July 1947; Esat Tekeli, “Çalışma Konferansında Türkiye,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 20 (1947), 1–2; “Milletlerarası Çalışma Konferansında Türkiye (Bir Radyo Konusması),” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 22 (1947), 40–44; “Dünya Basınında Akisler,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 22 (1947), 46–49.
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), 181.
Ziyaeddin Fahri Fındıkoğlu, “Türk İçtimai Siyasetinin İlk Zaferi,” İş, no. 60 (1946), 2–5.
Ahmet Makal, Türkiye’de Tek Partili Dönemde Çalışma İlişkileri: 1920–1946 (Ankara: İmge Kitabevi, 1999), 468; Talas, Sosyal Politika Tarihi, 125.
Sadi Irmak, “Beveridge Planına Göre Sosyal Dayanışma,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 1 (1945), 24–25.
“Çalışma Bakanlığı Nasıl Çalışacak,” Cumhuriyet, 6 July 1945.
Muammer Kurtay, “İçtimai Emniyetin Temelleri,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 16 (1947), 64.
tbmm Tutanak Dergisi (Records of the Grand National Assembly), “Çalışma Bakanlığı Kuruluş ve Görevleri Hakkında Kanun Tasarısı ve Ekonomi ve Bütçe Komisyonları Raporları” (1/508), 26 November 1945, Session vıı, Volume 21, Meeting no. 3, 52.
tbmm Tutanak Dergisi (Records of the Grand National Assembly), “İş Kazaları ile Mesleki Hastalıklar ve Analık Sigortaları Hakkında Kanun Tasarısı ve Geçici Komisyon Raporu,” (1/316), 13 June 1945, Session vıı, Volume 18, Meeting no. 2, 257–258.
tbmm Tutanak Dergisi (Records of the Grand National Assembly), “İş kazaları ile Mesleki Hastalıklar ve Analık Sigortaları Hakkında Kanun Tasarısı ve Geçici Komisyon Raporu,” (1/316), 15 June 1945, Session vıı, Volume 18, Meeting no. 2, 270.
Sadi Irmak, “İşçi Sigortaları Kurumu Genel Kurul Toplantısı,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 4 (1946), 51–54.
Süreyya Oral, “Bakırköy Bez Fabrikasında Çalışan İşçilerin Hayatı,” Türk İşçisi, 1 March 1947.
Salahattin Güngör, “97 Yıl Önce Kurulan Bir Fabrika,” Türk İşçisi, 22 February 1947.
Sadi Irmak, “Istanbul Çalışma Konferansı,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 24 (1947), 92. In his 1947 novel, Grev (Strike), the prominent social realist author Orhan Kemal portrays the reactions of the factory owner, the police commissar, the governor, and the prosecutor in the face of spontaneous strike action at a textile factory. To calm the factory owner and his son, the governor repeats: “God forbid, what would we do if [Turkish] workers behaved like those in Europe?” Upon receiving the news of the strike, the prosecutor furiously reacts: “[Strikers] think they are in Italy or France, bastards!” See: Orhan Kemal, Grev (Istanbul: Everest, 2007), 1–13.
Jan Breman, “The Formal Sector: An Introductory Review,” in The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour, eds. Jonathan P. Parry, Jan Breman, and Karin Kapadia (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999), 30–31; Beverly Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalisation Since 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 125–128; Vivek Chibber, “From Class Compromise to Class Accommodation: Labor’s Incorporation into the Indian Political Economy,” in Social Movements and Poverty in India: Poverty, Power and Politics, eds. Mary Falased Katzenstein and Raka Ray (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 38–39; Ravi Ahuja, “Produce or Perish: The Crisis of the Late 1940s and the Place of Labour in Post-Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies 54, no. 4 (2020).
Ziyaeddin Fahri Fındıkoğlu, “Türkiye’de İçtimai Siyaset,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 24 (1947), 95.
Gerhard Kessler, “İşçi Hareketlerinin Hedefleri ve Yolları,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 16 (1947), 5.
Tehyun Ma, “A Chinese Beveridge Plan: The Discourse of Social Security and the Post-War Reconstruction of China,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 11, no. 2 (2012); Ravi Ahuja, “A Beveridge Plan for India? Social Insurance and the Making of the ‘Formal Sector’,” International Review of Social History 64, no. 2 (2019), 220–221; Daniel Beland, Gregory P. Marchildon, Michele Mioni, and Klaus Petersen, “Translating Social Policy Ideas: The Beveridge Report, Transnational Diffusion, and Post-War Welfare State Development in Canada, Denmark and France,” Social Policy and Administration 56, no. 2 (2022).
Cem Eroğul, Demokrat Parti: Tarihi ve İdeolojisi (Ankara: İmge Kitabevi, 1990), 30–31, 46–48; Taner Timur, Türkiye’de Çok Partili Hayata Geçiş (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1991), 18–27, 38–50, 61–63; Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey, 108; Boratav, Türkiye İktisat Tarihi, 91.
Kemal Karpat, Turkey’s Politics: The Transition to a Multi-Party System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 300–301; Osman Okyar, “The Concept of Etatism,” Economic Journal 75, no. 297 (1965), 106.
Fazıl Şerafettin Bürge, “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, 2–9.
Richard Hymand and Ian Brough, Social Values and Industrial Relations: Study of Fairness and Inequality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 11.
Abidin Daver, “İşçi Vergilerini Hafifletmek Lazımdır,” Türk İşçisi, 8 March 1947.
“24 Saat Çalışma,” Cumhuriyet, 5 February 1947; Sedat Toydemir, “Türkiye’de İş İhtilaflarının Tarihçesi ve Bugünkü Durumu,” İçtimai Siyaset Konferansları, no. 4 (1951), 56.
“Fabrikaların Hususi Eşhasa Devri,” Cumhuriyet, 8 June 1950; “Hususi Teşebbüs ve Devlet Fabrikaları,” Cumhuriyet, 20 June 1950; “Devlet Fabrikaları Devri Meselesi,” Cumhuriyet, 23 June 1950; “Sanayi İşletmelerinin Devri Meselesi,” Cumhuriyet, 29 June 1950; “Fabrikaların Hususi Teşebbüse Devri,” Cumhuriyet, 7 July 1950; “Satışa Çıkarılacak Devlet Fabrikaları,” Cumhuriyet, 12 August 1950; “Devredilecek Devlet Fabrikaları,” Cumhuriyet, 17 August 1950; “Yeni Sanayi Kanun Tasarısı,” Cumhuriyet, 24 August 1950; “Tekel Kibrit ve Şarap Fabrikaları Satılacak,” Cumhuriyet, 9 September 1950.
Lex Heerma van Voss, “Introduction,” International Review of Social History 46 (Supplement No. 9: Petitions in Social History, 2001), 4, 6.
Peter J. Armstrong, John F.B. Goodman, and Jeffrey D. Hyman, Ideology and Shop-floor Industrial Relations (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 15.
“Dokuma tezgâhı dairesine girer girmez,” (n.d.), Kemal Sülker Papers, Folder no. 402, ıısh.
Hayri Erdost, “İşçilere zarar temin eden sigorta kanunları,” 30 July 1949, Kemal Sülker Papers, Folder no. 384, ıısh.
Şefkati Türkekul, “Mensucat İşletmelerinde Ücret Problemleri,” Mensucat Meslek Dergisi 4, no. 8 (1951), 8.
Donald Everett Webster, The Turkey of Atatürk: Social Process in the Turkish Reformation (Philadelphia: The American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1939), 252–258; “Türk Raporu,” Çalışma Dergisi Istanbul Yakın ve Orta Doğu Bölge Çalışma Toplantısı Sayısı, no. 24 (1947), 71; Ali Güzel, “3008 sayılı İş Yasasının Önemi ve Başlıca Hükümleri,” Sosyal Siyaset Konferansları, no. 35–36 (1986), 215; Talas, Sosyal Politika Tarihi, 119.
United States of America, Department of State, “International Conference on Safety of Life at Sea,” (London, 23 April 23–10 June 1948), 70; Antony Evelyn Alcock, History of the International Labour Organization (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1971), 148.
“İşçi Sigortaları Kurumu Genel Kurul Toplantısı,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 4 (1946), 51–54; Sadi Irmak, “Sosyal Sigortalarımızda Gelişme,” Çalışma Vekâleti Dergisi, no. 16 (1947), 1–2.
International Labour Office, “Labour Problems in Turkey,” Report of a Mission of the International Labour Office (Geneva: ILO, 1950), 73.
Between 1937 and 1943, the average number of work accidents was 8,423. See: Ahmet Makal, Türkiye’de Çok Partili Dönemde Çalışma İlişkileri: 1946–1963 (Ankara: İmge Kitabevi, 2002), 392. In 1949, the number of cases increased to 17,289. The number of occupational disease cases increased from 55 to 434 during the same period. The amount of work accident and occupational sickness insurance premiums paid by employers increased fourfold in the same period. See: İşçi Sigortaları Kurumu 1953 Yılı Çalışma Raporu ve Bilançosu (Ankara: İşçi Sigortaları Kurumu Genel Müdürlüğü, 1954), 52.
Şefik Ungun, “Hayat Pahalılığı Karşısına Devlet İşletmelerinde İşçi Ücretleri ve Sosyal Yardımlar,” Feshane Mensucat Meslek Dergisi 2, no. 6 (1949), 94.
The right to paid annual leave was part of the Ministry of Labour’s five-year work programme in 1946. But the legislation came only in 1960. At a 1947 labour committee meeting held by the Ministry of Labour, workers demanded paid annual leave. See: “İş ve İşçi Hayatı Bakımından Önemli Toplantılar,” Türk İşçisi, 3 May 1947. State factories and some large private factories gave workers yearly paid leave of ten to fifteen days. See: “Türk Raporu,” 57–59. But, according to their files, many Bakırköy workers chose to work during their annual leave instead.
Tevfik Erdem, “Kısımlarda Eli Kamçılı Beyler,” Sendika Yolu, no. 8 (1948); “İç Hizmetler Şefliğinin Nazar-ı Dikkatine,” Gayret: Kayseri Tekstil Sanayii İşçileri Sendikası Organı, no. 35 (1951); “Gece Postası Gazetesi Yazı İşleri Müdürlüğü Yüksek Makamına,” 10 July 1955, Kemal Sülker Papers, Folder no. 402, iish.
Cahit Talas, İçtimai İktisat (Ankara: s.b.f. Yayınları, 1961), 299; Talas, Sosyal Politika Tarihi, 104.
Lütfü Erişçi, Türkiye’de İşçi Sınıfının Tarihi (Ankara: Kebikeç Yayınları, 1997), 24.
Official Gazette of the Republic of Turkey, No. 4,165, 24 March 1939.
Salahattin Güngör, “97 Yıl Önce Kurulan Bir Fabrika,” Türk İşçisi, 22 February 1947.
Bülent Nuri Esen, Türk İş Hukuku (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Hukuk Fakültesi Yayınları, 1944), 148; Rahmi Alp, “İşçi Mümessillerinin Durumu,” Türk İşçisi, 31 May 1947; M. Koyulhisarlıoğlu, “İşçi Temsilcilerinin Mukaderatı,” Türk İşçisi, 20 September 1947; “İ.e.t.t. İşçileri Birinci Mümessili Mehmet İmanlı’dan Aldığımız Mektup,” Türk İşçisi, 18 October 1947; İlhami Coşkundeniz, “Toplulukla İş İhtilafları, Hazırlanması ve Yürütülmesi,” Sosyal Siyaset Konferansları, 7. Kitap (1955), 67.
Toydemir, “Türkiye’de İş İhtilaflarının Tarihçesi,” 56; Orhan Tuna, “Türkiye’de Cebri Tahkim Sistemi ve Tatbikatı, 1939–1963,” İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 26, no. 1–4 (1967), 42.
Hikmet Kümbetlioğlu, “İş ve İşçi Hayatı Bakımından Önemli Toplantılar,” Türk İşçisi, 3 May 1947; Sait Kesler, “Eyüp Mensucat İşçileri Sendikası,” Türk İşçisi, 13 September 1947; Sait Kesler, “İstanbul’da Bir Günde 6 Sendika Kongresi yapıldı,” Türk İşçisi, 11 October 1947; “İşçi Mümessilleri İçin Yeni Hükümler ve Sigorta İşi!,” İkdam-Gece Postası, 25 December 1948; “Beyoğlu Mensucat İşçilerinin Üzerinde Durdukları Meseleler,” Kemal Sülker Papers, 19 June 1949, Folder no. 148, iish; “Mümessil Seçiminde Dikkat Edilecek Noktalar,” İkdam-Gece Postası, 2 April 1949, Kemal Sülker Papers, Folder no. 148, iish.
Melih Göktan, “Türkiye’de İş İhtilafları ve İşgücü ile Münasebetleri,” Kemal Sülker Papers, Folder no. 347, iish.
A. Afet İnan, İzmir İktisat Kongresi: 17 Şubat-4 Mart 1923 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1989), 51; “Amele,” Türkiye Sendikacılık Ansiklopedisi, vol.1 (Istanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı ve Tarih Vakfı Ortak Yayını, 1996), 38–39; A. Gündüz Ökçün, Türkiye’de İktisat Kongresi: 1923 İzmir-Haberler, Belgeler, Yorumlar (Ankara: Sermaye Piyasası Kurulu Yayınları, 1997), 358–361.
“Amele,” 38; Said Kesler, “İşçi ve Amele; Bizde Bu Tabirler Ne Zaman Kullanılmaya Başlanıldı?” Türk İşçisi, 28 December 1946; S. Oflaz, “İşçi Mi Yoksa Amele Miyiz?” Sendika Yolu, 1 April 1949.
“Istanbul’da İşsizler Çoğalıyor,” Cumhuriyet, 17 September 1949.
“İş İhtilafları ve Alınan Tedbirler,” Cumhuriyet, 4 February 1950.
Ergin Aygöl (Ahmet’s son), interview by the author, online, 15 February 2022.
“Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası’nda Bir Hadise,” Cumhuriyet, 7 March 1950.
Robin Cohen, Contested Domains: Debates in International Labour Studies (London: Atlantic Highlands, 1991), 101.
Jeff W. Henderson and Robin Cohen, “Work, Culture and the Dialectics of Proletarian Habituation,” Papers in Urban & Regional Studies, no. 3 (1980), 6.
Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organisations and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
Henderson and Cohen, “Work, Culture and the Dialectics,” 6.
Sanford M. Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in the 20th Century (London: Routledge, 1985), 200.