Global Management, Local Labour: Turkish Workers and Modern Industry

Global Management, Local Labour Turkish Workers and Modern Industry

Theo Nichols and Nadir Sugur

Global Management, Local Labour

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Global Management, Local Labour Turkish Workers and Modern Industry Theo Nichols and Nadir Sugur

© Theo Nichols and Nadir Sugur 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–1750–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nichols, Theo. Global management, local labour : Turkish workers and modern industry / Theo Nichols and Nadir Sugur. p. cm Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–1750–7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Labor—Turkey. 2. Working class—Turkey. 3. Industrial relations—Turkey. 4. Industrial management—Turkey 5. Industries—Turkey—Case studies. 6. Globalization—Economic aspects—Turkey. I. Title: Global management, local labor. II. Sugur, Nadir. III. Title. HD8656.5.A5N53 2004 331′.09561—dc22 10 9 13 12

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

List of Tables, Figures and Boxes

vi

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction Part I 1

Specificities – Gender and Ethnicity

43 45 59

The World of TQM

77 79 94 121

Trade Unionism

141

State, Law and Trade Unionism Union Autocracy, Mechanisms and Contradictions

Part V 9 10

25

Management and its Practices TQM from Above The View from Below

Part IV 7 8

23

Women Workers in Textiles Muhacir Bulgarians

Part III 4 5 6

Hello to the Factory

A General Account

Part II 2 3

1

Signs of Change

143 165

183

Modernity and Younger Workers The Future of Workers in the Modern Sector

185 201

Bibliography

207

Index

217

v

List of Tables, Figures and Boxes

Tables 1.1 1.2 1.3

3.1 3.2 3.3

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 6.1 6.2 8.1 8.2 9.1

Good job for someone like me Satisfaction with physical working conditions Indicators of physical discomfort at work: reporting physical discomfort for half the time or more in the last month Earners in Turkish and Muhacir Bulgarian households How they got present job: Turks and Muhacir Bulgarians (a) Education of Turks and Muhacir Bulgarians (b) Education of Turks and Muhacir Bulgarians – Women only Managers’ level of education, by industry Fathers’ occupation of managers, by industry Some age-related social characteristics of managers Managers’ familiarity with management methods Managers’ sources of knowledge about management methods Workers’ familiarity with management methods Managers’ views on particular problems with Turkish workers Workers’ views on particular problems with managers in Turkey Managers’ job training in the last 12 months, by industry Duration of workers’ job training in the last 12 months, by industry Content of courses attended by workers in the last 12 months Quality circles and their characteristics, by plant What would you do if you found a way to do your job that was easier or faster than the specified way? BoluWG and BursaText2 compared to other plants on various criteria Changes over the last five years Workers’ evaluations of management and trade union Source of support for workers in case of grievance Social characteristics of workers, by age vi

29 38

39 69 71 72 72 82 82 83 88 90 91 99 101 108 109 110 115 119 126 132 168 169 187

List of Tables, Figures and Boxes

Workers’ satisfaction with physical working conditions, by age 9.3 Satisfaction with pay, by age 9.4 Good job for someone like me, by age 9.5 Perceived job influence over various aspects of work, by age 9.6 How workers describe relations between management and employees, by age 9.7 Workers’ evaluation of trade union and management, by age 9.8 Aspects of support for management, by age 9.9 Descriptions of self, by age 9.10 Whether workers would like their sons/daughters to do this job, by age

vii

9.2

188 190 191 191 192 193 194 196 197

Figures 1.1 1.2 4.1 6.1 7.1 7.2 7.3

7.4

Ideal typical corporate sector advantages Company brochure for employees The seven plants, level of technology and modern management The seven plants and climate percentage ‘good’ and ‘very good’ Strikes by Türk-Is and DISK 1970–80 (a) Real non-agricultural wages in Turkey 1970–79 (b) Real non-agricultural wages in Turkey 1980–89 (a) Strikes 1984–2001 (b) Workers on strike 1984–2001 (c) Days lost by strikes 1984–2001 Minimum wage and wage in 500 largest enterprises 1987–2001

33 37 92 125 148 152 152 155 155 155 156

Boxes 2.1

(a) Descriptions of self – Men (b) Descriptions of self – Women

56 57

Acknowledgements

Our thanks are due to Erol Kahveci, especially for his contribution to the initial design of the project on which this book is based and for reading it in draft; to Erol Demir for his contribution to the interviews conducted in white goods and car plants and for his work on imputing quantitative data; to Cevat Tasiran for his contribution to the analysis of age-related differences and his knowledge of Turkish political economy; and not least to Serap Sugur for her interviewing in textiles and an all-round contribution to what is written here on textiles and women. At various points we have benefited from the help of Fatih Gungor, most especially with reference (and references) to trade unions, and of Engin Yildirim. Special thanks are due to Ufuk Aydin for his valuable help with respect to Turkish Labour Law. Other Turkish academics who spared us their time and helped in various ways include Sencer Ayata, Hacer Ansal, Surhan Cam, Lale Duruiz, Veysel Bozkurt, Tanel Demirel and Mehmet Ecevit. In no case of course do they have any responsibility for what we have written. We are also indebted to Engin Atac, Rector of Anadolu University, for his support of Nadir Sugur during the project that led to this book and to the British Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for financial support received under Award R000237766. We owe a great deal to the officials of Chambers of Commerce for their guidance and information about Istanbul, Izmit and Bursa, and to the trade unionists and members of employers’ organisations we have interviewed. Our greatest debt is clearly to the 700 or so workers and managers upon whom the study is primarily based. Partial or preliminary versions of some of the material have been published in academic journals. Chapters in Part II draw upon Nichols, Sugur, and Sugur (2003) ‘Muhacir Bulgarian workers in Turkey: their relation to management and fellow workers in the formal employment sector’, Middle Eastern Studies, 39(2). Chapters in Part III are prefigured in Nichols, Sugur and Demir (2002a) ‘Globalised management and local labour: the case of the white goods industry in Turkey’, Industrial Relations Journal, 33(1). Chapters in Parts IV and V had their origin in viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Nichols et al. (2002b). ‘Beyond cheap labour: trade unions and development in the Turkish metal industry’, The Sociological Review, 50(1) and Nichols, Sugur and Tasiran (2003) ‘Signs of change in Turkey’s working class: workers’ age-related perceptions in the modern manufacturing sector’, British Journal of Sociology, 54(4).

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Introduction

‘Globalisation’ – at the start of the twenty-first century this term, with its diverse meanings, has become common in much social science and in the mass media. Sometimes it refers to the compression of time and space, typified by the increased velocity at which money flows throughout the world financial system or the speed at which news travels. Very often, it refers to the diffusion to each and every continent, country and seemingly, village, of western cultural styles – T-shirts, jeans, basketball caps, and to an extent, popular music and film. Sometimes it is the subject of detailed historical investigation, with consequent doubts about whether, say, some economies are more integrated into the world economy today than they were a century ago. Quite often, the idea fulfils an ideological function. For this it is well suited. It is invoked to justify both why those who are already rich have to be paid more and to justify why workers cannot be. Discussion of globalisation and related matters has called forth a huge literature and there is room for debate about the logic of much of this, the evidence adduced, and indeed the value of the concept itself, its popularity being in part a function of its imprecision. There is, though, in all this, an aspect that is usually neglected – the world of work. This neglect is in part a consequence of a wider trend that has gained hold in recent years whereby consumption has come to play a more central part in our understanding of the world than production. There is no puzzle about why this should have happened as far as what might be termed the popular imagination is concerned. The emergence of mass markets and the mass media have meant that the commodities people consume, and images of commodities, are what they have in common. At more or less the same time the decline of the massed workforce, never the norm but once a definite feature of most advanced capitalist societies, has 1

2 Introduction

reduced the common experience of work. This same neglect of production has, however, also come to characterise much modern social science. Symptomatic of this is that Anthony Giddens, commonly recognised as the world’s leading sociologist, and an influential writer on globalisation and related subjects, has little to say about work and production (Giddens 2002). Similarly, Leslie Sklair, who has developed the idea of ‘transnational practices’ and further identified the transnational corporation as the main locus of transnational economic practices, has generally had very little to say about production rather than consumption and consumerism or the actual production practices of managers (Sklair 1995). In Economics, such neglect is nothing new. In that discipline, production has long figured as a ‘black box’, a place where, guided by the hidden hand of the market, inputs invisibly turn into outputs – an understanding nicely captured by Marx’s designation of the site in which production takes place as a ‘hidden abode’. In Sociology, there has been a change however. For whatever this subject’s strengths and weaknesses, a particular feature of the concerns of its founding fathers was precisely an interest in work. In one way or another work was fundamental, most especially in the context of industrialisation. For Durkheim, it was of fundamental importance, through the division of labour, as a source of social solidarity. For Weber, it was important for the part it played with religion (more exactly Calvinism) in the origins of capitalism and the development of a particular form of rationality. For Marx, it was important as the meeting point of capital and labour, as the locus of exploitation and of class consciousness. How strange it is, then, that the Sociology of today has so little to say about the significance of this apparently ubiquitous ‘globalisation’ of work – especially as it exists in industrialising economies located outside North America, Western Europe and Japan. In particular it has had little to say about the effects of this globalisation in the very places where, in the public imagination of the West, it is often assumed that ‘our’ jobs are going. True enough, in radical circles concern is increasingly expressed about third-world working conditions. Interestingly, this, too, very often has as its focus the production of personal consumer goods – jeans, other clothing apparel and footwear, footballs and so on. As far as political activists are concerned there may be a good reason for this, for as already noted these are products that can make a direct connection with people’s lives in rich countries. Yet despite much generalisation about the compression of time and space, it is only rarely (for instance, Kaplinsky and Posthuma 1994) that attention is paid to how this affects third-world

Introduction 3

factories in other respects. Consider for example ideas about how to manage factories. These are usually developed in the United States or Japan. Are they diffused to these countries? Do they inform management practice in these countries and if so how are they mediated by local conditions? And how do they impact on workers in these countries? These are some of the specific concerns to inform this book. They are worth pursuing because the term ‘third world’ often signifies nothing more than cheap labour. A neglected aspect of the compression of time and space is that in some sectors the situation might more properly be thought of as cheap labour plus modern management methods. Not the industrial revolution over again but the industrial revolution plus twentyfirst-century management techniques. This book investigates these and related questions in the context of one particular country, Turkey. However, in an attempt to develop a broader and deeper sociological view, we will necessarily concern ourselves at various points in the book not only with ‘workers’ – but with workers who are men, women, of particular ethnic origin, younger and older – and not only with ‘globalisation’ but with the role of specific international institutions – the IMF and the EU – and the wider aspects of Turkish social structure. In Turkey in 2003 the minimum wage of 306 million TL (223 million TL after stoppages) was worth about US$185 ($135) at market exchange rates. Inexact as this calculation is, it leaves no doubt about the presence of cheap labour in the Turkish economy. What concerns us in this book however is, on the one side, the nature of the developments that are taking place in the modern sector of Turkish industry and the extent to which managers in this sector can be considered a part of global capital in so far as they share advanced levels of knowledge, technique and practice; and, on the other side, the position of local labour, of the workers who work in these factories in Turkey. As for the broader aspects that concern us, relevant here is that few countries have been founded so deliberately in the image of modernity as the Turkish Republic that Atatürk brought into existence in 1923. Superficially, modernity meant the forced abolition of the fez in favour of the western hat and suit and the requirement that everyone took a surname. But it also meant the introduction of the Latin alphabet, a countrywide literacy campaign, legal equality for women in advance of many western countries, the abolition of the caliphate and the declaration of a secular republic, the replacement of Islamic law by the Swiss civil code (and Mussolini’s penal code), and so on. Because of all this, it is not at all surprising that ‘Turkey attributes everything that is deemed

4 Introduction

modern in the state to Kemal’ (Pope and Pope 1997: 62). In terms of economics, the project of making Turkey a modern, western state has meant a series of policy shifts. In the early 1920s substantial incentives were provided to create an entrepreneurial class. In the mid-1930s the state created state owned enterprises (SEEs) and a wide range of industries were supported with an eye to both industrialisation and regional development. The SEEs remained in place as the private manufacturing sector began to develop in the late 1940s. In 1950, following the demise of one-party rule, the post-war era saw an attempt to continue the project of modernisation through the liberalisation of economic policy. An indigenous industrial bourgeoisie began to emerge and, in the middle of the decade, the introduction of the Law for the Encouragement of Foreign Capital opened up the economy to foreign investment, in petroleum, fertilisers, food processing, chemicals, electrical goods, tyres and rubber, and other manufacturing and assembly. In the 1960s state planning increased and a policy of import substitution was pursued until the late 1970s, the end of which decade marked a major turning point in recent Turkish political economy. Amidst violence on the streets between the forces of the Right and Left and in the context of a trade union movement that had developed in strength considerably since the early 1960s, a military coup ensued in 1980 (other military interventions having occurred in 1960 and 1971). Turkey had experienced balance of payments and foreign debt problems and inflation soared to 100 per cent. The coup paved the way for the implementation of an IMF stabilisation and adjustment package and the policy of export-oriented industrialisation. The opening up of markets, which later on, in 1996, included entry to the EU Customs Union, has not led to the influx of foreign investment that free market theory might suggest. Political and economic instabilities have kept foreign direct investment at relatively low levels, certainly compared to a country like Hungary where foreign affiliates account for nearly half of manufacturing employment compared to under ten per cent in Turkey (OECD 2001: 22, Figure 5). Nor has the disengagement of the state from economic affairs gone as far as the IMF and others have wanted, in particular, various privatisations have been long delayed. However the apparatus of protection has been progressively dismantled. On the other side of the coin, as part of the 1980s political turn, the trade unions have been fettered and civil liberties have been curtailed, the latter only beginning to strengthen as part of a recent attempt to meet EU fullmembership requirements.

Introduction 5

Atatürk would probably have taken pride in the vast cities that have now come into existence and in some important changes in Turkey’s social structure over the last half century. In 1960, 68 per cent of the population lived in rural areas. By the end of the century about the same proportion lived in urban areas. In 1960 literacy was under 40 per cent. By the end of the century the proportion was twice as high. There is, however, in all of Turkey one area that stands out as a centre of industry. This is the Marmara region, and within this the Izmit triangle. Over half the biggest 500 companies in Turkey are in the Marmara region and millions of new migrants have been attracted to it since the 1950s. The region includes nearly 30 per cent of all the workers employed in various industries in Turkey. It accounts for nearly 40 per cent of GDP. Around a third of employment in Marmara is in industry, a higher proportion than for any other region. The World Bank suggests that the Marmara region experienced some increased incidence of relative poverty during the 1990s, partly as a consequence of internal migration from poorer areas but the general trend has been for rich provinces like Marmara to become richer and poorer provinces poorer (World Bank 2000: 23, 41). Regional inequalities in Turkey are pronounced and Marmara constitutes a zone of relative prosperity. Some indication of what this means is that in 2000 income per head in Izmit, one of the region’s leading industrial centres, stood at US$7556, ten times higher than the US$725 for Mus in the remote east (EIU 2003: 37). The area known as the Izmit triangle is at the economic heart of the Marmara region. The triangle runs from Istanbul at its apex to Izmit (also called Kocaeli) and Bursa at its other two points. It was the site of extensive industrialisation in the 1970s and 1980s as industry spilled out of Istanbul. There is intermittent industrial development along the 100 miles of road between Istanbul and Adapazari. Mostly this is on the strip between the E5 road and the sea. There are occasional green spaces and places where the hills encroach too far to leave any space for development. But the traveller along the E5 is left in no doubt that this is a highly industrialised region. The development is especially dense between Istanbul and Izmit. The region’s geographical proximity to the European market has made the triangle the centre of economic growth and employment in Turkey and among the main industrial goods produced are processed food items, textiles, ready-to-wear clothing, cars, white goods, machinery, cement, paper, petrochemical products and ships. Millions of new migrants have been attracted to the region since the 1950s. Thanks to internal migration, the population of Istanbul, Izmit and Bursa now stands at around

6 Introduction

15 million, about 20 per cent of Turkey’s total population, with annual population increases for the triangle still running at twice the rate for Turkey as a whole at the end of the 1990s. In addition to the internal migration, these cities also received many of the 350,000 immigrants from Bulgaria who went to Turkey in 1989. In 1999 and 2000 research was conducted in seven plants in or adjacent to the Izmit triangle. Three of these plants produced white goods. Two produced cars. Another two were in textiles. All of these plants have a minimum of 500 employees. At the start of the research four of them were joint ventures with large foreign multinational corporations, two were entirely owned by one of the two large conglomerates that dominate the domestic economy and one was a large independent Turkishowned company. The car and white goods plants were taken to represent the economy’s modern sector, the textile plants were chosen as the most advanced in this predominantly traditional industry. With the partial exception of one of the textile plants, which is presently focused on the domestic market, these plants are either geared up for increased exports or have, in most cases, recorded substantial exports already, especially to Europe. During the research for this book we interviewed 356 workers, about 50 in each plant, with only 2 refusals. All the workers interviewed worked in one of the main production departments. Two-thirds were assembly line workers. The rest consisted of indirect production workers such as maintenance workers and quality control workers and packing workers. Information was obtained on the age structure of blue-collar workers from HRM managers. This was then used as a sampling frame to request workers for interview in such a way as to provide a representative spread of ages and positions. Workers with less than six months service were excluded on the grounds that they were not well placed to provide information and opinion on some of the matters investigated. In addition to interviewing over 350 workers, 353 replies were received to a questionnaire which was sent to managers and white-collar staff, again aiming for about 50 per company (with a response rate of over 70 per cent). For this survey over half of those sampled were from the main production unit, including line managers, engineers, chiefs and team leaders and the rest included those in other departments such as marketing, research and development, material supply, accountancy and human resource management. As well as conducting a survey of managers, we also interviewed managing directors, HRM managers, production directors, R&D managers, marketing managers, line managers and team leaders.

Introduction 7

Interviews with workers took place inside the plants and lasted around an hour for each worker and in some cases more. Structured, semi-structured and open-ended questions were included. During the fieldwork, workers and managers were observed inside the workplace. Visits were made to the neighbourhoods where most of the factory workers lived, to coffee houses and so on, and additional in-depth interviews with workers were conducted, which lasted around two to three hours outside the factory. In this way, workers’ life stories were collected as well as further comments from them on various aspects of work. Shop stewards were interviewed in each plant where there was a union. We conducted in-depth interviews with head union officials in each city. In addition, we interviewed top officials in each city’s chambers of commerce and obtained general information about industrial development at regional level. The plants were initially studied in the following sequence: BoluWG, spring and summer 1999; GebzeWG, summer 1999; CerkWG, autumn 1999; GebzeCar, winter 2000; BursaCar, spring 2000; BursaText1, autumn 2000 and BursaText2, winter 2001. Most of the information that appears in the book was therefore collected before the banking crisis of November 2001 which deepened and led to the failure of the IMF programme then in force and devaluation of the Turkish lira in February 2001, leading to short-time working and lay-offs in many factories. However, in Turkey crises of various kinds have been the rule rather than the exception. Both the previous 1997 Asian crisis and then the crisis in Russia had had significant effects, especially in the textile industry. The so-called ‘post-modern coup’ of 1997, whereby the military effectively ousted an Islamic party from government also contributed to continuing political and economic instability. When the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a party with some common Islamic roots to the party that the Army had ousted, came to power in November 2002, it followed on the heels of over a dozen mostly short-lived and precarious coalitions. A major earthquake hit the Marmara area in August 1999, followed by the Bolu earthquake in the November. Only CerkWG lay out of the path of these disasters. Workers in some of these factories were both astonished and extremely grateful for the assistance that management offered them at this time. Such assistance, which was offered in the context of a general lack of state support, ranged from the provision of blankets, tents, food, and visiting workers’ apartments to, in one case (GebzeCar), company provision of apartments for a year together with the payment of rent, electricity, water and other services. We are quite convinced that had most of the interviews in these companies followed

8 Introduction

shortly after the earthquake rather than having just preceded it, workers’ estimation of management would have been considerably higher, although how long such an effect has lasted is a moot point. CerkWG, one of the three white goods plants, is situated in Thrace (Trakya), to the west of Istanbul on the European side of the Bosphoros. It is part of a German–Turkish joint venture company, which in its present form dates from 1996/97. One of the two German partners is one of the biggest white goods manufacturers in the world. The manufacturing complex as a whole employs 3000 people. More than 1000 are employed in the refrigerator plant, which is concentrated on here. The plant has over a third of the home market, producing around a million fridges annually. It exports 40 per cent of them. Since the arrival of the German partner, who appointed a German managing director, the plant, which hitherto had been starved of investment, has benefited considerably from upgrades to its technology. The site has also developed highly specialised R&D facilities for aspects of fridge and freezer production with other aspects of fridge and freezer R&D being located in the corporation’s plants in other countries. This specialisation of the R&D function has meant an important shift towards innovation. In an R&D manager’s words they have moved ‘from copying to inventing’. Most pre-assembly line work in the paint section, in metal cutting and bending, in plastic cutting and in moulding has been automated. German managers claim the equipment used is the same as that at the corporation’s factories in other countries. Final assembly and some sub-assembly (where some women are employed) is labour intensive, but with some final quality control again being automated. The pace of technological change in this plant has been impressive and major investment has continued to be put in despite the economic crisis at the turn of the century. In autumn 1999, when most of the fieldwork in this plant was conducted, rolls of steel were handled manually. By 2002 they were moved by machine and the entire process of moving the steel rolls to loading a new giant press (which could produce three different panels simultaneously) to delivering the shaped steel to the paint section had been very considerably automated. The crashing noise from the old presses in one part of the workshop had also gone. This area of the shop floor is now extremely clean whereas before it had been the dirtiest section in a plant, which in any case, has a generally high standard of housekeeping. At CerkWG 60–70 per cent of materials are imported, with variations according to particular cases. The main Turkish suppliers are in Istanbul, only about five per cent are local. The rule is that no one contractor

Introduction 9

should conduct more than 30 per cent of its work for the company and the managing director is critical of policies like those in the other two white goods firms, which he argues create relations of dependence and hold back the development of Turkish infrastructure. There are signs of investment in long-term relations as the company has now instituted a training programme for its suppliers with a special emphasis on quality. (The foreign partner took over completely in 2003.) GebzeWG, is located between Istanbul and Izmit, which is the site of heavy industrialisation, which increased in the 1980s as industry spilled out of Istanbul in a second phase of development. The GebzeWG plant has occupied the site since the end of the 1960s. It produces washing machines and is owned by one of the large Turkish conglomerates. It became a dedicated washing machine factory in the mid-1980s, and began production of automatic washing machines in 1997, the revamped plant then being described by an international trade magazine in glowing terms as ‘a modern manufacturing marvel’ and as symbolic of the company’s rise as a regional manufacturing power. Turkey’s youthful population, the growing number of households, and a relatively low level of penetration in such items as washing machines have helped to make the conglomerate the biggest private firm in Turkey. The company generated a capital turnover of 1.2 billion US$ from sales in 2000. It is one of the biggest white goods manufacturers in Europe and the plant, which produces about one and a half million washing machines annually, has over 50 per cent of the home market. In 2002 it exported 50 per cent of the production. Production is assembly line based and a variety of models is produced, stimulated by the presence on site of an advanced R&D unit. GebzeWG employs just fewer than 1000 in a well laid out modern plant which has invested heavily in new technology since the end of a partnership with a German multinational in 1986 (like many Turkish companies it had begun by working under license). Metal cutting and bending are highly automated and there are automatic devices and numerically controlled machines throughout the production process. In the powder paint unit where metal frames are painted automatically, workers are largely reduced to pressing buttons when necessary. In the pre-assembly unit, most work tasks are highly automated through the use of CNC machines. In the final assembly unit, most of the work is carried out manually with a minority of women working side by side with the men. In the final quality control, the work tasks are again highly automated. Just over 50 per cent of parts are produced in Turkey with more complex electromagnetic mechanisms being imported from abroad. The company

10 Introduction

seeks to maintain close relations with its domestic suppliers, as does BoluWG which is owned by the same conglomerate. BoluWG is situated to the east of the Izmit triangle proper and is again a product of the spillover of industry from Istanbul that occurred in the 1980s. Just fewer than 1000 are employed in the plant, which produces over half a million ovens annually. A variety of models is produced for both the home and European markets and BoluWG has just over 50 per cent of the home market, with 50 per cent of sales going for export in 2002. Of the three white goods factories BoluWG is the most labour intensive. The company began to upgrade its technology in the mid-1990s in a bid to concentrate more on the international market. However, most work has not been automated with the exception of the metal cutting and bending unit where there are a few computer controlled machines and CNC lathes, and the paint unit. It is also the case that R&D remains centralised, away from the plant, in company HQ. No women are employed in the production process. A small area of the workshop is organised on the basis of cell production but employs less than a dozen people and output per person is significantly lower than on the main lines. BoluWG sources about 75 per cent of raw materials domestically. These mainly come from Istanbul. It is company policy to draw such suppliers geographically closer to the plant and this localisation policy is meeting with some success. BoluWG is subject to a wider holding group policy, also evident at GebzeWG, which tends to make suppliers company dependent. BoluWG has more long-service managers and workers than any of the other plants (were visitors from Western Europe to see these shop floors they would be immediately struck by the lack of middle-aged workers). At the time of the fieldwork in 1999 elements of a paternalist tradition still survived at the plant. The plant was scheduled for management reorganisation, but at the time of the fieldwork this had not yet occurred. The plant’s vestiges of paternalism, the fact that its labour force is overwhelmingly of local origin and its lower level of technological development all mark BoluWG as different to the other two white goods plants. In many ways it will serve in this book as a useful point of comparison against which to judge emerging tendencies. BursaCar, one of the two car plants, is a joint venture in which the two partners are a leading Italian producer and the largest Turkish holding company. The plant started production at Bursa in 1969. In 2000 it had 5000 employees, including about 4250 manual workers. In the past

Introduction 11

production has been mainly for the home market, though the plant’s new model, introduced during the fieldwork, was aimed predominately at Europe and has lived up to management’s expectations. In 2001, the company exported just under 100,000 units of the new model generating around 1 billion US$ from this source alone and it has done better in subsequent years. To put this in context, the production of the entire Turkish automobile industry had never reached 100,000 before 1987 (Duruiz and Yenturk 1992: 64, Table 3.6). The plant has six main production units: press shop, engine, underbody, welding, paint and assembly, which includes pre- and final assembly lines. Some new machinery and lathes have been introduced in all units and in the press shop and paint units in particular. Most of the work in the paint unit is automated. Generally, though, the production process is labour intensive. Fifteen kilometers of conveyors run from the press shop to final assembly where there is a marked absence of highly developed electronic devices and even relatively few powered hand tools. For much of its history BursaCar has fallen behind the most advanced technology in the automotive sector. An engineer estimated the changeover time on one press was closer to 60 minutes rather than the 6 minutes that it reputedly took in Japan. However, highly automated presses have been purchased and although these were still not fully operational at the time of the fieldwork, they promise considerable reductions in down time in the longer run. A new R&D unit has also been created which should stimulate further product variety and advances in quality. Between 50 and 95 per cent of the plant’s supplies are from Turkey, the proportion differing for different items and models. The majority of suppliers, around 200, are located in Bursa, with the rest in Istanbul and elsewhere in the country. International suppliers are normally preferred who work with or are part of the Italian parent company. GebzeCar is a recently established small assembly plant. It is therefore unlike BursaCar, which is a major car manufacturer in Turkey and which produces most of the most important components of cars, including engines, as well as performing assembly. It is restricted for the present to one model with two different engine capacities and certain variations in specification. Formed as a joint venture between a leading Turkish industrial group and a global Japanese car producer, the plant started producing cars only in 1997. Although a joint venture at the time of our research, it became 100 per cent Japanese owned in 2002. GebzeCar employs over 500 employees and had an annual production capacity of 30,000 passenger cars in 2000. The company has so far concentrated on the home market but is planning to increase its capacity

12 Introduction

to 100,000 in the next few years and aims to export cars to the international market. From the beginning, design was predetermined in Japan, and the main parts of cars such as car engines were provided by the parent Japanese company, which has its own international material suppliers and warehouses around the world. The factory layout is light and spacious and the plant’s exceptionally young workforce is largely engaged in assembly work using electrical hand tools. Managers at the plant are much enamoured with modern management methods but the plant has little autonomy on the R&D front. In GebzeCar R&D is centralised in the Japanese parent company that dictates matters of technology, layout and product specification. Even prior to the 100 per cent Japanese takeover, Turkish managers expressed their frustration that they were not permitted to alter production or innovate without Japanese approval. The two car plants differ considerably in their degree of local and international integration, in part because GebzeCar was only two and a half years old at the time of the fieldwork. Ninety per cent of its materials were imported, mainly from Japan and to a smaller extent from the Japanese company’s plant in Europe. Managers claimed that they intended to source more of them from Turkey in future and talked of their hope of reaching a 50 per cent share in a few years time. In the meantime in this and most other respects the plant remained dominated by the Japanese parent. BursaText1, one of the two textile plants, is largely owned by a UK multinational textile company. Initially set up in Istanbul in 1952, it moved out to Bursa in 1968. The plant employs just fewer than 1000 people of which two-thirds are women. Almost half of the labour force consists of Turkish-Bulgarian immigrants. BursaText1 is one of the leading firms in the production of yarn, zippers and embroidery in Turkey and the company has concentrated on the internal market which makes up 80 per cent of the total sales. At BursaText1 the zipper unit represents about a third of the factory and mainly consists of machining work. BursaText1 has got its own kanban system and managers make much of the idea of ‘right first time’, the principle of working with minimum stock and of the need to be extremely responsive to customer demand. Delivery of any order is promised in 48 hours whatever the amount and wherever the customer is located in Turkey. A computerised system permits 10,000 colours to be precisely matched to customer requirements and new colours to be developed. However, the R&D function is situated outside Turkey in the home country of the parent company.

Introduction 13

BursaText1 plans to export more of its products to the Group’s companies around the world. At present its exports are worth circa US$10 million per year. The company usually gets its main raw material from Egypt, where the Group has extensive cotton fields with high quality yields. The plant’s technology is more than usually mixed, highly automated in spinning and highly labour intensive in the zip and finishing unit, but generally lacking the good layout and technical sophistication of the white goods and car plants. Overall only 30 per cent of all supplies come from Turkey and 70 per cent from outside with major decisions about suppliers being taken by the parent company which has worldwide interests. BursaText2 is owned by one of Turkey’s leading textile industrialists. It was set up in Bursa in 1972 and started to produce towels and bathrobes with two semi-automatic looms and five employees. The company now employs around 1500 people of which just over half were women in 2002. It is the largest producer in this sector in Turkey with exports of US$20 million and a turnover of US$100 million and it claims to have taken its place among the ten largest companies in the sector in the world. In 2001, three quarters of its products were exported mainly to the UK and the USA. The level of technology is relatively higher than that generally found in the textile industry in Turkey. On average 10–20 million US$ has been invested in new technology in recent years but the production process is still labour intensive, especially in the spinning and confection unit. Although computerised embroidery machines are used to produce different designs, the products are relatively simple and typically produced in big batches. Writing of factories in Istanbul in 1970, Makofsky observed: Very often, new workers are recruited to the city by factory owners. In an effort to hire loyal employees, an owner will return to his home province to ensure that the positive characteristics of paternalism and subservience are continued in an urban environment (1977: 69). This was no longer true of the factories in this study – except at BursaText2. In this particular factory the owner-manager still to some extent follows the traditional practice. An important part of the labour force comes from the owners’ hometown and in this and other respects the plant approximates more closely than any of the others to a traditional Turkish plant. At BursaText2, ‘management’ means the owner himself. He is to be seen in the yard and in the workshops. He is known to the workers and they are known to him. In short, rather like BoluWG but

14 Introduction

with a different ownership structure and one that is familiar in the Turkish textiles industry, this factory operates on paternalist lines. The two textile plants differ in their degree of local and international integration and these differences are closely associated with their respective foreign and local ownership. At BursaText2, which is Turkish owned, only ten per cent or less of materials are imported and most come from another of the company’s plants which is nearby. There is no major R&D function to stimulate changes in production and, in practice, the entire plant, its organisation and the methods that it uses are a function of the power of its single owner. On the other hand, the fact that BursaText2 is so strongly oriented to the overseas market meant that it actually benefited when the Turkish lira collapsed to half its value in 2001 and it gained a further advantage because tourism was the only Turkish industry to grow, and hotels and tourists bought towels. BursaText2 therefore actively recruited in 2001 whereas by the end of that year every other firm had either made dismissals or put workers on short time. In briefly comparing these plants to each other it has been seen that ownership exercises an important influence and there are also some differences in markets and products. Generally, in terms of broad levels of technological development the white goods and car firms are more or less at the same level, followed by those in textiles. In a sense, there is nothing surprising about this. Textiles is an old industry, and typically the industry of first resort for countries that are undergoing industrialisation. It seems common sense that textiles would lag behind the representatives of the newer white goods and car sectors. Even so, the two textile plants are in fact leading plants in their sector both with respect to their technological development and what they offer workers as employers. For example, several trade union officials described BursaText1 as having, from their point of view, the best management in the textiles industry. And BursaText2, where women are paid only the minimum wage, is still valued for other reasons. Such more particular points of comparison will prove of considerable importance as we proceed in later chapters to consider how management techniques impact on workers in these different plants. One of our guiding assumptions will be that to the extent that modern management methods are globalised, the response to these is likely to be mediated by particular local and historical conditions. Relevant here is what a particular plant offers to workers as compared to what has been on offer hitherto and what is on offer elsewhere in the industry and in the local labour market. A case in point is the BoluWG plant, which differs considerably from the other two white goods plants. There is a relatively low level of skill at BoluWG (most workers

Introduction 15

in all the plants being mainly semi-skilled) and this complements the relatively low level of technology. But the factory is in a town with an essentially rural location, and this and its paternalist tradition lend it a distinctive character. One aspect of this concerns the stance adopted by the plant’s managers to workers’ religious practice. This seems an appropriate point to offer some more general comment both on the role of religion and also about what might be called ‘rurality’. Religion requires some comment because of western preconceptions. Writing in the late 1950s, citing contemporary opinion, the American political scientist Daniel Lerner reported: Whether from East or West, modernisation poses the same basic challenge – the infusion of a ‘rationalist and positivist spirit’ against which, scholars seem agreed, ‘Islam is absolutely defenceless’ (Lerner 1964: 45). Western opinion is considerably different today. The assumption tends to be the very opposite, that Islam is very well able to defend itself. Indeed in some versions it is depicted as a successful anti-modernist force. Of course discussion can take more complicated turns than this with arguments about the meaning of Islamists using cell phones and computers and other advanced technology and, at another level, about Islam’s historic contribution to the advancement of science and culture, not least during the Christian Dark Ages. But the point that has to be made here is that the role of religion in Turkish business is by no means what might be suggested by the fact that Turkey is an Islamic society, which it is, as judged by the religion of the vast majority of its people – and indeed by the fact that two-thirds of the workers we interviewed in these factories thought it important that people could pray at work. Outside Turkey, mention of the relation between Islam and business is likely to trigger discussion about the rise of Islamic capital, or of course the nature of Islamic banking and the treatment of interest or provision for prayer at work. What has to be understood is that none of these issues is pertinent to an understanding of most of the plants looked at in this book. The attempt to forge a secular Turkish state has had consequences for the mode of operation of the largest Turkish companies, many of which owe their origin or success to state contracts. It also has meant that joint ventures, in which these firms are usually the Turkish partners, are likely to have a secular orientation. The companies discussed in this book are not part of Islamic capital, which predominately consists of relatively new small- and medium-sized

16 Introduction

firms located in Anatolia. They belong to TUSIAD, the organisation of big Istanbul capital, and not to the largely Anatolian-based Islamic employers’ federation, MUSIAD. They have no problems with interest, other than the high rates they have to pay. Nor are they preoccupied with the sorts of Islam-related issues that have begun to concern some employers in advanced capitalist countries outside Turkey, including the United States. It is now quite well known that an influx of peoples from Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq and elsewhere had led to there being around six million Muslims in America by the end of the last century. What is less well known is that HRM specialists in America have begun to busy themselves advising business how to conduct itself in relation to Muslim people. Thus in 1998 one of them is to be found drawing managers’ attention to a recent publication An Employer’s Guide to Islamic Religious Practices, which provided information on the legal protection of religious rights and explained ‘practices such as daily prayers, washing, dietary requirements, holidays, clothing and grooming’. For good measure the Guide also promised explanations of ‘social customs involving work-related requirements for eye contact, handshaking and socializing’ (Minehan 1998: 216). More grist to this mill is that Muslims have brought increased charges of religious bias against employers. These more than doubled between 1992 and 1999. No doubt with an eye to this in 1997 a Workplace Religion policy was implemented, guaranteeing Muslims who worked for the Federal government that they would be able to pray during the day and wear jihabs at work (Townsend 2000). The contrast with what happens in most of our firms in Turkey could hardly be greater. At BoluWG workers are bussed by the company to a nearby mosque for midday Friday prayer and at BursaText2 workers are allowed to pray at work. But there is no bussing at the other plants and none of them provides a mescit (prayer room). One of the plants, GebzeCar, follows so determinedly a secular policy that any job applicant thought to be a zealous Muslim will not be employed. Workers play down their Islamic identity accordingly. At GebzeWG not only is there no question of workers praying in work time, but stories are told of a worker who was caught in the act of prayer being kicked up the backside by an engineer, a deeply offensive act. And in all the white goods and car plants, except for GebzeCar, where workers were well aware of managers’ secular orientation and would not dare to raise the question of prayer with them, workers reported that managers had responded to their queries about whether they could pray with the phrase ‘çalismak ibadettir’ (to work is to worship). We asked a member of MUSIAD what

Introduction 17

was different about an Islamic factory. He told us that apart from the question of interest and that if there were women they would be more pious, arrangements must be made for prayer. Well, to be clear about this, whether Turkey is a Muslim country or not, workers do not openly pray at work in most of these factories. As for rurality, some comments are in order because a process of change is underway. In 1950, when conducting a study of Balgat, which was then a village outside Ankara, Lerner asked ‘If you could not live in Turkey, where would you want to live?’ He reports that ‘the standard reply of the villagers was that they would not live, could not imagine living, anywhere else’ (Lerner 1964: 24–25). A decade later an account of the lives of villagers who had migrated to Istanbul from eastern Anatolia commented that they were ‘almost oblivious’ to people who did not come from their village ‘even in situations when the latter group were their neighbours in the shack settlement’ (1964: 211–12). In similar vein, Erder has observed of Istanbul, a city that has been no stranger to many peoples – Armenians, Greeks, Jews – that after the 1950s a wave of migration from Anatolia meant the arrival of people whose style of life was seen by residents as alien, the so-called ‘peasants in the city’ (1999: 162). Remarkably, these ‘alien’ people were also Turks but it is a familiar theme in Turkish social science that rural-to-urban migrants retain their rural identity in the city where they surround themselves with other rural migrants. There are some problems with this line of commentary as far as the workers in the present study are concerned. For a start, out of all the workers who had been born in Turkey (15 per cent had come from Bulgaria), 60 per cent had been born in one of Turkey’s large cities or in a small city or town rather than a village. Over half of all workers had fathers who had been workers. Two-thirds had been educated to high school or technical school level. The profile that emerges is therefore one in which these workers are not predominately from villages (though almost every one will have rural roots at some remove), are educated and are often of working-class origin. For nearly all of them it is also the case that wage labour is their only source of income. The ‘peasants in the city’ idea is often advanced with reference to those who live in gecekondu areas (the squatter settlements, literally ‘built overnight’ without official permission) that house an estimated 35 per cent of the urban population or perhaps half of the population of the big cities. Little at all is documented about workers like many of those considered here. Typically, they live in apartments and not in gecekondu areas.

18 Introduction

As already noted BoluWG and CerkWG are located east and west of the Izmit triangle proper. At the end of the 1970s a researcher described Bolu as having an ethnically and religiously homogeneous population of first-generation workers who had not totally severed their ties with the land and as having the kind of workforce which reflected the majority of industrial workers in Turkey (Kalaycioglu 1995: 82). In some ways this remains the case and the Bolu habitat is not typical of the workers who figure centrally in this book – those who work for big private corporate sector in the Izmit triangle proper. Today Bolu is a city of about 80,000 people, and it might well be described as ‘a city in the country’. Bolu is surrounded by beautiful countryside and lakes and is situated on a plain at the edge of which there are mountains. The centre of Bolu takes on a sense of bustle and activity at the weekends. On weekdays, it is quiet with few people – women, usually in headscarves, and middleaged men, usually wearing caps, strolling around smoking and talking. On winter nights the atmosphere is thick with smog from the cheap coal burnt on domestic fires. The old centre of Bolu is dominated by a large mosque. Just a little further on there is a hamam (a Turkish bath). Then, next to the hamam there is a white goods shop. Behind them is the local headquarters of the right wing MHP (Nationalist Movement Party). A new town centre, where some of the managers live, has a distinctively modern appearance, dust-free roads, and modern shops, some of which are part of international chains. There are no such shops or supermarkets where Bolu workers live. Some live in detached and semi-detached houses. Others live in new, usually four-storey apartment blocks on the village-like perimeter of the city near to older wood and wattle houses. All the buildings are of low density, with just a few workers living in the prefabricated estates, set up after the 1999 Bolu earthquake. None however live in gecekondu areas. At Bolu no such ‘shanty town’ exists. CerkWG workers lack the social homogeneity of those at Bolu. The town is located close to main roads, airports, the railway and seaports. State-supported development (which also played a part in development at Bolu) has meant that its population rose from 8000 in 1975 to over 40,000 by 2000 (70,000 including the surrounding villages) and it is the fastest growing town in the European part of Turkey. Compared to Bolu, the town is quite modern and has a secular look about it. Hardly any women are to be seen in karaçarsaf (the veiled blackcrow type dress) and very few even wear a türban (headscarf). Although the town is not planned well there are no gecekondu districts. Most roads are dusty in the summer and muddy in the winter and the German managers from

Introduction 19

CerkWG, who live on site, are apt to complain of the wind, which at times blows hard. For their part, though, about half the workers live in the four, five and six-storey new apartment blocks that have been built in the town, others live in Saray and Çorlu, other towns about ten and twenty miles away and in their surrounding villages. However, most of the workers in this study live in Gebze and Bursa. Gebze is the main home of workers at GebzeWG and GebzeCar (about a third of whom travel in from Izmit, an hour away by road). Gebze is located in the heart of the Istanbul–Izmit industrial complex and is one of the Turkish towns that has undergone rapid socio-economic change along with industrialisation. A small town in the 1960s, with a population of clearly fewer than 50,000 for most of the decade, it has become a medium-sized city of about a third of a million. There is a strong Islamic influence. There are few women on the streets without headscarves. There are few places that sell alcohol. The cafe areas or public parks are segregated for men, women and families. Writing of Gebze in the late 1970s Gunes-Ayata reported that the factory owners did not generally live there (Gunes-Ayata 1987: 237). There is no evident middle-class area in Gebze and still today GebzeCar and GebzeWG managers have little contact with the area. They live in Istanbul, on a good day for traffic about three-quarters of an hour away by car. One manager who we asked where we could find a hotel replied ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been there.’ The shops of the big international chains have no premises in Gebze. There is no McDonalds, no Burger King. The best roads in Gebze have potholes. Most side turnings are thick with mud when it rains and otherwise dusty. Gebze lies on the busy E5 road from Istanbul. The industrial development on the coast side of the E5 Istanbul road has mushroomed over the last two decades. But the residential area, which is mostly on the other side of the road, has grown even more. The hills of Gebze are marked by different generations of gecekondu. There are older buildings at the bottom – usually one storey high, sometimes two – and newer building higher up, with various districts displaying different degrees of prosperity. Twenty years ago Gunes-Ayata saw accommodation to be scarce and expensive; that rented accommodation was unpopular among the migrants and that to own a house was considered better and more secure. Nearly 60 per cent of the migrants who fuelled Gebze’s growth then lived in their own houses (Gunes-Ayata 1987: 238). Today the percentage of workers at GebzeCar and GebzeWG who own their own homes is about the same (out of all workers in these plants about 60 per cent own their own homes and 30 per cent own cars). The car and white goods

20 Introduction

workers tend to live in relatively new apartments, which are three, four or five storeys high. Whereas the streets have no pavements, the accommodation of most workers from the two Gebze factories is a clear step up from that endured in the main gecekondu areas. Bursa is home to nearly half the workers in this study. An ancient city that was once the capital of the Ottoman Empire, it has been long known for its hot springs and Turkish baths, it was famed for many centuries for its towels (which derive from the baths), its knives and textiles, the origin of its textile industry going back to the time when the city was an important link in the old silk route (Cinar et al. 1988: 291). Today two million people live in the city and its environs. Of these 55 per cent register their birthplace outside the city, and of these in turn 30 per cent are immigrants from the Balkans (the clear majority of these from Bulgaria) and 70 per cent from other parts of Turkey (Parlak 1996a: 129). The city is the centre of two main industries, the textile industry, which employs many women, and the automotive industry. In textiles it is an important commercial and production centre, about 25 per cent of the city’s value added coming from textiles, an industry that employs over 60,000 people in over 6000 firms. The Turkish car industry developed under import substitution policies and the two giants of the Turkish industry Tofas (a Fiat joint venture) and Renault (a joint venture with OYAK, the Army Mutual Aid Foundation) went into production in Bursa in the early 1970s (Duruiz and Yenturk 1992; Parlak 1996b). These two accounted for a massive 96 per cent of car production in 1993 (Parlak 1996a: 126). In the 1990s world overcapacity in the car industry and the search for new markets has led to further investment by foreign multinationals, including Toyota, Opel, Honda and Ford but Bursa has retained its position as the centre of the industry. In 2003 three car plants in Bursa employed around 10,000 people and produced 80 per cent of the country’s passenger cars. Between 1970 and 1990 Bursa’s population expanded 300 per cent by which time 70 per cent of the labour force was employed in manufacturing, the highest proportion of any city of any size (Parlak 1996a: 128). The expansion of industrial employment has been aided by the development of three organised industrial districts where over 350 mediumand large-sized firms employ over 50,000 people (Ipekyun 1997). An extensive informal industrial district also exists in Bursa. Hand carts, pony carts and cars jostle through the narrow streets amongst car repairers, metal working shops and in particular textile workshops located in two- and sometimes three-storey buildings mixed in with residential areas. However, such picturesque hustle and bustle is a different world

Introduction 21

from that of BursaCar, BursaText1 and even BursaText2. This matters. Over a quarter of a century ago a small workshop owner in Bursa complained to the researcher Mehmet Ali Dikerdem that even his most talented workman (who, he insisted, he had raised ‘like a delicate flower’), wanted to become a floor sweeper at one of the big car companies (Dikerdem 1980: 377). ‘The assembly plants’ he complained ‘have been like magnets, drawing in all the skilled workers. They pay high wages, offer better work conditions, shorter hours, free meals and holidays’. It is the same story today. For as we shall see, the big plants in the modern corporate sector still act like magnets in the labour market. As we will also see, however, those who work for them are a good way removed from the stereotypical gecekondu dweller who works in the informal economy – and from the rural idiocy all too readily supposed by some westerners (and, it must be said, some Turks). Whether judged by their social origin, level of education or their living accommodation the workers in this study are not to be indiscriminately labelled ‘peasants in the city’. The book is in five parts. Part I provides a general overview. The workers are introduced with the emphasis on what working in these factories signifies in the context of the Turkish economy as a whole with respect to material and other benefits and in terms of physical working conditions. The general picture that results does not sit well with some current western preconceptions. Part II provides a more specific consideration of some important differences within the labour force that relate to gender and ethnicity. First the position of women workers in textiles is considered. This leaves no room for doubt, if any were to be had, that these women live in a male-dominated world or that they suffer both a double-burden of paid work and housework and other penalties imposed by ‘traditional behaviour’. It also opens up, however, the idea of paid work as an escape from the home and as a source of pride. The position is then considered of workers who had been born outside Turkey, in Bulgaria, and who had immigrated to Bursa, usually in 1989. It is seen amongst other things how the particular history of these workers has contributed to a particular disposition to work and a particular form of factory politics, to the advantage of management, although we see this to be reducing over time. Part III enters the world of the managers and of modern management – a world that has been substantially formed in the USA and Japan. The

22 Introduction

managers are introduced and their knowledge and local adaptation of these global methods is considered. Then attention switches to how workers regard their managers and the way their factories are run and more generally how they reflect on working in these factories in the light of their experience. The idea that they have lost their identity to a newfangled corporate culture is rejected. Part IV examines trade unionism. It begins with an account of the development of trade unionism in Turkey and of the repressive turn signalled by the 1980 coup. It then provides some consideration of the specific obstacles that confront trade unions in three of the plants. Following this, an examination is made of Türk Metal, the major trade union in the Turkish metal working industry and the main union to organise these plants. The union is seen to be autocratic and is run by a self-perpetuating oligarchy. Rather than fall back on the idea that this is often the case with trade unions in developing countries, a step by step analysis is mounted of how this union came to power and how it reproduces itself. Taking things further, the implications of its continued existence – and of support for it by the leading employers’ association – are then examined for the development of civil society in Turkey. Part V follows up the theme of the lack of development of civil society and democratic institutions in Turkey and looks for signs of change. To this end a systematic analysis is made of different degrees of criticality amongst younger and older workers. In sharp contrast to the contemporary tendency to add the epithet ‘fundamentalist’ to any reference to young Muslims – and in contrast also to the tendency of many social scientists to automatically deny that modernisation can bring enlightenment – this provides some reason for optimism. Finally, by way of conclusion, the future of workers in the modern sector is considered, in the process of which the promise of entry to the EU is seen to be, for them, a double-edged sword.

Part I Hello to the Factory

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1 A General Account

A recent research monograph on car workers in the USA bore the title Farewell to the Factory (Milkman 1997). Outstanding as that account is, it is entirely appropriate to adopt the very opposite idea as the title for this opening part of the book. For the workers who feature in these pages work in the big corporate sector, not in the USA, but in Turkey. For them, the dream is not to say ‘Farewell’ to the factory. It is to say ‘Hello’. Jobs in the big corporate sector are highly valued precisely because they are some of the few that promise an escape from the much more extensive informal economy. This is rather remarkable when viewed in the context of some western views about both the informal sector and foreign multinationals in countries like Turkey, which in recent years have begun to change. In the case of the informal sector, a perverse development has occurred. Some western intellectuals, notably Beck (2000), have seen the trend in their own countries as towards ‘Brazilianisation’ – and they have gone on to present this development in positive terms. Turkish workers would no doubt recognise parts of Beck’s description of ‘a semi-industrialised country’ in which many people are ‘travelling vendors, small retailers or craftworkers, offer all kinds of personal service, or shuttle back and forth between different fields of activity’. What needs to be said here however is that they would find risible his ‘vision’ of such insecurity offering ‘the prospect of gradually gaining sovereignty over time and experiencing political freedom within self-organised activity networks’ (Beck 2000: 1, 6). In the case of big foreign multinationals in developing countries the emerging orthodoxy is that they employ sweatshop labour. The idea that workers should value working in these companies (or, for that matter, big domestically based multinationals) flies in the face of this. 25

26 Hello to the Factory

But so common has this view became that it sometimes seems as if the entire third-world proletariat is employed in appalling conditions making footwear, clothing, sports goods and toys for western consumers – commodities that actually account for less than 10 per cent of world goods exports as the critics of these views delight in pointing out (Graham 2000: 101). For many people in North America and Europe, Naomi Klein’s No Logo, a book that was widely read at the start of the century, has done much to broadcast the notion of miserable pay and appalling conditions. As has been well remarked, it conjures up an image of ‘globalisation’s paradigmatic labour force’ – the ‘non-unionised, horribly underpaid, permanently “temporary” female workers in the export processing zone’ (Klein 2000; Bello 2001). We very much welcome that the abject position of many workers in developing countries should be brought to the forefront of public attention in the rich countries of the West. The problem is that in some popular accounts such workers have come to stand for all labour in all developing countries. And they don’t stand for the workers at issue here. The production workers in these factories are generally full-time, permanent, male (outside of textiles), unionised and relatively well paid. Full-time? Permanent? Unionised? Relatively well paid? There is an important qualification to be made to this startlingly different description. We are dealing with plants in three industries – white goods, cars and textiles. Almost everything said about the advantages of working in the white goods and car sectors of the big corporate economy has to be considerably watered down when applied to textiles. There are more women in textiles, both in the industry as a whole and in our two plants. The level of pay is also lower. Indeed, BursaText2 pays its women workers the minimum wage. Unionisation is also less developed in the industry as a whole, and in the two textile plants considered here. Even so, to work in these two textile plants, most especially the foreign-owned BursaText1, is still to gain benefits not available in the vastly greater part of the industry, which is more or less completely submerged in the informal economy and around nine out of ten of the direct production workers in all the plants in this study are permanent and work full-time. It is the desire to escape the informal economy – where the worst jobs are – that makes these workers seek work in the big private sector – where the best jobs are – and they are keen not to let these jobs go. Half a century ago the American sociologist Chinoy wrote a study that has made a lasting impression, in part perhaps because of its memorable

A General Account 27

title, American Automobile Workers and the American Dream (Chinoy 1955). Chinoy saw self-employment as part of the American dream and he argued that when workers talked about working for themselves this served a psychological function in large mechanised plants. In short, what was being expressed was ‘the desire to escape from the factory rather than a positive search for success’ (Chinoy 1955: 119). Writing four decades after Chinoy, Milkman has gone further than this and notes that ‘the phenomenon he identified has become a reality, rather than merely a dream, for a significant number of former auto workers’ (1997: 121). The context in which these studies were conducted matters. Chinoy’s investigation took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s at a time of labour shortage in the economic expansion that followed the Second World War (Chinoy 1955: 94). It may be no less relevant that Milkman’s study, although conducted half a century later, also took place at a time when the local labour market was favourable to workers. In addition, in Milkman’s case, the company concerned, GM, had actually offered workers a financial package which made setting up a ‘micro business’ a more realistic choice than it would usually have been. Whatever the weight that is to be attributed to these particular factors amongst the workers Milkman wrote about, it is important to appreciate that North American workers (and not only Turkish ones) are also quite capable of valuing their corporate sector jobs in a way that would seem to be beyond the imagination of writers such as Beck. They value them because they are anxious to avoid what is known in the West as the ‘flexible labour market’ and because, as Wells notes, with respect to Japanese transplant car factories in North America, the relatively high wages and job security offered by such factories represents ‘a last hope for many to enjoy the “middle class” lifestyle that forms the basis of full citizenship in much of Canada and the United States’ (1996: 199). This interpretation has been firmly endorsed by Rinehart and his colleagues in their account of Suzuki–GM’s joint venture CAMI car plant in Canada. As they point out, in Canada this ‘last hope’ exists in the context of widespread joblessness, underemployment, the absence or erosion of a state social security net, growing wage polarisation, and, as a consequence, employment insecurity (1997: 170). It is in precisely this connection that it is worth staying with Milkman’s study a little longer – for Milkman did more than to report on workers who opted for micro business. She also researched those workers who did not opt to leave the GM plant. And like the Canadian authors cited above, Milkman says of these people that they were motivated to stay as long as they did because ‘for people with limited education and

28 Hello to the Factory

few marketable skills, this work offered a middle-class income, excellent fringe benefits, union representation, and historically at least a high degree of job security’ (1997: 135). The point is this: in Turkey, such considerations also motivate workers to go for jobs in the big private sector and to stay in it as long as they can – but such considerations weigh yet more heavily with Turkish workers than they do with workers in North America or for that matter in the most advanced economies of Western Europe. There is no labour shortage in Turkey. As a recent World Bank enquiry emphasised, a feature of the Turkish social insurance system is that ‘it mostly covers the middle class’ (World Bank 2000: 57). If you do not make it to the formal sector (in which traditionally the public sector is best of all) you can fare very badly. At a time when the public sector is being increasingly undermined, this means aiming for the big private sector. To make it to the formal sector promises escape – escape from the informal economy, which, in Turkey, is the site, in its own fashion, of ‘self-employment’ or ‘micro business’. Compared to millions of people who are less fortunate, it is an achievement to join the big private sector. And for many, this is not only a ‘last hope’, it is the hope. That is to say, it is not a matter of hanging on to what you have in a world made newly insecure, as in the United States, where, as Milkman observes, the jobs that have been disappearing in industries like steel and cars are the very ones that provided high wages, excellent fringe benefits and union protection (1997: 94). It is rather a matter of workers gaining a foothold for themselves and their families in the midst of an insecurity that is deep, historically long established and pervasive. A quarter of a century ago it would have been little cause for surprise to find accounts that said just this sort of thing – and which in particular distinguished between the position of labour in at least some large corporations in developing countries and the position in other sectors. For example, writing largely with an eye to South America and Africa, a writer reported in the early 1980s ‘Wages in these firms are good, that is to say, they are generally higher than in other forms of available employment’; ‘Working conditions are good. The factories are modern’. He was also able to report that there were regular holidays and basic social security (Lloyd 1982: 52–54). Even to say such things is now to go against the flow of much current social democratic and social scientific thought. It is as if, in rejecting ideas to the effect that modernisation – in the guise of industrialisation – will automatically benefit everyone, it has become accepted that industrialisation can never benefit anyone.

A General Account 29

For this reason the rest of this chapter considers further what it means to work in the big private sector in Turkey. In an attempt to tap the extent to which workers believe that they have done well to get their present jobs relative to other jobs that they think available to them, we asked whether they thought that their present job was a good one for someone like them. Over 80 per cent of all workers replied that this was the case (Table 1.1). Workers at BoluWG affect the response for white goods because a staggering 96 per cent of them agreed that this was so. But with BoluWG excluded, the white goods figure for those who think the job a good one for someone like them only falls to 81 per cent. And even in the plant with the lowest score, CerkWG, 72 per cent of workers agree that their job is a good one for people like them. These are high percentages and they are amply confirmed by workers’ own accounts of what getting one of these jobs meant to them. A worker at GebzeCar recollected: When I heard the news that I had got the job, I just couldn’t believe it. I received a letter from GebzeCar saying that I could start work at the beginning of the next month. . . . A day before I started work, I sat down and began to dream about how brilliant it was and how lucky I was to get the job. I was so thankful to Allah. I dreamt about things like, I could buy a car and a flat for my family and me in the next 10 years. I thought that if I could do these things, I would keep the promise that I made to my father before he died. On the first day, I woke up very early and ready to work for a great company. As soon as we arrived, the company managers delivered uniforms to workers. The factory seemed to me a workplace made in Heaven. Everything was so clean, tidy and light. I thought that I could work there forever.

Table 1.1

Good job for someone like me (%)

Yes No Partly Don’t know

White goods (N = 153)

Cars (N = 100)

Textiles (N = 103)

all (N = 356)

86 13 1 1

84 16

76 24

82 17 1 1

30 Hello to the Factory

Other workers were no less overwhelmed. A worker at BursaCar told us he was so happy to get a job at the plant – ‘that was the best job I could ever get in Bursa’ – that when he found out he had been offered a job he couldn’t speak. A worker at BoluWG told how the night before he started he was so excited that he went the whole night unable to sleep. Ample evidence of the high value that workers place on getting these jobs is provided by the lengths to which they go to get them. The precise way they go about this is a function of a long-standing feature of Turkish culture and of a particular problem faced by the managers of these companies. The social anthropologist Paul Stirling nicely captured the long-standing cultural aspect at the beginning of the 1990s, when he commented that for many Turks: If you want something from, or within, a large organisation, then to get it, what you most need is not a formally correct case, nor even manipulative knowledge of the working of the system, but a personal link to someone of power above or within the organisation who is prepared to use that power on your behalf (1993: 12). The particular problem faced by the managers of these companies can be readily understood by what happens when companies publicly advertise jobs. BursaCar did this once. The plant was besieged by hopeful applicants descending on it in buses, lorries and tractors. Managers still recall the event. Some of them still remember the piles and piles of applications that they had to process. This and similar experiences have meant that all the plants now advertise jobs internally in order to restrict the very large number of applications that would otherwise result. Looked at in purely economic terms it might be argued that such a process reduces search costs. Considered sociologically, it also complements the Turkish practice of looking for an informal way in. All the firms require a reference from the inside and this too enhances the role of informal connection. It may also of course reduce the element of risk inherent in any selection process. It is not in the interests of those already employed in an organisation to support the recruitment of new employees who don’t behave themselves. It was noted in the Introduction that the traditional recruitment practices of the owner-manager at BursaText2 were not followed by the career managers at the other plants but the influence of social networks is still apparent. To have personal contacts does not guarantee a job, nor are interviews regularly dispensed with and sometimes performance (aptitude) tests are used. But there are all kinds of connections that

A General Account 31

figure in workers’ accounts of how they got in – and which figure yet more so in their accounts of how others did so. Some workers are quite open about having obtained their jobs by ‘torpil’ (by having someone on the inside), like this one at BoluWG: I got in with ‘torpil’. There was someone close to the family, a deputy director, who worked here. He helped me. I think half of all the employees entered here with the help of someone. Also at BoluWG, the tradition has been that a father can ask for his son to replace him when he retires. But the role played by social networks in recruitment is not confined to BoluWG, with its paternalist tradition, or to BursaText2, with its owner-manager. And the variety of personal connections drawn upon by hopeful applicants is very large. Everywhere there are brothers and fathers who already work in the factory and put in a word, and who tell future applicants about jobs coming up (which of course the firms encourage by not advertising publicly). Everywhere, also, there are mothers who look after the children of managers, uncles who are trade union officials, fathers who are tailors and make suits for an important manager, cousins who are secretaries to managing directors, managers who one way or another can be got to by intermediaries who will put in a good word. As a worker at CerkWG explained: It isn’t possible to enter these kinds of factories, especially the big ones by your own efforts. You have to have a man [a patron] to help you. This man can either work in the factory or be outside, for example, someone who knows a director or a chief in the factory. Governors and kaymakam [the primary local government representative in the town] can help too. Research at Gebze in the late 1970s found that: Factory management prefer to recruit people from the same ethnic community, to maintain a peaceful workforce. Skilled personnel are first recruited to the factory, and then given a say in the recruitment of the unskilled workers. They recruit their co-villagers, relatives, neighbours, or others from their ethnic community (Gunes-Ayata 1987: 237). Today the power of these mechanisms is somewhat diluted. We have no evidence, for example, of skilled workers being given a say in the

32 Hello to the Factory

recruitment of the unskilled. But the results of similar processes clearly show up in the common social relations that are to be found within the workforce. Nearly two out of three workers in our sample had at least one relative and/or at least one hemsehri (fellow townsman) working in the same plant. A similar finding is reported in a study of four plants in the metal industry in Gebze in the 1990s (Yildirim 1996: 152). In five of the plants researched, the percentage of workers who had at least one relative and/or at least one hemsehri working there ranged between 55 and 84 per cent. The two other plants represented extreme cases. At BoluWG all the workers we interviewed had such a relationship, all claiming to have a hemsehri in the plant, and 60 per cent claiming to have at least one relative. At GebzeCar only four per cent of workers had such relationships, but this is a new plant, where family and hemsehri relations may in time come to play a greater part. What is clear is that competition for these jobs is stiff, and that workers have been typically driven to explore every thread of connection to friends, friends of friends and acquaintances to get into the big private sector. Above all, the big private sector offers three things – relatively good wages; other important material benefits; and good physical working conditions. The starting point for putting pay in perspective is to recognise that workers employed outside the big private sector are likely to get only the minimum wage. The big private sector pays considerably more than this, and so generally – although this goes against the conventional wisdom – do foreign affiliates, partly because they tend to be part of the big private sector but also for other reasons. In fact, in Turkey compensation per employee in firms under foreign control was more than twice as high as the average for national firms over the course of the 1990s (OECD 2001: 24, Figure 8). Four of the seven plants – all those in white goods and one of the car plants, BursaCar, are covered by the same trade union agreement. A worker in these plants who had five years service received pay, including four bonuses of about one month’s pay each, to the value of almost four times the minimum wage. Those who had as much as twelve years service earned 50 per cent more than teachers or policemen and twice as much as nurses. At GebzeCar workers have less years of service because the company is relatively new and they earn less on average than those in the white goods industry or at BursaCar. However, the company follows the metal industry agreement in most respects even though it is not a party to it.

A General Account 33

In BursaText1, the trade union is not recognised by management for collective bargaining purposes but the average wage here is still about twice the minimum wage. BursaText2 is non-union and the company has a dual wage policy for men and women. Men get one and half times the minimum wage, plus four bonuses a year. The women, who usually work in the most labour intensive parts of the factory, such as spinning and confection, get the minimum wage without any extra bonus. It is, then, only in the worst paid of the textile firms that the ways of workers – notably women workers – approximate the level of the minimum wage. Most of these workers fare considerably better than that. Yet we have only touched the tip of the iceberg as far as total material differences are concerned. The wage, including bonuses and seniority pay, is only one form of material benefit to be derived from work in the big private manufacturing sector. Other benefits are listed in ideal, typical fashion in Figure 1.1. Pay-related advantages appear at the top of the figure. In addition to the high pay and bonuses that we have come

Medium, small and informal sectors

Corporate sector

Directly from the employer High pay Regular pay Bonus Advances against pay Seniority-related pay Redundancy pay

X X X X X X

√ √ √ √ √ √

Permanent contract Trade union recognition Social insurance

X X X

√ √ √

Bayram and other gifts Free meals at work Work clothes and boots Bus service to/from work Discounts on company products

X X X X X

√ √ √ √ √

Outside the factory Creditworthiness Marriage prospects Status in community Social activities

X X X X

√ √ √ √

Figure 1.1

Ideal typical corporate sector advantages.

34 Hello to the Factory

across before, regular pay also appears here. Getting paid on time is a most important economic benefit in any society but especially in one in which inflation has run at an average of 65 per cent per year between 1980 and 2001 with a high point of 126 per cent in 1994 and a ‘low’ of 22 per cent in 1982. Advances against pay are also available in these firms, including those in textiles, and they are also important. Redundancy pay is also of considerable importance. These permanent workers are entitled to one month’s pay for each year of service – not a vast amount but a significant improvement on those in the informal economy who get nothing. Looking down the figure, the next batch of advantages might appear entirely obvious. But whereas the advantage of having a permanent contract and belonging to a recognised trade union might be regarded as self-evident (though we shall have more to say about this in later chapters) the full benefits of being covered for social insurance are not. Workers in all the plants – again including those in textiles – are covered for social security. This is of direct importance to them because these contributions mean that workers’ spouses and children are also covered for hospital, dental and optical care as indeed are their mothers and fathers. But yet more important is that such contributions confer pension rights, which are much more likely to accrue – through regular payments – than is the case in the informal economy. The meaning of the entry for ‘Bayram (religious holiday) and other gifts’ also merits some comment. The value of such gifts is difficult to estimate but trade union officials and managers have suggested that they might amount to the equivalent of about one-third of one month’s minimum wage a year. They include, varying from company to company and year to year, substantial quantities of rice, butter, olive oil (for example, four to five litres), sugar, hazelnuts, pasta, tomato sauce; also shoes, trousers and coats for wearing outside work (this is in addition to work clothes and boots). There may also be help with children’s education – for example the provision of writing materials before the start of school terms. Most of the other items probably appear straightforward enough but, as with social insurance, the full meaning of them in the Turkish context may not be. For example, free meals at work do not sound all that much of an advantage but at the same time that this research was being conducted textile workers in some parts of Turkey were not being paid at all and were going to work for just such a free meal (Dikmen 2001: 25). Similarly, discounts on company products would seem to offer little advantage but in the industries concerned these could be on substantial products, including fridges and other white

A General Account 35

goods and cars. In addition, some years all workers in a particular factory have received TVs, cookers, full sets of crockery, pressure cookers and blankets. The last section of the figure almost certainly needs some further comment. By ‘creditworthiness’ we refer to the fact that working for these companies means that workers can get credit in local shops. Again, this is no small advantage in an inflationary economy. Workers frequently told us how credit had become available to them after they had secured one of these jobs. Several also told us how their marriage prospects had improved. Getting a job like this meant having some security and pay that was good and regular. Such advantages can melt the hearts of potential fathers-in-law. Arif’s experience as a worker who got a job at CerkWG speaks to both of these points about creditworthiness and marriage ability. Arif was born in a village and has spent all his life in or near Çerkezköy, except when he went East as a conscript. Ask him about his background and, after recounting how his sister works in a factory that makes jeans on the minimum wage and how he himself worked in various small workshops, he tells a familiar story: Two years ago, a friend of mine at CerkWG told me that there would be new recruitment in the company. I applied immediately and two weeks later they called me for an interview. This is how I got the job. Working for this company is really something in this area. This is the best job you can get here. If you have no chance to work in the public sector, companies like CerkWG offer the best jobs around. After I got the job here, people’s attitudes towards me changed. They respected me more. For example, if I want to buy goods by instalments, they usually ask where I am working. When I say ‘CerkWG’, they don’t ask for a guarantor. Six months ago I got married. I tell you that if I didn’t work in this company, her parents would not have agreed to the marriage. The same points about marriage and credit are made by Ahmet: I got married in 1995 and had a son and then a daughter. I actually wanted to marry her a few years before, when I was working for a metal workshop. But her father wouldn’t let her marry me because he said I couldn’t afford to give her a reasonable living. My parents went to visit her family a few times to try and persuade him but he determinedly said ‘No’ every time. After I got the job at BursaCar

36 Hello to the Factory

I asked my parents to see her father once more. Because I got the job, he couldn’t refuse my parents anymore and eventually said ‘OK’. If I hadn’t got the job at BursaCar, I would never have had permission to marry her. You should have seen how people changed after I got the job in BursaCar. In our neighbourhood, I remember grocers, small shop keepers and other shop owners came to congratulate me. All of them told me that if I shopped at their shops, I wouldn’t need to worry about cash, I could make payments by monthly instalments. Even in our local coffee house, people’s behaviour towards me changed. They began to regard me as a proper man with a proper job . . . The name of BursaCar is enough to make you something in Bursa. You don’t only get respect but credit too. Other benefits of working in these large firms include the provision, by law, of a company crèche (there is a good one at BursaText1). Of lesser importance but not to be underestimated in a society where much social provision of this kind is institutionally linked, there may also be provision for football and volleyball; also, in most firms, picnics, and at BoluWG a coffee house in the town. Some idea of how these firms directly appeal to workers can be had from Figure 1.2, which translates the items displayed in one of the company’s employee brochures. It is difficult to calculate the precise monetary value of the wage and all other benefits to these workers. On our best estimate, for the average worker with five years service, wages and bonuses plus all extra benefits amount to about four/five times the minimum wage. The calculation is difficult, both because there are so many benefits and because they sometimes relate to specific events in a worker’s life. The range of benefits is certainly considerable. These are some of those that are set down in the collective bargaining agreement that applies at BoluWG, GebzeWG, CerkWG and BursaCar, which is also largely followed at GebzeCar. Each September there is about 17 million TL (at 2001 prices) for each child at primary school, 23 million TL for those at secondary school and 35 million TL if a child goes to university. There is marriage allowance at 72 million TL, maternity allowance at 43 million TL and 30 million TL for funeral arrangements in the case of the death of near relatives (56 million TL in the case of the worker’s own death). Then again there is 43 million TL for pocket money when going for military service, 60 million TL annual holiday money (in addition to the wage), one pair of shoes per year for outside – work summer wear and one pair for winter wear, six large bars

A General Account 37

$

$

$

$

$

$ $ $ $

$

$

$

$

$

$ $

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC BENEFITS

$ $

$

$

$

$

$

Social Benefits

$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $

$

$

$

$ $

–Bonuses –Spending money for Bayrams –Money for children's educational provision –Home heating money –Wedding money –Money for child birth –Funeral allowance –A small lump sum for military service –Additional spending money for the annual holidays –Overtime payments

$

$

Other Benefits –Provision of shoes –Towels –Soap

Figure 1.2

Company brochure for employees.

of soap twice a year, and one large and one small towel twice a year, and foodstuffs at the beginning of Ramadan (large quantities of sugar, rice, flour, pasta, butter, sausages, salami, cheese, olives, olive oil, etc.). Such benefits have their forerunners in the early years of the Republic when educated Turks, who were in short supply, had to be persuaded to work in the Anatolian heartland, which lacked social infrastructure. They became prominent in collective bargaining in the 1970s, at a time when labour was strong. For employers they provided a way of giving

38 Hello to the Factory

a better package to workers without incurring extra social insurance costs. For workers themselves the advantages of these contractual benefits are clear enough. By contrast, if and when employers in the informal economy make such contributions – for example making payments when workers get married or are conscripted – they do so on a voluntary basis. Surveying the position in Canada, the United States and Britain, Wells wrote in the mid 1990s: ‘Competition for well-paid, relatively secure jobs is made even more fierce because workers are increasingly forced to rely on corporate welfarism (company pensions, health care, and dental care) thanks to the decline of state welfarism’ (Wells 1996: 199–200). Our general point should not really now need restating: in Turkey, employment in these companies provides both relatively good pay and a large number of other advantages, sometimes small, but in aggregate undoubtedly important, that constitute the best chance that many workers will ever have. But what of the physical conditions in which these workers work? An overall indication of how workers rate their conditions is to be found in Table 1.2. This suggests that about ten per cent of all workers are very satisfied, with a further two-thirds saying that they are satisfied. Those employed in the white goods industry are generally the most positive, followed by those in cars, with those in textiles less so. This pattern is in line with the results of more detailed probing into workers’ reports of their actual experience of a number of possible specific workplace problems (Table 1.3). Few workers in any industry claimed to have worked with physical pain or discomfort for as much as half the time in the month before they were interviewed. Generally, though, with respect to dust, air temperature and noise, discomfort was most commonly experienced in textiles (especially with respect to dust and air temperature) and least commonly in white goods. These figures

Table 1.2

Satisfaction with physical working conditions (%)

Very satisfied Satisfied Dissatisfied Very dissatisfied

White goods (N = 153)

Cars (N = 100)

Textiles (N = 103)

Total (N = 356)

16 68 15 1

12 67 18 3

1 66 33 0

11 67 21 1

A General Account 39 Table 1.3 Indicators of physical discomfort at work: reporting physical discomfort for half the time or more in the last month (%)

Physical pain Dust Air temperature Noise

White goods (N = 153)

Cars (N = 100)

Textiles (N = 103)

Total (N = 356)

5 2 14 6

8 5 31 21

6 27 53 20

6 10 30 14

hide some plant-level differences. In particular, within the car industry 56 per cent of BursaCar workers reported being troubled by air temperature half the time or more, compared to only 6 per cent at GebzeCar, a difference that reflects the nature of the two plants. The first is decades old and covers a vast area, the second is only a few years old and relatively compact. Similarly, 30 per cent of BursaCar workers complained of noise compared to only 12 per cent of those at GebzeCar. Overall, though, these data are consistent with our own observations of the physical conditions. They are also consistent with the impression of other social scientists who have visited the Turkish white goods and car plants with us (which was one of surprise), or who have seen an almost identical plant owned by the same multinational in Brazil. In their view, and ours, the physical conditions are generally good. And this is so not only when judged locally – for they most certainly are good when compared to the standards that prevail in the local informal economy and in medium and small firms in the local formal economy – but as judged by international standards. It is difficult to conduct a systematic examination of just how the conditions to which these workers are exposed compare to those of workers employed in other countries. Recently however the attempt has been made in some countries to benchmark working conditions and the measures developed for this purpose were used in our own research in Turkey. Comparison with some of the results of this benchmarking is interesting. For example, Lewchuk has assessed the situation in various clothing and textile, box, paper, aluminium, electrical and electronic industries in Canada (Lewchuk 1997: 23). It was found that on average about 35 per cent of workers in these plants reported working with pain for half the time or more in the last month. It can be seen from Table 1.3 that this is well above the average

40 Hello to the Factory

6 per cent figure for the plants in Turkey. Yet more striking is that in not one of 23 Canadian firms did the proportion reporting pain fall as low as that in any of the Turkish plants. If the temporal threshold for the assessment of pain is lowered from half the time or more to only a few days a month, the percentage of Turkish workers reporting pain rises from about one in twenty to one in five. Yet this still falls well below the figures found for Canada. Nearly 50 per cent of Canadian workers reported dust to be a problem for half the time, and nearly 50 per cent reported temperature (the Canadian study did not report on noise). The Turkish white goods and car figures again fall below this. However, the figures for textiles in Turkey for air temperature and, to a lesser extent, for dust, are rather more similar and this might be thought to indicate that the broader comparative results are in fact a function of the Turkish and Canadian industry mix. It is therefore pertinent to consider some industry-specific comparisons. The car industry figures large in the research that has been conducted to date and is thus the best choice for this purpose. One such study at four Canadian vehicle assembly plants found that between 42 and 67 per cent of workers reported that they worked in pain half the days in the previous month as did 39 per cent of workers at a GM plant in the UK (Lewchuk et al. 2001). For the two Turkish car plants the figures are again very much lower – 6 and 10 per cent. The fact that the Canadian and British data were collected through the trade union might have biased the figures upwards. 1 But part of the difference in the results for Turkish car workers and others might be thought to be a function of differences in age. The average age of workers in the four Canadian plants ranged from 33 to 43 and the average age of the British workers was 39. In our GebzeCar sample the average age was 26, at BursaCar it was 31. It is possible of course that the reporting of discomfort, pain, excessive temperature and trouble with breathing in the last month might entail a subjective element, such that Turkish workers are generally less likely to report the experience of pain than Canadian or British workers. We have no evidence of this, however, still less that they experience less pain – a line of thinking that invites a criticism that Edward Said once made of Marx. To paraphrase: ‘Those people don’t suffer – they are Orientals’ (Said 1995: 155). Human history is full of examples in which members of dominant groups (imperialists, middle-class people, whites, men) have told each other that although they would experience pain, boredom, alienation or whatever, members of subject groups (natives, workers, blacks, women) did not. It is not our intention to add to this here.2

A General Account 41

Of course these indicators can only be approximations and they are subject to a number of possible distorting factors, even for example, in the case of complaints about temperature, from the particular month prior to the question being asked and of course to differences in climate in different countries. Also they do not tell a whole story as far as the work health of workers is concerned. For example, although all three white goods plants have joint health and safety committees, as do BursaCar and BursaText1, this is not the case at GebzeCar or BursaText2. Moreover at BursaText1 only one union representative sits on the committee, which is otherwise composed of managers and engineers. Generally, too, company doctors in these plants do not give reports that attribute RSI (or other work-related conditions) to work. It is simply not considered to be an issue in any of these factories. It is in line with this that the main trade union in these factories, Türk Metal, has no health and safety specialist and does not produce publications relevant to RSI. Workers who suffer in this way are usually simply moved to other jobs. There is, then, good reason not to romanticise these workers’ working conditions and not to forget either that working in factories, however modern they may be, is generally not fun, for anyone, anywhere. Even so, the comparisons we have made do nothing to disconfirm what our eyes and ears tell us. Physical conditions in these factories are not only better than in the surrounding economy but, in the white goods and car sectors, they are no worse – and often probably better – than those to be found in many plants in advanced capitalist societies. For workers coming fresh to these factories, they can look very good indeed. In particular, CerkWG, GebzeWG and GebzeCar are ‘clean, tidy and light’. The meaning of a job for a worker’s life outside work is not the same as his or her experience of work itself. When Henry Ford introduced the five-dollar day, workers flocked to his factory. They did so because it was the best option they had. This tells us nothing of how they felt about actually working in the factory. So it is with these Turkish workers and we will look at their actual experience of working in these factories later. In particular, we will look at how workers respond to modern management techniques and how they look back on their jobs in the light of experience. In the meantime it has been seen that these jobs have very considerable significance for their lives outside work and, especially in white goods and cars, are valued for their financial and other material benefits and the physical conditions of work that they offer. There are no such equivalent benefits on offer in medium or small manufacturing, nor in the service sector, nor in the sea of uncertainty that constitutes the informal economy (or ‘self-employment’ and

42 Hello to the Factory

‘micro business’ if you will). These workers have had good reason to say ‘Hello’ to the factory in the big private manufacturing sector. All this is generalisation of course. This is true in the sense that little space has been devoted to particular individuals (for the record, we did find one worker out of the 356 who, when asked what he would do in future, replied that he planned to return to his village and farm). It is also true in the sense that some basic sociological dimensions have been ignored – for example those related to gender and ethnicity and to a lesser extent, age. Age-related differences will be examined at greater length much later in the book. A consideration of the particularities of ethnicity and gender is provided in Part II.

Notes 1. The opposite tendency, to bias the figures downwards, might be associated with management-conducted surveys. However, whereas contemporary management seemingly benchmarks anything and everything to do with production and much else besides, it does not typically benchmark the conditions in which their workers work. 2. Apart from anything else, other data, this time from China, do nothing to confirm the Orientalist line of thinking. A study of car workers in Shanghai (Wu 2002, Chapter 6) found that whereas the same proportion of Chinese car workers complained about temperature for more than half the time in the previous month (32 per cent compared to 31 per cent for Turkish car workers), more of them complained about physical pain (18 per cent compared to 8 per cent); more also complained about dust (31 per cent compared to 5 per cent); and more complained about noise (38 per cent compared to 21 per cent). Further comparative work is underway. In the meantime, we take these results to mean that conditions in the Chinese factories were not as good as in Turkey. So, too, the Canadian results.

Part II Specificities – Gender and Ethnicity

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2 Women Workers in Textiles

Statistically speaking, most workers in this study are men (77 per cent), of whom eight out of ten are married, usually with no more than two children, and in only just one in ten cases with wives who go out to work. The workers in these factories are not homogeneous however. Part II therefore moves beyond the general account attempted so far and provides a consideration of first gender- and then ethnic-specificities within the workforce. The two Bursa textile companies are at the centre of this chapter. They employ substantially more women on their shop floors than the other five car and white goods companies. But the textile industry also employs a disproportionate share of the Bulgarian-born Turks who work in the seven firms. Accordingly, workers in the two textile companies, and especially BursaText1, also figure along with some workers from the metalworking plants in the next chapter, which looks at the particular position of those Bulgarians, men and women, who migrated to Turkey, usually in 1989. In this chapter the focus is on 42 Turkish-born women in the two textile companies. In the next, it shifts to 23 men and 30 women from Bulgaria. Of these 28 work in textiles, 25 in the metalworking industries. Over the past several decades historians and social scientists, especially those of them who are women, have made a determined attempt to render visible what was hitherto often invisible – the role of women in history and the part they play in contemporary society (Rowbotham 1974). As part of this development the term ‘patriarchy’ (Walby 1986) has come into widespread currency, sometimes in the attempt to provide a rival and supposedly superior theoretical object to that offered by capitalism (or other modes of production), which we find less than 45

46 Gender and Ethnicity

convincing; sometimes with the insistence, with which we concur, that everything cannot be ‘reduced’ to an abstract capitalist ‘logic’. With respect to work, this heightened feminist interest has led to increased interest in several related aspects – in women and waged work; in the work constituted by the domestic duties that women perform within the home; and in so-called ‘home work’, work performed in the home for money. The latter sort of work has often been investigated with reference to the production of garments (Singh and Kelles-Vitanen 1987; Çinar 1989; Lordoglu 1990; Mitter and Luijken 1992; Peck 1992; White 1994; Kümbetoglu 1996; Balakrishnan 2002). But the textile industry has been a common point of investigation in the attempt to render visible women’s waged work roles and the interconnection between these and the work they do at home (Chapkis and Enloe 1983; Cho and Koo 1983; Ecevit 1991; Pessar 1994; Eraydin and Erendil 1999). The textile industry has made an important contribution to the industrialisation of many countries and it is a major employer of women. In Turkey the situation has been no different. In 2000 textiles still accounted for 38 per cent of Turkey’s exports (more like half if the so-called suitcase trade is included). Thirty one per cent of those recorded as formally employed in the industry are women – the informal sector contributing many others who remain unrecorded (Engin 2000; Turkish Textile Employers Association 2001). Fatma, a 37-year-old Turkish-born woman who works at BursaText2, is one of them.

Fatma’s story I was born in [a village]. My father was a peasant. My mother was a housewife. They lived on a small plot of land. After primary school I went to secondary school. But my parents could not afford to pay my expenses. Therefore I had to leave school. I wanted to work as a secretary in an accountancy office. But my parents wouldn’t let me work there. ‘It is not honourable for a women to work outside the household’, they said. My family didn’t let me marry the man I loved very much. I was forced to accept an arranged marriage. After I got married, we moved to Bursa to find a better job. My husband found a job in a factory and started to work on the shop floor. I have been living in Bursa for 12 years now. My husband also grew up in a village not far from ours. In their village, women were not allowed to work outside the home either.

Women Workers in Textiles 47

It is men who are supposed to work outside. But men work only in the summer and do nothing for the rest of the year, as there is no work to do in the winter. Therefore it is quite difficult for peasants to get through the winter. My husband’s family could not make a living in their village so they moved to Bursa into our house. I wasn’t working at that time. My husband had to work and support the whole family (we were seven people altogether including his parents, his sister and brother). I wasn’t working outside but I was working like a slave in the house. My husband would beat me quite often in front of his family. His parents were also insulting me. In Turkey, the bride is used as a maid. I could not bear it any longer. So I left him. We are not divorced but we live separate lives. I live with my son in a small rented house. After I left my husband, he became an alcoholic and lost his job. I mean, I don’t get any support from him at all. I am struggling to look after my son and make a living on my own. As soon as I left him my friends helped me find this job. I have been working in this factory for seven years. At the beginning I was disturbed by the noise but now I am used to it. I have lumbago and pains in my knee as well. But I have to keep working in this factory. As our society does not respect women who work outside the home, it is very difficult for a lone-woman to work in a small place. People gossip. From the point of view of honour, it is easier for a lone-woman to work in big companies. Big factories offer this advantage to lonewomen. There are so many women workers here, that people are not interested in each other’s private lives. In Turkey, only old men would marry a single parent or she might become a maid. I am lucky that I have this job and so able to keep my self-respect. Through the day I get very tired. I don’t have any spare time I have to keep working all day long. I am not only working in this factory but I am also doing embroidery work at home. This work makes me about 20 million TL [equivalent to 20 per cent of the minimum wage at time of interview]. The wage I get from the factory [110 million TL] is not enough to make a living. I am paying 40 million TL for rent. I cannot afford to pay the coal bill to heat the flat. My father used to pay it for me. But he died a few months ago. My son is 12 years old. I cannot afford to pay for his transport to and from school. In this company, everybody is allowed to withdraw 35 per cent of their wage in advance. I live on this ‘sub’ money. Every month I have

48 Gender and Ethnicity

to ask for an advance from the factory. I talked to my managers about the difficulties I have. They showed understanding and try to help. Sometimes, when I do overtime late at night they give me a lift. After work I go home. We have a coal stove for heating. I light it and then I tidy up the house and start cooking. After the meal, I do the washing and then I go to bed and get a half an hour rest. Later on, I wake up and embroider till midnight. When I work overtime I walk around full of sleep but still try to keep working. Women are oppressed in our society. I find it difficult to tell people that I live a separate life from my husband because this not accepted in Turkey. In the neighbourhood where I live, there are narrowminded people. I have to live and behave according to them. I have a difficult life. My freedom is limited. I cannot go out like my married friends. When I go out, people ask me where I am going and what I am going to do. As I am lone-parent, they think that I am up to no good. ‘Women should not live alone. They should live with their husbands’ they say. If I wear new clothes or put on some make-up they ask who I have done it for. They ask where I got the money since they know that I work for a minimum wage. How can I afford to buy new clothes? It’s very difficult to live as a lone-parent in Turkey. This is a large factory. I can work here. In other small places I could not work, as I am a lone-parent. They would not leave me in peace. They would disturb my privacy.

As her own account makes clear, Fatma, who is 37 years old, and who works at BursaText2, has a hard life. It is harder than that of most of the other women in this factory or in BursaText1. She is separated from her husband, so her battle to survive is all the greater economically, and socially, because of the strong patriarchal aspects of Turkish society. Also as part of her struggle to make ends meet Fatma takes in homework in the form of embroidery. None of the other women in either BursaText2 or BursaText1 do such home-based piecework but important features of their lives are recognisable from her account. The weight of tradition that bears down on Fatma is also present, though unevenly felt, more generally. Ecevit reports that in the past young girls who worked in Bursa’s factories were called ‘company girls’, which implied they were promiscuous (Ecevit 1991: 59). Still today the social restrictions on women make it difficult for them to work outside the home, and even more difficult to work at night.

Women Workers in Textiles 49

Traditional behaviour Considering all the women workers in the two textile plants it can be said that ‘traditional’ behaviour, which as in Fatma’s case, in some instances extends to husbands beating wives, is probably more prevalent at BursaText2. An important difference here is that BursaText2 employs more Turkish-born women and less Bulgarians than BursaText1 but it is also possible that ‘traditional’ behaviour is more common and pronounced at BursaText2 than BursaText1 even among exclusively Turkish-born women. This interpretation fits with the different origins and experience of the women at these two plants. The women at BursaText2 are less well educated. Only three out of ten of them have progressed beyond primary education as opposed to six out of ten at BursaText1. Similarly, and in keeping with this, the women who work at BursaText2 are predominantly of rural origin. Seven out of ten of them are from villages whereas seven out of ten of those at BursaText1 were born in big cities. It is indeed at BursaText2 that we come closest in this book to workers who fit the ‘peasants in the city’ idea. However, our sample contains only 18 Turkish-born women at BursaText1 and only 24 at BursaText2 and hard evidence of differences between women in these two plants is difficult to establish, not least where matters such as beatings are concerned of course. What is certain is that elements of these traditional behaviours and assumptions by husbands, fathers and brothers, other family members and neighbours affect Turkish women in both of these plants (although not without spurring some opposition and resentment towards them as Fatma’s own words make clear). Traditional conceptions of what women should and should not do and a presumption against women working outside the home mean that in many cases men did not initially welcome these women going out to work. As far as husbands were concerned there was also a further more specific consideration. Women themselves report that in practice the help their husbands give them rarely goes beyond being there with the children when they are on shift and that the burden of cooking and washing still falls on them. Mothers and sisters sometimes help with the housework and in one case a woman said she did it with her husband. Generally, though, women viewed their husbands as not helping at all or as not helping enough. Any extra demands placed on husbands because their wives go out to work do not therefore amount to much but husbands themselves are still sometimes reluctant to have their wives work outside the home in so far as this had consequences for

50 Gender and Ethnicity

their own contribution to the functioning of the household. One woman describes the situation at home like this: I do all the housework. My husband lies on a sofa and tells me that he is tired. He never helps me. As soon as he finishes his meal, he goes out and doesn’t care about clearing the table or washing up. Men and women should share things fairly in the family. I just cannot explain this to my husband (BursaText2). This may not be a totally accurate account of the contributions of husbands and wives in all cases but as well as reflecting a common stereotype of Turkish men it is probably also quite close to what most of these women experience on a regular basis. In the white goods and car industries workers are often able to support their wives at home. In fact 86 per cent of all the married men in this study (that is in all seven plants) have wives who do not go out to work. A worker at BoluWG even claimed that ‘I have never met anyone who would like his wife to work outside the home’. But the husbands of the women who work in these textile factories are not in anything like such a good position to live up to this idea. They generally work outside the big private capital sector and also lack the protection of state employment (and of the considerable benefits of a material and non-material kind outlined in the previous chapter). In the informal economy and in small firms they have low wages and are threatened by unemployment. As another study reports, men say that they will not ‘live on women’s money’ and they may well ask ‘who will take care of the children if you are out at work all day?’ (Erman 1998: 152). The response of the BoluWG worker just quoted above was in line with such thinking: ‘What could I do then? I can’t cook anything. I can only cook eggs. That’s all’. Some of the men who worked in the textile factories took the same view. ‘Women shouldn’t work. They should stay at home and be housewives’ said one. Others expounded the same theme in more detail: Women shouldn’t work. If women work, there will be no peace in the home. Who will look after the children? Who will do the washing up? (BursaText1). No. You know, the house needs to be cleaned, men have to be served, children need to be looked after, linen needs to be washed. Who would do all this? (BursaText1).

Women Workers in Textiles 51

Women’s place is in the home. They belong to their house. A woman’s main duty is to look after children, do the washing and serve her husband (BursaText1). Even so, the lack of money is a crucial determinant in pushing these men’s wives into work.

Status and material considerations The situation is made more tolerable by the social standing of BursaText1 and BursaText2. Most places of employment in the textile industry are located in the informal economy, are small and, apart from low wages, have poor conditions of work. The lack of formal procedures (and of course trade unions) means that individual workers can be exposed to the caprice of those in authority. The small number of employees means that women are thrown inescapably into the path of men. Large companies such as those that own BursaText1 and BursaText2 are better places to work in terms of their pay (extra pay for overtime, regular pay and the possibility of getting advances against pay are all important), their physical conditions of work and other benefits. For example not all firms, even out of those that are formally registered, employ workers on formal contracts and they thus lack benefits prescribed by law such as health care, holidays, and, as at BursaText1, crèche facilities. We asked workers about what they regarded as the best things about working in their firms. The most common responses at BursaText2, the firm that is closest to the informal end of the formal–informal economy spectrum, were that workers got paid on time and that the company paid its insurance contributions. The implicit assumption is that other, generally smaller companies did not do these things. However, the fact that women workers in big firms are more likely to escape the traditional ‘company girl’ image of what it means to work in textiles is an additional advantage and for the women themselves working in a large company, together with many other women, can provide a sense of security and confidence through which they can defend themselves from others in their wider family and neighbourhood. To a large extent workers in these firms are segregated by gender. At BursaText1 there are five departments – spinning, knitting, dyeing, zip and final units. Spinning consists of women. Knitting consists of men and a few female floor sweepers. Dyeing consists of men. The Zip department comprises both men and women but although physical contact is possible between them they actually work separately in smaller work

52 Gender and Ethnicity

groups. The final unit mainly consists of men but with a packing section in which a group of women works to help men. Women and men workers use the same refectory but the women usually go to eat in small groups separated from the men. BursaText2 has four main departments – Spinning, Weaving, Dyeing and Confection. Spinning consists of women and has a woman manager. Weaving and Dyeing are essentially male units. Confection consists mostly of women with one section where they do cutting and knitting and another where they do sewing, quality inspection and packing. In both factories, then, in the departments where women mostly work there are few men other than managers, engineers and foremen. In the departments where men work, there are only a few women who are cleaners. At BursaText1 the managing director, based in Istanbul, is a woman but most of the women workers are not aware of this. They do not see her. Most of the managers they see are men. At BursaText2 all the managers are male, apart from the manager in the Spinning Department. Generally, most women white-collar workers are secretaries, few have managerial positions. As is true in most countries, the division into women’s work and men’s work has economic benefits for management (and disadvantages women workers in relation to men) but it also means that, from the point of view of many husbands, women are more likely to be treated properly in these factories because of the consequent physical separation. A male worker at BursaText2, who was well placed to consider these issues, commented: My wife doesn’t work outside the home. She is a housewife. If I can’t manage to support the family, I may let her work when our kids start primary school. I am against women working outside the home, side by side with men. What can you do? If you can’t afford to bring home the bread, you must let your wife work also. In the textile companies, there are hundreds of women working and I will probably let her work in a large textile company. Ecevit’s earlier study of women textile workers in Bursa found that 51 per cent of the wives earned as much or more than their husbands (1991: 60). These women also make a significant contribution to their families’ material well-being. On their own estimate two-thirds of the married women amongst them (six out of ten of the women are married) contribute half or more than half of their household’s income. This contribution exacts a cost. The women in these factories work long

Women Workers in Textiles 53

hours. All work a six-day week. It is common to work an extra two or three hours overtime two or three days a week. A few people are known to put in four or five days overtime and then work Sundays. Unlike the case in smaller firms overtime is paid extra. At BursaText1 overtime is paid at double time and Sundays at three times the basic wage. At BursaText2 overtime is at a lower rate, time and a half, and Sunday also lower at double time. But nearly six out of ten of the women put in more than 55 hours a week and most of the rest put in 46–50 hours a week. Time put in at the factory (to which has to be added travel time) is time spent away from home. Working in textiles can make for considerable disruption in family life but not only does the money come in handy, overtime is difficult to refuse for another reason. Unemployment is high and management may well remember who has refused if the order book gets low and lay-off threatens. On top of overtime there is shift work to contend with. Nine out of ten of the women work shifts. At BursaText1 there are two shifts that run from morning to afternoon (8.00 am to 4.00 pm) and from afternoon to midnight (4.00 pm to 12.00 am). At BursaText2 work begins an hour earlier and the two shifts run from 7.00 am to 3.00 pm and 3.00 pm to 11.00 pm. In each plant the women work two weeks on one shift and then two weeks on the other. Over half the women report being adversely affected by shift work. At BursaText1 it is the first thing most women think of when they are asked about the worst things about working for the company, followed by long hours and pressure of work (at BursaText2, where women get only the minimum wage, low pay heads the list). Women complain that the night shift leaves them sleepless, restless and troubled. Some complain of feeling sick and dizzy, others of becoming quick-tempered. But in addition mothers worry about leaving their children (even when their husbands are at home) and of not having time for their domestic chores and keeping everything tidy (for which they often unthinkingly accept responsibility). Working night shift is troublesome in another way too, for the woman concerned and not least her husband. In the eyes of many her honour, and that of her family, is threatened by being out late and husbands or other male family members have to escort women to bus stops and meet them back again to ward off gossip and the real or imaginary dangers of the night. One woman did say ‘I don’t care about the night shift. I am doing a double shift everyday anyway – housework and factory work’. Another said she liked working nights because it gave her more time with her baby during the day but this was very much the exception. Women more commonly regretted that they could not see their children as much as they wanted.

54 Gender and Ethnicity

These women have usually been driven into working outside through economic necessity and usually their husbands have assented to this for reasons of economic necessity too. With the passage of time, some men have softened towards the idea, like this man who works for BursaText1: When I started working here in 1995, I was single and personally against women working outside . . . I thought ‘I wouldn’t let my future wife work in places like this’. You know what happened afterwards? I got a girl friend who worked in here and I married her. It’s funny really. You know there is a saying, ‘Even if you eat big, don’t talk big’? After a few years, I came to the idea that nothing was wrong with women working outside. After I got married, I let her continue. Yet nearly all of the women think women should work. Often this view is informed by no more than a pragmatic regard to what is necessary (‘Life is never easy’. ‘We have to work’. ‘One income is not enough’. ‘Divided we fall. United we stand’) or by the consideration that ‘it is better working outside than sitting at home’ or ‘it is better to see a workmate than a mother-in-law every day’. It is also the case that an egalitarian theme sometimes runs through their thinking: Life should be shared in common between men and women (BursaText1). Everybody should work (BursaText2). Everybody should and must work (BursaText1). Yes, men and women are equal (BursaText2). However, even to the extent that some of the women see themselves as workers, paid work is something that is a provisional status, until they get married, until they have a child, until, if this ever happens, their husbands can afford to have them at home. As for the union, there is no union at BursaText2, and at BursaText1 any identification with the union and its activities is limited. Women are as likely as men to be members but there is a real sense in which the union is not part of their world. In terms of the occupancy of its top positions it is a male institution. The union head in the factory is a man, four out of five union officials are men. And in any case, these women’s lives are not centred

Women Workers in Textiles 55

on the factory so much as on the home and the union is something that they ‘don’t have time to deal with’ or is not thought to be useful to them or about which they simply do not know.

Self-conceptions Some women are very clear that working outside the home strengthens them as individuals: After I started work, I have somehow become an important person in people’s eyes. I know that we deserve more pay than what we get now, but I have something to thank work for (BursaText1). Factory work means a lot to me. It means security, self-confidence and some insurance for my future. I won’t have to look to my husband’s hands for money after I retire. I can stand on my own feet. Factory work is good for women and it is good to work (BursaText2). Women should work. Then they have their freedom in their own hands. They feel much stronger when they work outside (BursaText1). Women need to work to feel secure in themselves (BursaText2). Women should work outside the home so that they can meet their own needs and be free. For example, I didn’t work for ten years and I used to ask my husband for money for things I needed. Then I started working. I now have more say at home. When I used to ask him for money for shopping, he always used to ask me to give him the change. It doesn’t happen now. I also help my family economically (BursaText2). If women don’t work outside, they become slaves to men (BursaText1). Hatice, who works at BursaText1 was personally committed to preventing what happened to her happening to her daughter: Education is very important in our society and I learned this very well from my mother who was a housewife and very much depended on my father. She wanted me to go on after primary school but my father wouldn’t send me. My mother was powerless to put pressure on my father to let me go to secondary school. My two brothers carried on their education. My father kept saying: ‘What will girls do if they go to school? Won’t they get married to someone one day and

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leave us? Why should I bother about their education? Their husband will look after them anyway. But boys should go to school. Men are the breadwinners everywhere.’ Ever since I started to work in here, whatever I earn, I do my best for my son and daughter. I don’t discriminate between them. Neither does my husband. They will both carry on their education so they can have a prosperous life. Some insight into these women’s thinking may be gleaned from the answers they gave when we asked them how they would define themselves, apart from as citizens of Turkey and in particular how their answers differed from those given by men. What comes through from some of the men’s self-conceptions is above all a sense of pessimism (Box 2.1a). Not all the men’s responses are coloured in this way. But

Box 2.1a

Descriptions of self – Men

BursaText1 Someone who works. Someone who is not in a good condition. A Muslim. Someone who just wants to pass away as soon as possible. So so. A worker. Someone who is in a very bad situation. Someone from Bursa. A worker.

BursaText2 An ordinary citizen. A worker. A good person. A conservative. A citizen. Someone in the middle. Someone from the bottom of the social strata. An unimportant person. A worker. A worker. A good person. Someone who fails to enjoy a proper life style. A worker. Someone who is working. A citizen. Someone in the middle. Someone at the bottom. Someone who is not respected. A Turk. A good friend. Someone with no expectations from life, you know how things are. A Turk and Muslim.

Women Workers in Textiles 57

those that are, fit with some of the men in these textile factories having aspirations about how they should be treated, and with their resentment that those aspirations have been thwarted. Such pessimism and resentment is nowhere nearly so marked for the women (Box 2.1b).

Box 2.1b

Descriptions of self – Women

BursaText1 A housewife. A good person. An honest person. A worker. Someone who likes working and is easy to work with. A good person. Someone who is not educated very well. A Muslim. Someone who is working. A worker. A mother. A Muslim. An honest person. Someone who is worn out. A mother. A worker. A female worker. A citizen. An unlucky person.

BursaText2 A good citizen. A Muslim. An ordinary citizen. A human being. An honest person. A worker. Someone who works at BursaText2. Someone who is useful to her country. Someone who is honest, hard-working and a Turk. This is what a Turkish citizen is supposed to be. Someone who is honest and does the job word for word [exactly as they are told]. Someone who is not happy. A good friend. A good friend. Someone who is working very hard, trying to become very useful for this country and looks after her family and children properly. Someone who is very useful for this country. But this country doesn’t help us. Someone who is loyal to [can be relied on to do] the job. Someone from the middle class. A good friend. I am proud to be a nationalist. But in this society. Especially the ones who are separated from their husbands.

58 Gender and Ethnicity

Whatever else their answers suggest, the idea keeps coming through that they are good people – honest, good, reliable people who contribute to others, who are useful and who have done and will do what is asked of them (including presumably, though few say so, as mothers and wives). It is as if they are saying they are dependable. That they have played their part. And in saying this, perhaps, they are saying also that they feel a certain sense of achievement.

3 Muhacir Bulgarians

In the last chapter it was recalled that feminists and others had sought to render visible the role of women in history and daily life and that the absence of women from hitherto historical and contemporary accounts has come to be recognised as an important form of bias. In now turning to consider ethnicity rather than gender this question of visibility/ invisibility takes an interesting turn. It concerns the position of Kurds. There are perhaps 12 million Kurds in Turkey (only broad estimates are possible because such information is not counted in census data). Millions of them live in the Izmit triangle. Yet on our best estimate, based on a consideration of where people were born, there were only two Kurds amongst the 356 workers we interviewed. If there were second-generation migrants they did not reveal themselves as such. We have no evidence that this situation is the result of conscious discrimination by management in the recruitment process. This is possible since discrimination against Kurds certainly exists in Turkey but it may also be a function of differential educational attainment. There are clearly many Kurds from rural areas who lack adequate formal education for work in the formal sector, some whose schooling has been interrupted in the most brutal way (Kahveci et al. 1996b: 40–41). Whatever the case, in considering another aspect of workforce segmentation, in this case on the basis of ethnicity, it would be remiss not to mention that the key fact about the largest ethnic group in Turkey, the Kurds, is precisely their ‘invisibility’ in the factories that we studied. This invisibility does not arise because we have ignored them however. It arises because they are not there, an absence that deserves mention in its own right. In the social sciences ethnicity is one of those concepts that may be used so much because it is so lacking in clear definition. Sometimes it is used to refer to people from a particular nation, sometimes to people of 59

60 Gender and Ethnicity

a particular religion, sometimes to people who manifest differences of a cultural type; and sometimes to combinations of all three. The 53 immigrants from Bulgaria who feature below qualify in one way or another on several counts: they came from another country; in that country they had been marked out because they had a different religion, Islam; and in the factories they are judged positively by managers because of their work habits, and negatively by fellow workers, for the same reason. In Turkey, immigrants from the Balkans, particularly from Bulgaria, are called ‘Muhacir’ or ‘Göçmen’ (immigrants). About two-thirds of the Muhacir Bulgarians referred to in this chapter work in Bursa, about nine out of ten of these work in textiles and the rest in the metal goods industry (cars). The other third work outside Bursa, all in the metal goods industry (cars and white goods), either in Trakya (Thrace) or between Istanbul and Izmit. The largest number of these came from Kirdjali in southern Bulgaria about 50 km west of Edirne in Turkey or from Varna on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. Mustafa is one of many thousands of Muhacir Bulgarians who made the journey from Bulgaria to Turkey in 1989, in his case ultimately becoming a textile worker in Bursa. In an attempt to convey something of the life experience of many such people we begin with the story of his journey and later settlement. Following this a broader consideration of Bursa and the Muhacir Bulgarians will be provided, and then details of their employment and material support, their position in the labour market, and their relation to management, trade unions and other workers.

Mustafa’s story I was born in Bulgaria in 1966. I completed all my education in Bulgaria. After finishing technical school at the age of 18, I began working in a textile company producing blankets. Life was so different there. In Bulgaria you didn’t lose your job. You would be given a house to live in and a job. The pay wasn’t very high but you would manage to survive. Until 1988, to be a worker was a privilege in Bulgaria. We were really kings there. Nothing in Turkey compares to that. We used to have very good and friendly relationship with the people above us. We wouldn’t call them ‘Amirim’ [My Master] or ‘Sefim’ [My Chief]. We used to call each other ‘Comrade’. You had free education, free health services, it was easy to get sick leave from work. There was 100 per cent job security. I actually never thought that there was such a thing as losing your job till we came to Turkey. I was old

Muhacir Bulgarians 61

enough to remember that most of us thought that we were much better off than people in Turkey were. I don’t mean that it was Heaven. I am not a communist. I am actually against it. But these things were true. Of course there were difficulties. For example, you had to save a lot of money to buy a car. It would take years to buy a car. You had no chance to see a foreign country. It was impossible to do so for two reasons. First, the authorities didn’t let you go where you wanted. Second, you didn’t have enough money to see a foreign country anyway. It wasn’t an open society. That is what I don’t understand about communism. You couldn’t freely criticise things there. If you did, you would be prosecuted immediately. You would be regarded as a traitor. They were especially sensitive to criticism made by Turks. They just didn’t like Turks, I suppose. I don’t know why. We were later given a very bad time by the Bulgarian authorities especially in the late 1980s. Turks were not allowed to speak freely and were ordered by the authorities to change their names. Even in factories like the one I was working for, Turks weren’t treated fairly by the management anymore. They began to discriminate against Turks. They started to give us donkey work in the factory. They began to shout at us and bully us. It didn’t happen in a week or a month. It took some 10 or so years to make life miserable for Turks, but they succeeded. When the trouble got worse, some of the Turks in our area began to leave Bulgaria and immigrated to Turkey. At first, you had to have a Turkish visa from the Turkish Embassy to go Turkey. The Bulgarian authorities wrote down the names of those who applied for Turkish visas. They made a black list. When more people got Turkish visas, the Bulgarian authorities got even angrier because Turkish people who used to work in agriculture and the factories would try to go to Turkey without considering what the consequences were for the Bulgarian economy. We were still undecided about going to Turkey. Then one day I remember a Bulgarian engineer in my department approached me and asked ‘Are you leaving too?’ At first I said ‘No’. Then I said ‘I don’t know’. I saw his face getting whiter and whiter . . . so then I said ‘May be’. He taught me a very good lesson, which I have never forgotten. ‘Who leaves a sinking ship first?’ he asked. ‘Rats’ I told him. Then he said ‘This is what all Turks are’. I was upset but I didn’t respond to this. Then he asked me a second question which was the

62 Gender and Ethnicity

biggest lesson of my life. ‘Do you know what the worst news is for the rats who leave the sinking ship first?’ ‘I don’t know’ I said. He answered his own question: ‘The worst news for those rats is that the ship won’t sink, thanks to those who didn’t leave. For the rats, the worse is still to come, comrade. There is no shore to swim to. Good luck comrade, good luck.’ In those years, of course, we all used to listen to an official Turkish Radio station called ‘Voice of Turkey’. The Turkish radio made an official announcement that Turks in Bulgaria no longer needed a Turkish visa to go Turkey. It added that all of those who went to Turkey would be warmly welcomed by the Turkish State and given permanent residence immediately. That same night we decided to go to Turkey. I didn’t go to work and saw that all our relatives and other Turks were getting ready to set out for Turkey. Three days later, we had left every single thing behind us except for some of our clothes and valuable items. On the way to Turkey, it was unbelievable; thousands of people were going to the Turkish border. Bulgarians on the road were looking at us very angrily, making gestures at us and shouting abuse. Anyway, as soon as we got to the border, there were camps provided for us by the Turkish Government. I kissed the ground and thanked Allah for that. We were put in camps near the city of Edirne, which was close to the border. But when more and more people fled to Turkey, the camps were no longer big enough. Most people slept on the ground. We lived in terrible conditions there. There weren’t enough toilets, food, water, and so on. At the start we had been told that the Turkish Government would make a proper settlement for us immediately. But we stayed in the camp for some three weeks and nothing was provided. We saw that the Turkish State just couldn’t cope with the problem. The situation just overwhelmed it. Some of us already had some relatives who had gone to Turkey sometime before. These people came to pick them up. We had some relatives but we didn’t know where they were because they had immigrated to Turkey 30 years ago. My father had lost contact with his relatives a long time ago. We didn’t know where to go. My mother suggested that it would be better if we went back to Bulgaria. We didn’t want to do that. Many people actually did go back to Bulgaria after a few weeks in the camp. Then, a very good friend of ours in Bulgaria who was also in the camp with his family told us that his relatives would come to pick them up and take them to Bursa. He told us to join them to go to Bursa. We said OK. Their

Muhacir Bulgarians 63

relatives came and we talked with them and they told us that there were many Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria in Bursa. So we could stay in their houses for a bit and then we could start a new life there. We had no choice and went to Bursa with them. My mother and father stayed in one of the Bulgarian immigrants’ houses and my younger brother and I stayed in someone else’s house. We were looking for a flat to rent and a job urgently. I can’t put into words how desperate we were then. After 10 days or so, I found a job in a small garment company offering only the minimum wage. At first I was working like a slave. It was incredible that the owner of the workshop kept telling other workers that how good I was and blaming them for not working as hard as I did. On the second day I wanted an advance against my pay and the employer gave it to me without hesitating. We needed money to rent an apartment. We found one and the owner of the flat told us that we didn’t need to worry about the rent for three months. You wouldn’t get this kind of understanding in Bulgaria. We moved into the flat immediately. Then my younger brother found a job in an industrial estate as a car mechanic. Next month my father got a job in construction. My mother stayed at home. I will never forget the first three months. We were working like animals to make a living. I counted each lira we earned and tried to save some money for the family. After six months, the small garment shop went bust. I found another job in a textile company, again on the minimum wage. I had no choice but to work. But there were lots of Bulgarian immigrants in our neighbourhood working for this company [BursaText1] and they asked me to apply there. It is a very good company to work for. It has the best pay you can ever get in the textile industry. I applied there. After two weeks, they called me for interview and I got the job. I began earning twice as much as I could earn in other textile companies. Plus, in a year, I get three bonuses, one of which is equivalent to one month’s salary. In addition to that, you get bus services to and from work. You can also be a union member. As to my biggest lesson, I began to realise that working in the textile industry in Bursa you really have to work very hard. I can tell you that every shift I do three times more work than I used to do in Bulgaria. But the managers are still not impressed. Turkish managers seem mentally incapable of admiring workers. They were born to shout at people. There is no way you can satisfy them. Whatever you do is not enough. In Bulgaria we used to be kings inside the factory but we were

64 Gender and Ethnicity

prisoners outside. In Turkey, we are prisoners inside and free outside. But this freedom doesn’t feed your stomach. You are free to starve if you don’t earn enough. In Bulgaria, we were not free but we never starved. I just ask myself sometimes whether there isn’t a system where you can be free and have enough money to live on. From what I have learnt from life, the Bulgarian manager was half-right. He was wrong in one way because I did get to the shore; but he was right that ‘the ship didn’t sink’. If you asked me what I would chose if I had known that change was coming in Bulgaria, I would have preferred staying there to change things till it was no longer possible. They changed over the years, didn’t they? But it was too little and too late for us. We have now settled down in Bursa. I like working in the company. We bought a gecekondu two years ago. We demolished it and have been building three floors of apartments for my parents, my brother and myself. We have completed two floors. I got married two years ago to a girl from the company and I moved into the second floor. She still works there. We are now building the third floor. After that everybody can go his own way. I mean we won’t need each other as much as we have so far. I will continue to support my parents. My father is a bit old now and can’t carry on working in construction anymore. My brother is still working in the industrial estate and we expect him to get married soon.

Muhacir Bulgarians and Bursa Under the Ottoman Empire, Turks were to be found in a number of places in the Balkans including among others Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, these Turks often found themselves under pressure from the new authorities. Turkish Muslims from Bulgaria emigrated to Turkey after the Russo–Turkish War of 1877–78 put an end to the Ottoman domination of the Balkans (Vasileva 1992) and also in several waves over the course of the last century – in 1921–28, 1950–51 and 1989. In 1989 Turkey received an influx of around 370,000 migrants from Bulgaria, it being reported that the line of cars and trucks loaded with refrigerators, stoves and domestic animals sometimes stretched over 20 km back across the border (Vasileva 1992: 347). The exodus was in response to a policy of forced assimilation carried out by the government of Todor Zhivkov, whose regime was to fall later that year (hence Mustafa’s reflection on what he might have done if he had known that change

Muhacir Bulgarians 65

was coming to Bulgaria). The teaching of Turkish in Bulgarian schools had been proscribed as early as the mid-1970s and the Communist government had long regarded the Islamic faith as a key factor inhibiting loyalty to the state, with various Islamic customs being seen to be in conflict with the precepts of modernisation. In 1984 the Bulgarian authorities had initiated a countrywide campaign to forcibly change the names of all ethnic Turks to those of Bulgarian or Slavic origin. Police and troops with dogs and tanks surrounded villages with predominantly Turkish inhabitants, often in the early hours of the morning. Officials who brought with them new identity cards visited every household, or in other cases, a list of ‘official’ names to choose from. The inhabitants were forced, in some cases at gunpoint, to accept the new identity cards and to sign ‘voluntary’ forms requesting their new names. In other instances the inhabitants of ethnic Turkish villages were assembled in the main square of the village where they were then obliged to accept the new identity cards. Sometimes name-changing and the issuing of new identity cards was carried out at the workplace and in some cases ethnic Turks were given a period of days to accept the new cards or lose their jobs. There are reports of violence and rape by the security forces; of mosques being forcibly closed or destroyed or of them being turned into museums (usually with now locked doors bearing the sign ‘Museum of Bulgarian Muslims’); of pressure to use only Bulgarian in religious services; and of young people facing harassment and possible arrest if they attempted to attend religious services. The authorities attacked the practice of fasting during Ramadan and attempted to stop the traditional Bayram days and practices such as the slaughter of sheep at the Muslim Eid festival. The Islamic custom of washing the body of the deceased prior to burial was also forbidden, as was the practice of circumcising male infants, and separate Muslim cemeteries were abolished. In addition to the specific offensive on Turkish identity that was mounted through the name-changing campaign, Turkish music was banned, women wearing shalvari (traditional Turkish trousers) were harassed in the street and faced fines and there was a ban on the speaking of Turkish in public places. In a final twist to the attack on Turkish identity the Bulgarian government claimed that all ethnic Turks were actually descended from Slavic Bulgarians (Pomaks) who had been forcibly Islamicisised by the Ottoman authorities (Poulton 1993: 124, 130–37). The 1989 exodus, which was sparked by heightened protest against such treatment and the Bulgarian state’s repressive reaction to this, was facilitated by the actions of the Turkish government. In the midst of a ‘tremendous upsurge in nationalist fervour’ (Zurcher 1997: 333) the

66 Gender and Ethnicity

Government passed a decree to permit the refugees to be accepted as Turkish citizens without having to undergo a waiting period. It also announced that it would allow the Bulgarian leva to be exchanged for lira at Turkish banks. Many of the ethnic Turks from Bulgaria were initially placed in two large tent cities in Edirne and Kirklareli in the European part of Turkey (Kirisci 1995: 12, 67). Some were so repelled by the conditions that they found in the camps or found such difficulties in Turkey that within a year almost 155,000 had returned to Bulgaria (Vasileva 1992: 348–49). But many followed a path similar to those who had emigrated in earlier waves and a significant presence was established in the Marmara region in the west of Turkey which, according to the major compendium of ethnic groups in Turkey, had been home to nearly half the immigrants from Bulgaria as early as 1950–55 (Andrews 1989: 94). Within the Marmara region there has always been a relatively high concentration in Bursa, which is the first major city beyond Istanbul on the route from Bulgaria through Trakya and into Anatolia. The job opportunities have generally been better in Bursa than in many other cities in Turkey. The city has always been a relatively prosperous place to live. The climate is also similar to that of Bulgaria. Such has the influx been, as perceived by some of the natives, that there are reports from Bulgarians of them referring to ‘ForeignBursa’, a term that in Turkish conveys considerable hostility (Zhelyazkova 1998a: 10–11). When the early post-war Bulgarian migrants arrived in Bursa in the 1950s and 1960s they were assigned by the State to the Hürriyet district (Hürriyet means ‘Freedom’). Some of the 1989 Bulgarian immigrants to Bursa also came to Hürriyet which is quite close to two organised large industrial districts, where hundreds of small, medium and large size industrial firms are located. Most roads in Hürriyet are muddy in the winter and dusty in the summer and there are a few gecekondu houses. However, apartment blocks make up the majority of the housing and are usually much better than gecekondu houses. They usually consist of two or three floors with quite small apartments. Many of the 1989 newcomers also settled in the poorer parts of some mixed districts – especially Kestel but also Ovakça, Yeni Baglar and Kazim Karabekir. The fact that Hürriyet has a majority of immigrants makes the district quite distinct from the rest of the city. For although the Muhacir Bulgarians had been harassed by the Bulgarian authorities for their Muslim identity most of these immigrants are relatively more secular than the local people.1 They are also better educated and tend to have a more modern lifestyle and appearance. Most women do not wear headscarves when they are outside. There are fewer mosques compared to

Muhacir Bulgarians 67

other parts of the city, which again suggests a more secular worldview. There are other small signs of cultural difference; older men can be seen riding bicycles – male dignity ensures that such a sight is rarely to be seen in other areas of the city or elsewhere in Turkey. The Bulgarian Turks are also relatively more tolerant to outsiders. For example, university students who in other poorer areas are often thought to pose a threat to wives and daughters can find it somewhat easier to obtain flats among them. Kestel is a ‘second wave’ version of Hürriyet. Adjacent to an organised industrial district and within reach of many small and medium textile firms (but 50 minutes away from BursaText1), its population of over 30,000 mostly lives in four or five floor apartment buildings. Its Muhacir Bulgarian inhabitants again tend to favour a modern life style. Settlement in such areas had been helped by state provision of land, infrastructure for housing projects and state assisted loans.

Employment and material support The Muhacir Bulgarians had been extremely vulnerable in Bulgaria. They had arrived in their ‘home’ country on a wave of nationalist support. Yet upon arriving in Turkey, they had felt like outsiders. In the words of the Muhacir Bulgarian senior shop steward at BursaText1, they were ‘like fish out of water’. They sought work where they could find it, often in the informal economy. Some of them, then or subsequently, found jobs in the formal sector, including those parts of it represented by the textiles and metalworking firms. As reported in Chapter 1, wages here are generally appreciably better than jobs in the informal economy. Briefly, wages in the metalworking firms (cars and white goods) are three times or so more than the minimum wage, BursaText1 pays an exceptionally high rate for textiles, of twice the minimum wage irrespective of gender. BursaText2 pays less; one and half times the minimum wage for men and only the minimum wage for women. Like Mustafa then, the immigrants were glad to get such jobs. However, some Turkish workers met their arrival in these factories with hostility. More than ten years later they were still regarded with some suspicion. Workers in several factories regarded them as untrustworthy, as management spies and ‘not one of us’. In addition, the Muhacir were stereotyped as being only concerned with money and closed together against the outside world. Several of the criticisms made of the Muhacir Bulgarians were voiced by one of the workers in a metal goods firm at GebzeWG:

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I haven’t seen any group of people that has such solidarity. They all support one another. This solidarity isn’t to do with ideology; they just stick together and make a fortune for themselves. For example, there are Muhacir Bulgarians living in mass housing in Sekerpinar that was provided by the state when they came to Turkey 10 years ago. The mayor of Sekerpinar is also a Muhacir Bulgarian. You see, they look after themselves. Ninety per cent of the floor sweepers [sic] are Muhacir Bulgarians. Although the pay is very low, the wage level isn’t important for them. Their family structure is different from our traditional Turkish Anatolian family. In traditional Turkish families, women do not work outside. But all their women and other family members work outside and then they pool their income and are able to survive like that. In this factory, as in several others, the trade union worked hand in glove with the management. 2 To be part of the union’s official structure was therefore seen to be close to management and that three of the factory’s five shop stewards were Bulgarians fuelled further criticism. Some of the views expressed above are of a kind directed at immigrants in many other places in the world – that they stick together; that they only look after themselves; that they care only about money; and by implication that they take jobs that are needed by indigenous workers. In the case of the Muhacir Bulgarians, three well-rehearsed themes are that they can live cheaply because they pool their income; that they got their jobs through personal connection; and that management recruits them because of their compliance and hard work. Our view, which is developed in what follows, is that to the extent these views reflect certain aspects of reality they also distort others and to the extent they were once plausible they are becoming less so.

Sticking together and pooling resources There is good evidence for the view that the household structure of the Muhacir Bulgarians differs from that of other Turks in our sample. The mean household size for Muhacir Bulgarians was 4.7 whereas that for all other Turks was 3.9. Thirty per cent of the Bulgarians lived in households of six or more compared to only 11 per cent of other Turks. This difference has come about as a consequence of the way the Bulgarians arrived at Bursa. When they first came to the city, they usually lived together in extended households of two or three generations. Most family

Muhacir Bulgarians 69

members worked outside the household including the women and where present, parents. This allowed a certain amount of money to be pooled which usually went towards buying a gecekondu, a plot of small land or a gecekondu-type apartment with one or two floors. It is as a consequence of this that so many Muhacir Bulgarians in our sample claimed to own rather than rent their accommodation, over 80 per cent claimed such (often part-) ownership compared to just over half of nonBulgarian Turks. Home ownership stands in marked contrast to the state-provided housing to which many Muhacir Bulgarians had been accustomed. Cheap credit and other help from the state have facilitated it. To some degree it is true that the immigrants have ‘kept themselves to themselves’, tending to eat together at work and to marry other Muhacir Bulgarians. In some cases help in dealing with banks and officials has come through a Balkan voluntary association, the Balkan Göçmenleri Kültür ve Dayanisma Dernegi. This organisation claims a membership of 25,000 in Bursa and has branches in some other cities. It also provides assistance with finding jobs, the pursuit of retirement rights in Bulgaria and amongst other things it runs a cramming school for Muhacir Bulgarian students who are preparing for the university entrance examinations. Some Muhacir Bulgarians who had first lived in gecekondu houses built their own apartment blocks to replace them. When the first floor was completed the older brothers would move in, the rest following as the building work progressed. Typically the whole household would begin with a common budget with contributions being made by all members of the household until the building was done. The historical traces of this pattern can be seen in Table 3.1. The household in which there was no one else working except for the worker we interviewed was still an exception for the Muhacir Bulgarians. Gradually, though, the practice of pooling income is changing. In some cases the father still controls the money earned by his sons in a common budget. In other

Table 3.1

Earners in Turkish and Muhacir Bulgarian households (%)

No other earners other than worker interviewed One other earner Two or more earners

Turks N = 303

Muhacir Bulgarians N = 53

66

11

29 5

74 15

70 Gender and Ethnicity

cases – especially after marriage – the sons have begun to have their own budget separate from the larger household. In such cases, the sons continue to help their elderly parents financially but the structure of Bulgarian immigrant families has transformed from large to small separated households, like those of non-Bulgarian Turks. In this context an important feature of Table 3.1 is that it reveals that relatively few Muhacir Bulgarians – or other Turks – belong to households in which more than two other people work. To focus exclusively on the general differences that obtained in total size of household between Bulgarians and Turks in the past can therefore be misleading. It is also likely to obscure a difference that continues to distinguish the two groups and which makes an important contribution to the proportions of workers who have only one other earner in their household. The key issue here is that of wives who work. In just under half of the households of Turkish workers who have one other earner the person concerned is a spouse. In the case of the Muhacir Bulgarians this rises to over two-thirds. There are, then, still some traces left of the large households that were part of the Muhacir Bulgarians’ initial survival strategy but a more pronounced difference may now be the labour market participation of women and especially married women. Just under half of the married Bulgarian women in the two textile companies contribute half or more to household income. That a lower proportion of them do so than Turkish-born women (two-thirds of whom contribute this much) is possibly attributable to differences in employment status and wages between Bulgarian and Turkish spouses and to differences in size of household. Even so, this contribution is still a substantial one and the cost to them in working shifts is much the same in terms of sleeplessness and other symptoms. There are however some respects in which the position of Muhacir Bulgarian women differs from that of Turkish ones and such differences are nearly always to their advantage in becoming wage earners. They are less likely to experience opposition from family and neighbours when starting to work (in fact whereas only ten per cent of Turkish married men in our factories had wives who went out to work, 44 per cent of married Bulgarian men did). They are also somewhat less likely than Turkish women to regard being a housewife as their normal function, with paid work being something they do for a certain period of their life. In addition, it seems possible that Muhacir Bulgarian husbands and wives have a somewhat less unequal relationship in the home. We asked married women workers in the two textile firms how decisions were made about their wages. Over 9 out of 10 of the Muhacir Bulgarian women

Muhacir Bulgarians 71

claimed to make decisions jointly with their husbands compared to 2 out of 3 Turkish women. All of them thought women should go out to work, compared to 75 per cent of the Turkish women.

Job entry and discipline at work The idea that the Muhacir Bulgarians got their jobs through personal connection is widespread among non-Bulgarian Turks. It has some foundation in reality. Only a third of them claimed to have got their jobs through formal application. A few spoke explicitly of having got them by using inside influence (or ‘torpil’). Well over half cited the help of family and friends. One Bulgarian woman worker recounted that ‘My elder sister retired from here and I got the job through her recommendation’. Another told how ‘My mother-in-law retired from here and I replaced her’. ‘My neighbour was working here and I got the job on her recommendation’ said another. Yet another told us ‘A relative of mine retired from here and I got the job through them’. There are many other accounts involving other relatives – sisters-in-law who worked in the factory, fathers who were cooks in the factory, aunts who worked in the factory nursery. The point is not that the list is a long one however. It is that a very similar list can be constructed for the non-Bulgarian Turks (Table 3.2) and that, quite simply, this is the way that jobs in these factories are got. Possibly the Muhacir Bulgarians relied more on family connections than non-Bulgarians did, the latter presumably knowing more people outside their families. But the large fact is that the majority of both Bulgarians and other workers did not get their jobs by straight formal application. In 1989 larger firms had been specifically asked by the Government to employ Bulgarian immigrants but since then some managers have been motivated to employ them for other reasons. The Muhacir Bulgarians were frequently described to us by managers as better qualified, and as Table 3.2

How they got present job: Turks and Muhacir Bulgarians (%)

Formal application Through relatives Through friends Through torpil Others

Turks N = 301

Muhacir Bulgarians N = 52

44 25 19 7 5

33 44 13 10 0

72 Gender and Ethnicity

possessing higher levels of education, especially mathematics. Systematic data collected from our fieldwork confirms that they tend to be educated to a higher level. Muhacir Bulgarians were less likely to have only primary school education and more likely to have reached senior secondary level or above (Table 3.3a). The pattern is pronounced for both men and women (as can be seen from Table 3.3b, which reports the case for women only). Other workers commonly claimed that managements preferred Muhacir Bulgarians to Turks because they were more compliant. Interviews with managers in the Bursa textiles industry where the Bulgarians are disproportionately concentrated go some way to confirm this impression. A senior manager at one of the Bursa textile firms commented: Ironically, they come from a workers’ state but they are not used to trade unions and they are more disciplined than Turkish workers. When they first came we heard certain things. For example, Bulgarians were telling Turks that they shouldn’t be going for a smoke [the factory has separate smoking areas] without asking the supervisor for permission first. Managers in Bursa textiles are generally agreed: There are some differences between Turkish workers and the Bulgarians. Bulgarian workers work very hard. Let me give you an example, when Table 3.3a

Education of Turks and Muhacir Bulgarians (%)

Primary Secondary High school/technical college

Table 3.3b

Turks N = 293

Muhacir Bulgarians N = 53

26 13 61

4 13 83

Education of Turks and Muhacir Bulgarians (%) – Women only

Primary Secondary High school/technical college

Turks N = 51

Muhacir Bulgarians N = 30

45 16 39

7 20 73

Muhacir Bulgarians 73

I am on the shop floor and ask a Turkish worker to get something for me from somewhere, he walks there and takes his time. If I ask a Bulgarian worker the same thing, he runs there immediately. I am not saying that all Bulgarian workers are like this. But the majority of them work very hard indeed. ‘I can tell you that Bulgarian immigrants are much better and more productive than Turkish workers are’ said another. But he also explained, things have changed since the days the Bulgarians first came to the factory: The number of Bulgarian immigrants has declined in my department in recent months. We used to have a lot of immigrant workers here. They are better educated than local labour. We now recruit more and more local workers. The Muhacir are very well disciplined and they are very thrifty. As a result, relative to local people, their living conditions get better in a short time. They build their houses, buy cars, marry their children, etc. But after that they begin to relax a bit and don’t work very hard. Other managers say much the same thing. Asked how he compared the Muhacir Bulgarians to local workers another replied: Initially, immigrant workers were working very hard. Day by day, they have come to resemble our local workers. I don’t see any difference between them now. Managers tend to qualify this view of Bulgarian workers with respect to Bulgarian women. Muhacir Bulgarian women are particularly valued. One manager saw them as ‘more willing to work outside [the home], doing overtime, accepting shift work’. In particular he drew a contrasting picture of the place of women in Muhacir Bulgarian and Turkish families. ‘For Turkish families,’ he told us, ‘women should be at home very early in the evening. People would not be very happy to see women coming home at midnight.’ Muhacir Bulgarian women, then, are better educated, generally considered more compliant, more readily disposed to work at night, and even, on the following account – an additional bonus – taller: Bulgarian immigrants . . . are taller than Turkish women are and some of our machines require tall workers. However, in the dyeing unit, I have had a policy for the last 4 or 5 years not to accept any [male] immigrants.

74 Gender and Ethnicity

I am not happy about their performance. Their wives are brilliant. But because their wives are working, the husbands become a bit relaxed and slack at work, they take things easy, don’t push themselves hard, etc. Immigrant women are very talented workers. They really work very hard and do whatever you tell them. They are very productive and quick at work. There are signs that Bulgarian women are not always accepting of their lot. Even though most managers rate them hard workers, some also complain that these women will quickly switch to other jobs if the pay is higher. One of the production managers at BursaText2 claimed that the main streets of Bursa were plastered with A4 sheets that carried adverts from small textile contractors who did not provide social benefits and that Bulgarian women were attracted to these because of the only slightly higher pay. Only a few months earlier over 40 Bulgarian women had clocked off the Saturday shift in this manager’s department and not reappeared on the Monday. On first hearing this pursuit of other jobs which offer only slightly more pay by Bulgarian women workers at BursaText2 is puzzling since it usually entails leaving a job that provides social security cover, which is highly prized, for one that does not. The gist of what we had to say in Chapter 1 was that these jobs in the big private sector offered comparatively good wages and among other things social security benefits. It needs to be recollected here that the jobs concerned in cars and white goods were predominately for men and also that the position of workers in BursaText2 compared unfavourably both to that in BursaText1 and yet more so in the other companies. However, the whole point of looking at the segmentation of the workforce is to bring to attention the specific differences that distinguish particular categories of workers – in Chapter 2 differences between men and women workers; in this chapter differences between Bulgarian Turks and others. And a detailed consideration of the position of the women leaving BursaText1 reveals that there is no puzzle. For in reality, women whose husbands are covered by social security are covered too (as we saw in Chapter 1) and do not need to qualify in their own right other than for an independent pension. Paid only the minimum wage, they have an incentive to chase whatever the market will bear, a lesson the Bulgarians seem to be learning. In fact, several changes that have implications for work would seem to be underway. Turkish women workers, although still substantially dominated by men, can sometimes see benefits in working outside the home of a kind that do not fit stereotypes of quiescent women. Bulgarian men, for their

Muhacir Bulgarians 75

part, had initially attempted to protect themselves in ways that pleased managers as much as they displeased other workers, their reputation for exceptional hard work (and sometimes their endorsement of a promanagement trade union stance) having been a function of their desperate need to survive. Real lines of segmentation persist in the workforce in terms of the jobs that men and women do and in terms of lack of trust between Turks and Bulgarians. Even so, some managers now complain that Bulgarian men are beginning to relax a bit at work; and Bulgarian women workers – praised by many managers for their hard work and acceptance of managerial authority – are now criticised by some of them for playing the labour market. Are such developments signs of change? It would appear that they are. Much later in the book we will search for signs of change by considering another axis of segmentation within the labour force that cross-cuts those of gender and ethnicity – namely differences between workers that relate to age. Now, however, it is time to switch attention from workers to managers, to consider where their ideas come from, what use they make of them and how workers respond to this. In doing this, our attention has to shift from the specifics of the local scene, Turkey, to the global presence of corporate management and in particular modern management thought.

Notes 1. Poulton (1993: 125) cites survey evidence from the 1970s which suggests that ethnic Turks in Bulgaria were more religious than Bulgarians, but it also shows that nearly 40 per cent of them were ‘uncertain’, ‘passive atheists’ or ‘active atheists’. Such figures for non-believers might have been inflated by a prudent regard to Bulgarian official policy on religion – but anything approaching this figure would be totally surprising if produced by a survey of Turks in Turkey. Moreover, the Turkish Bulgarians we interviewed were clearly less likely to think it important to pray at work than their Turkish co-workers. Only 35 per cent of them thought this compared to 70 per cent of the Turks. This is entirely in line with another researcher’s observation that ‘The newcomers . . . feel embarrassed when their colleagues in the plants or other enterprises stop working to say their midday prayer or leave their workplaces to attend the Friday service, but nevertheless they themselves do not do it’ (Zhelyazkova 1998a: 8). 2. The nature of trade unionism in these factories is examined in Part IV.

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Part III The World of TQM

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4 Management and its Practices

The origins of Turkish private capitalism, which effectively dates from the 1950s, are in family ownership. This is very evident still today in the ownership of the large conglomerates that dominate many sectors of the economy. Both in these conglomerates and elsewhere there has been a tendency towards the emergence of professional managers. As one commentator sums it up: a younger generation of professional managers is emerging which has high education standards, no language problems, who are intelligent, willing to learn and work and who have a ‘Yankee style’ (Oktay 1996: 97). The contemporary generation of Turkish managers has been more and more able to access international developments in management theory and practice, through the development of business teaching; through an increasing number of joint venture companies; through the emergence of management consultancy both internationally and within Turkey; through new means of communication, including the web; and generally through the operation of what has been termed the ‘cultural circuit of capital’ and the many agents who form part of this and who produce and distribute prescriptions for business. An important role in the dissemination of new management ideas is played by the Turkish Quality Association (Kalite Dernegi or KAL-DER for short). Affiliated to the European Quality Association, it runs conferences at both national and local level, which bring in management gurus. It also presents case studies of leading multinational companies and provides recent literature and short courses. Management teaching in Turkey has been strongly influenced by America. In 1954 an Institute of Business Administration was set up in collaboration with Harvard Business School and supported by the Ford Foundation at the University of Istanbul. In 1968 a Faculty of Business 79

80 The World of TQM

Administration was set up at the same university providing both undergraduate and graduate courses. Other universities followed suit in the 1970s and 1980s. A citation analysis of the management literature in Turkey confirms the continuing American influence in these formative decades (Usdiken 1997). By 2000–2001 there were about 55,000 students studying management in Turkey at an undergraduate level. About a further 12,500 were studying at postgraduate level, nearly 11,000 of them taking MBAs. By the beginning of this century almost every university had a Management Department, many having both day and evening courses. In 1999, 43 out of 96 management programmes held courses in Turkish only. Even some of these ran one year preparatory courses in English. Of the rest, one department taught in German and French but all the others taught in English. This has helped retain the strong American influence, as has the mounting number of Turkish managers who have been educated in the USA. The velocity at which new ideas have been imported into Turkey has increased considerably over the last few decades. For example, it took 30 years for Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911) to appear in Turkish and much neo-human relations literature of the 1950s and 1960s seems to have remained untranslated with no Turkish versions of McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), Likert’s New Patterns of Management (1961) or Herzberg’s Work and the Nature of Man (1966). The 1970s saw Humble’s Management by Objectives (1971) published in Turkish within three years. In the 1980s, at a time when the number of management books published each year has been claimed to have increased by 50 per cent (Wood 1989: 379), a crop of them found their way into Turkish. Ouchi’s Theory Z (1981) appeared in Turkish in 1987, Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (1982) also appeared in 1987, with Imai’s Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success (1986) appearing in Turkish in 1994, Deming’s Out of the Crisis (1986) in 1996, and Peters’ Thriving on Chaos (1987) being translated in its year of first publication. In the 1990s Womack et al.’s The Machine That Changed the World (1990) appeared in its year of publication, Hammer and Champy’s Re-Engineering the Corporation (1993) came out in Turkish the next year, Hammer and Stanton’s The Re-Engineering Revolution (1995) again came out in its first year of publication, so did Hammer’s (1996) Beyond Re-Engineering. The transfer of knowledge about contemporary developments is further aided by the rapid translation into Turkish of recent journal articles, for example from Harvard Business Review. This situation is quite unrecognisable from that described by an American commentator on

Management and its Practices 81

management in Turkey in the mid-1960s according to whom: the ‘improvement of management processes has been reduced by the scarcity of modern management literature translated into Turkish or written by Turks’ (Terrill 1965: 103). Of course some of the fashions in executive enlightenment are themselves difficult to take seriously (Turks may note with amusement that in Britain top executives from the Bank of England and British Gas have been exposed to Whirling Dervish dance routines in an attempt to find inner peace and enhance business potential, Thrift 1999: 54). However, prescriptions for improved management practice are potentially available to managers in Turkey (and other developing countries) with a seemingly ever-decreasing time lag, and since the debate about such methods is conducted almost exclusively within advanced capitalist societies, some important questions arise: Who are the managers? What do managers in Turkey know of such methods? And indeed what do workers know of them? These are the matters considered in this chapter. Chapter 5 then considers in which respects managers implement such methods, and Chapter 6 how workers regard their managements in companies where modern management methods are present to different degrees and how far their views are mediated by broader concerns.

The managers Two-thirds of the managers in this study were employed in production departments and the rest in HRM, Marketing, Purchasing and other functions. The management hierarchy was defined as ranging upwards from those engaged in 100 per cent supervisory positions to the highest positions on site. Of the 353 managers in the sample 41 per cent are aged 30 or less, whilst 22 per cent are aged between 31 and 35, and 37 per cent are 36 years old or over. The mean age is 33 and 98 per cent are under 50. Most managers are men (81 per cent). Textile companies have more women managers (27 per cent) compared to those in the car (13 per cent) and white goods industries (17 per cent), partly because these companies tend to employ women managers in departments where the majority of workers are women. Most managers are graduates with 60 per cent holding first degrees and a further 14 per cent holding postgraduate qualifications. Managers in the car and white goods industries are more likely to have either graduate or postgraduate qualifications than those employed in textiles

82 The World of TQM

(Table 4.1). In all industries, however, about eight out of ten managers who held graduate qualifications had been trained in engineering, with mechanical engineering accounting for about half the cases in white goods and cars, and textiles being more likely to have managers qualified in textile or chemical engineering. Typically, they had graduated from leading universities, such as Istanbul Technical University and Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara. Generally engineering graduates in Turkey have been exposed to a number of courses that cover the main essentials of modern management theory and practice. Managers did not always provide survey information on their social origin but we do know that at least 36 per cent of all managers’ fathers were either civil servants or professional managers and that this is again more likely to be the case in the white goods or car industries than in textiles (Table 4.2). Managers in textiles are more likely to have had fathers who were workers and peasants. The youngest manager is 22 and the oldest is 55. Despite this compressed age range it can be seen that the tendency for managers to be recruited from higher status groups is more evident for those in the

Table 4.1

Managers’ level of education, by industry (%)

Primary Junior or senior secondary 2-year technical college University graduate Postgraduate

Table 4.2

White goods N = 142

Cars N = 96

Textiles N = 115

Total N = 353

1 4 9 74 13

0 4 5 60 31

17 28 12 41 2

6 12 9 60 14

Fathers’ occupation of managers, by industry (%)

Public civil servants Professional, manager Petty producer, shopkeeper Worker Peasant Not specified

White goods N = 142

Cars N = 96

Textiles N = 115

Total N = 353

18 20 13 10 9 30

25 29 18 14 2 13

11 5 15 17 14 37

18 18 15 13 9 28

Management and its Practices 83

younger age groups. Almost half the managers aged 30 or under have civil servant or professional fathers compared to about a third of those aged 31–35 and only a quarter of those aged 36 or older. Looked at the other way round, older managers are almost twice as likely to have had peasant or working-class origins. Other age-related differences also point to the direction of change in Turkish society and industry. Younger managers have been educated to higher levels and they are less likely to have been employed in the public sector (Table 4.3). In keeping with the skew towards younger managers and also the tendency of these companies to appoint from within, nearly 4 out of 10 managers in all sectors are in their first job. This makes them, to an important extent, creatures of their present companies. They are also, however, with the possible exception of managers at BursaText2, a product of something else – most especially the younger managers are a part of a better-educated, urban-based stratum, of middle-class origin, who are secular and modernist in orientation, and, in most cases, social democratic in their politics. It is not uncommon for them to volunteer their politics in conversation. ‘I have a secular and Atatürkist view’ they say or – in a way that blends capitalist development and the good of the whole society, like this manager at BursaCar, ‘we need to look forward to make Turkey a better place to live for all’. The latter sort of formulation is not perhaps distinctive to managers in Turkey but as a leading student

Table 4.3

Some age-related social characteristics of managers (%) 30 years or less N = 142

31–35 N = 93

36 or more N = 113

Total N = 348

Father’s Occupation Civil servant Professional, manager Petty producer, shopkeeper Worker Peasant Not specified

18 30 10 11 5 27

22 13 16 12 5 31

16 9 20 18 16 23

18 18 15 13 9 27

Level of Education Primary Secondary 2-year High School Graduate and above

1 13 8 78

8 10 9 74

9 12 12 67

6 12 9 74

6

10

25

14

Public Sector Former employee

84 The World of TQM

of the state and business has argued, the legacy of Kemalism is such that it makes it particularly easy for top industrialists to present themselves as part of a common, modernising, project in just this way (Bugra 1988, 1994). Many of these plant-level managers do the same.

Familiarity with modern management methods There are several Turkish as well as foreign companies that provide consultancy on quality matters including ISO 9000 certification. There are also a number of European certification agencies operating in Turkey that issue ISO 9000 certificates independently. However, the premiere institution responsible for quality and the implementation of the ISO 9000 standards in Turkey is the Turkish Standards Institute (TSE). A survey of Istanbul 500 companies in 1996 found two-thirds of these had ISO 9000 accreditation (Erel and Ghosh 1997: 197) and the proportion will certainly have increased since then. ISO 9000 has become an important factor in international trade and from 2002, Certificate Europe (CE), which requires compliance with the relevant directives has been obligatory for exports to the EU. Indicative of the spread of the quality movement is that all seven plants have ISO 9000 and a certificate from TSE. Except for BursaText2 they all also have ISO 14001 accreditation. One plant also has BS 8800.1 All plants have HRM managers rather than personnel managers, HRM managers having usually made their appearance in the early 1990s. Total Quality Management (TQM) is often thought to embrace both quality and HRM dimensions and it is considered in the Turkish context in the next chapter. Here, the attempt is made, first, to outline the management methods in these plants on an industry by industry basis, and then to present a more systematic account of managers’ and workers’ familiarity with them.

Industry profiles The white goods industry The GebzeWG plant had undergone considerable management reorganisation prior to the fieldwork, this making for fewer managers in a flatter structure. This sort of development is considerably at odds with the traditional way in which management has been allowed to flourish in the publicly owned and large corporate sectors (which to an extent took Turkish public bureaucracies as their model). As a consequence, the term ‘lean management’ is much more common among the managers and workers than ‘lean production’.

Management and its Practices 85

At CerkWG there had also been a major reorganisation of the management in the plant following the German takeover that occurred in 1997. This had stripped out the management levels of deputies and assistant managers so that the bottom level of management now consists of team leaders (postabasi) appointed by management and in charge of teams between 9 and 45. BoluWG is moving in the same direction as the other white goods firms but it lags behind. The plant had been relatively autonomous from its parent company until 1999 when it was fully integrated into the conglomerate’s white goods division. It had formerly recruited its own managers and maintained a paternalist style of management. At the time of the fieldwork the shift to lean management and the process whereby the parent company would intervene to restructure the plant on the same basis that it had already introduced in its GebzeWG plant was still pending. BoluWG workers had still not experienced TQM, lean production and other methods to the same extent as workers elsewhere in the white goods industry at GebzeWG or CerkWG. They were also significantly ‘behind’ in their experience of new management methods when compared to workers in the two car plants. But by 2001, the flatter management structure had arrived and management practice was coming more into line with the company’s GebzeWG plant.

The car industry GebzeCar has practised modern management methods from the start. Even before the complete Japanese takeover, the plant had several Japanese managers and engineers who were actively involved in the application of new management methods and about ten per cent of employees along with managers and engineers had been to Japan for training in 1999. Meetings that involve Turkish and Japanese managers are conducted in Japanese. Job rotation is practised on the shop floor and the management has intensively applied new management methods such as TQM, teamwork, kaizen and Just in time ( JIT). There is a suggestion scheme (as there was elsewhere at the time of the fieldwork except for BursaText2) and GebzeCar managers appear to attribute exceptional importance to this. Again, as at all the above plants, various problemsolving methods are in use such as the fishbone technique and Pareto diagrams. BursaCar has extensively applied new management methods in recent years. TQM, kaizen (started in 1997), quality circles (started in 1984), a suggestion scheme, total productivity maintenance (started in 1993)

86 The World of TQM

and JIT have been widely practised and there were 72 quality circles in existence at the time of the fieldwork.

The textile industry Compared to the great mass of plants in their industry BursaText1 and BursaText2 are among the most advanced. But as yet they have not intensively applied new management methods. BursaText1 began to apply kaizen and problem-solving methods at the beginning of 2001 after the fieldwork, and management and worker interviews were completed. For its part, BursaText2 was planning to introduce new management methods at the end of 2001. Thus far it has mainly concentrated on benchmarking against its own performance the previous year but in the second half of 2001 the company appointed a new training manager and began to provide courses for blue- and white-collar employees. In all the other plants (expect for BursaText2) benchmarking is extensively used on a company, sector and international bases. BursaText2 expected to introduce TQM at the beginning of 2002.

The significance of ownership Most domestic firms in Turkey, including the major conglomerates that dominate many sectors of the economy – for example those of Koç and Sabanci – are family dominated. They are still run from the top, above the heads of professional managers, by family members who have a powerful effect on the running of ‘their’ businesses (Bugra 1994), including the introduction of management methods. Ownership relations at both the domestic and international level have been crucial for the introduction of new management methods in the firms in this study. At BoluWG and GebzeWG new methods are disseminated to the plants from the holding company to which the companies that own these plants belong. This was the case with Six Sigma (which we will come to in Chapter 5). Six Sigma was adopted by the holding company to which these plants belong in 1999. The company also provided training courses for HRM managers and some engineers. Similarly the company recommended the same leading international consultants to each plant and also provides management literature and other information. At CerkWG new management methods were introduced by the German parent company. Managers have also been taken to Germany for training. At GebzeCar there is a manager in the plant who specialises in new management methods. He follows up the literature, provides courses

Management and its Practices 87

and training. Use is also made of consultants. Former lecturers at Istanbul Technical University are also sometimes invited to theoretical and practical courses, and training in new methods. New management methods, along with all matters of a technical nature, are however mainly determined from Japan. There are Japanese managers and engineers on site. Managers and workers have been taken to Japan and the Japanese company has imposed its own style and mode of operation right down to its own names for generically recognisable functions and methods such as Quality Circles (QCs) and team leaders. Even the names of teams are a product of the company’s international exposure – for instance, in English, ‘Economizers’, ‘Rate Busters’. At BursaCar the joint Italian-Turkish board in Istanbul exercises an important influence. The managing director is Italian and there are Italian managers in the plant who are familiar with the company’s mode of operation in Italy. But the Turkish side of the operation is also seen by managers to play a vital role, not least the head of the Turkish conglomerate himself. A manager explains wryly: Our boss comes across these methods applied in other companies, and he listens to the same people who show off how successfully TQM has been applied in company X or Z. He begins to think ‘Well, we should ask our boys to apply these methods in our group companies’. BursaText1 is dependent on the international parent company for raw material supply and international marketing and it is in no doubt that it is from here that advice on new management methods will come. At BursaText2 there are no international contacts based on ownership because the company is exclusively Turkish owned. Advice on organisation and methods was sought both from a local university professor of management and (probably through him) from one of the big international consultants.

Familiarity with management methods Of course the world is full of many different management methods but it is interesting to consider the responses Turkish managers made to an abbreviated checklist of some of the most widely used. In their responses to this around nine out of ten claimed to be familiar with Total Quality Management (TQM), Quality Circles (QCs) and Team Working; about six out of ten with Just in Time (JIT), Kaizen and Flexible Production;

88 The World of TQM

about five out of ten with Lean Production and four out of ten with Re-engineering (Table 4.4). There is no systematic evidence currently available on the extent to which managers in more advanced capitalist societies are familiar with these methods but these data do indicate the extent to which knowledge of at least some of these methods has spread to Turkey. Even in the case of those methods with which Turkish managers are most likely to claim familiarity – TQM, QCs and Teamwork – there are industry differences. Generally, managers are more familiar with these methods in the white goods and car industries than they are in textiles. The difference between managers in the white goods and car industries on the one hand and textiles on the other becomes yet more obvious when their replies are compared with respect to JIT, Kaizen, Flexible Production, Lean Production and Re-engineering. Only four out of ten textile managers claim to be familiar with JIT compared to seven out of ten of those in white goods and cars. Again, only a third of those in textiles claim to be familiar with kaizen compared to seven out of ten in white goods and over nine out of ten in cars. And again, only about a third of the managers in textiles claim familiarity with flexible production compared to six or seven out of ten in white goods and cars. Under a quarter of textile managers claim familiarity with lean production or re-engineering which once more compares to considerably higher proportions in white goods and cars. In all these cases managers in white goods and cars are not only more likely, but often considerably more likely, to claim familiarity. There are some differences within rather than between industries. The white goods industry average of 71 per cent of managers claiming familiarity with kaizen hides the fact that only 55 per cent do so at

Table 4.4

Managers’ familiarity with management methods (%)

Kaizen Lean Production TQM QCs Teamwork JIT Re-engineering Flexible production

White goods N = 142

Cars N = 96

Textiles N = 115

Total N = 353

71 62 97 94 99 74 50 71

94 77 95 99 96 74 46 61

32 22 85 69 87 42 23 32

65 53 92 88 94 64 41 56

Management and its Practices 89

BoluWG compared to 73 per cent at GebzeWG and 83 at CerkWG. In cars the 77 per cent industry average for familiarity with lean production hides a substantial difference between GebzeCar, which is a relatively new operation, where only 52 per cent of managers claim familiarity and BursaCar, which is long established and has recently undergone major management restructuring, where 98 per cent do so. In textiles the 42 per cent industry average for familiarity with JIT contrasts with a figure of 66 per cent for BursaText1 and only 25 per cent for BursaText2. Despite these particular differences in most cases the average figures for each industry in Table 4.4 are a reasonable guide to the situation in the individual plants. From where do managers derive their knowledge of these methods? It was noted earlier that these managers are in many respects creatures of their companies. Their knowledge of those methods with which they are most familiar comes from the practice of their own companies and training. In the case of TQM, Teams and QCs three-quarters of managers who claim familiarity with these methods cite company practice or training as the source of their knowledge. By contrast other sources of knowledge become more important for less well-known methods. For example, re-engineering is the technique with which managers are least likely to claim familiarity and the one most likely to be heard of from books (Table 4.5). The fact that managers claim familiarity with particular methods is not of course strong evidence that they actually practise them. In this respect it is instructive to compare managers’ claims to be familiar with these methods with those of workers. The first thing that becomes evident is that workers are less likely to claim familiarity with management methods than managers. But their responses do broadly confirm those of managers and they leave very little doubt about what is being applied in the factories. For what workers know about – most especially outside textiles – are, above all, TQM, QCs and Teamwork. Six out of ten of all workers claim familiarity with QCs and seven out of ten with TQM and teamwork. In white goods and cars these proportions rise to eight or nine out of ten for all three methods (Table 4.6). Yet Table 4.6 also makes very clear something that could also be seen to a lesser extent in the data for managers – namely that textiles differs considerably from the other two industries. Textile workers have hardly any familiarity at all with the range of methods that broadly define modern management. At BursaText1 40 per cent of workers claim familiarity with TQM, 2 per cent with teamwork and nil per cent with kaizen, lean production, QCs, JIT, re-engineering or flexible production.

90

Table 4.5

Managers’ sources of knowledge about management methods

Sources cited by managers who claim familiarity

TQM N = 551

Teams N = 518

QCs N = 445

JIT N = 343

Kaizen N = 331

Flexible Production N = 275

Lean Production N = 274

Re-engineering N = 193

Company practice Training Mass media Education Books Others

43 28 6 7 14 2

52 23 4 8 11 3

50 25 4 6 12 3

40 20 5 12 17 6

41 24 3 6 20 6

35 13 9 13 23 7

36 19 4 10 25 7

20 13 9 14 36 7

Management and its Practices 91 Table 4.6

Workers’ familiarity with management methods (%)

Kaizen Lean Production TQM QCs Teamwork JIT Re-engineering Flexible production

White goods N = 153

Cars N = 100

Textiles N = 103

Total N = 356

48 14 90 81 98 53 7 27

98 16 97 96 97 21 55 20

0 0 26 0 1 0 0 0

48 10 73 62 70 29 4 17

At BursaText2 an even lower proportion – only 12 per cent – claim familiarity with TQM, and nil per cent claim familiarity with teamwork, kaizen, lean production, QCs, JIT, re-engineering or flexible production. Despite the uneven distribution of knowledge about these methods, there is no doubt about the direction of change in which management practice in these plants is headed. As a manager at BursaCar commented: In Turkey and in this company, you cannot be against new management methods. You are not allowed to say that these methods are not very useful. If you say so, you are a loser. If you criticise these methods, you will be regarded as ‘Enemy Number One’. It is the younger managers who have a particular affinity with the new wave of management methods and this is evident from this same, older, manager’s views: Well, I am not against the term ‘quality’ per se. What I am against is the way our young managers and engineers jump into the world of new management methods. They don’t assess them. They don’t critically evaluate them. They just take those methods as a remedy for everything. It is like a fashion, a postmodern fashion to know about new management methods. No matter whether they are useful for this country, no matter whether they are useful for this company and no matter whether they are useful for their workspace. If you know more about these methods, you are regarded as an intelligent, bright and very knowledgeable manager. From that point, they regard themselves as experts on kaizen, TQM, lean management,

92 The World of TQM

circles, and the like. I know that when they have read about one of these methods for about a month, they think that they are expert in this particular method. Ask them: ‘OK then. Show me how you do it on the shop floor’. They all fail. In the early 1990s two commentators on the Turkish automobile, steel and clothing industries concluded that firms were ‘not aware of the fact that the introduction of new organisational methods plays as crucial a role as the automation technologies in their competitive success’ and they went on to state that ‘the application of the new organisation methods such as JIT, TQC, TPM are not even being considered by the firms . . . and will be one of the key barriers in their restructuring process’ (Duruiz and Yenturk 1992: 183).2 None of the seven plants we have looked at can be characterised in this way – not even the two textile plants. Nor is there evidence of a sharp choice having been made between the application of modern management methods and technology. Their ranking in terms of modern management methods would appear to be partly related to their implementation of modern technology (as schematically presented in Figure 4.1).

BursaCar GebzeCar CerkWG GebzeWG BursaText1 + Modern management

BoluWG

–

BursaText2

– Figure 4.1

Level of technology

+

The seven plants, level of technology and modern management.

Management and its Practices 93

Putting the emphasis on the application of modern management methods such as TQM and kaizen, the clear leaders in Figure 4.1 are two of the white goods plants (GebzeWG and CerkWG) and the two car plants (GebzeCar and BursaCar). Then behind these plants comes BoluWG. Managers of the four leading plants might dispute the particular ordering of the top four. But it is improbable they would dispute that there is a gap between them on the one hand and BoluWG on the other. They would also agree that clearly below BoluWG came BursaText1 and then BursaText2. More or less consistent with this ranking is the result obtained by considering workers’ claimed familiarity with kaizen in each of the plants – an indicator that might be justified on the grounds that many people regard kaizen (or continuous improvement) as an integral part of the TQM idea. At GebzeCar 100 per cent of workers claimed familiarity with kaizen; at BursaCar plant where 96 per cent claimed familiarity many workers actually had the word ‘KAIZEN’ emblazoned on the back of their uniforms; at CerkWG 66 per cent claimed familiarity; at GebzeWG 62 per cent. All these plants may be regarded as in the same ballpark. At BoluWG by contrast only 14 per cent claimed to be familiar with kaizen and at BursaText1 and Bursa Text2 not one worker did.

Notes 1. ISO 9001 certifies quality over a wide range of activities including design, production, sales, after-sales and R&D. ISO 14001 refers to environmental management and BS 8800 to health and safety. 2. By the end of the century the changes stimulated by entry into the EU Customs Union in 1995 had led one of the authors to observe, in an account of the automobile sector in Turkey, that efforts were being made towards new organisation methods and quality as well as new products and microelectronic technologies (Duruiz 2000: 52).

5 TQM from Above

In the previous chapter it was seen that out of all the management techniques about which we questioned managers, they were most familiar with TQM, teamwork and QCs. Here the attempt is made to explore more fully what TQM means in the Turkish context and to examine how it fits with other aspects of management practice. This is by no means a straightforward task because, quite apart from anything else, TQM itself lacks clear definition. Even experienced researchers in this field have been reduced to broad approximations. For example, building on previous work, Wilkinson etal. (1997: 800–801) suggest three component principles: customer orientation, process orientation and continuous improvement. By customer orientation they refer to the idea that quality means meeting customer requirements both inside and outside the organisation. It is supposed that this customer orientation provides a common goal for organisational activities and members. Process orientation refers to the idea that the activities performed within an organisation can be broken down into basic tasks or processes, which are linked in a series of ‘quality chains’ to form extended processes. Each process in the quality chain has a customer, stretching back from external customer, through the various internal customers, to the organisation’s suppliers. Continuous improvement rests on the idea that satisfying customer requirements involves the continuous improvement of products and services. The most effective means of improvement is held to be to use the people who actually do the job to identify and implement appropriate changes. On paper all this can be made to loosely cohere into a complementary set of practices. The reality is that it leaves a good deal of opportunity 94

TQM from Above 95

for different practices each to stake a claim as the implementation of TQM. This becomes very evident when Wilkinson et al. inform us: ‘These principles of TQM are implemented using statistical process control (SPC) methods, process simplification, process re-engineering, measurement systems, self-inspection and teamworking in various forms’ (1997: 800–801, emphasis added). Apart from anything else, it becomes a moot point whether TQM is a ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ method. As Wilkinson et al. themselves go on to comment: ‘Hard’ TQM concentrates on the tools and techniques and the systematic measurement and control of the work process, ensuring conformance to performance standards and the reduction of variability. It also tends to be associated with the BS 5750 and ISO 9000 series, which are systems-based approaches to audit the policies and practices of organisations. ‘Soft’ TQM, on the other hand, places more importance on areas such as increasing the customer orientation of the organisation, training, teamwork, employee participation and cultural change (1997: 801). Top managers in Turkey are as capable as those anywhere of ‘talking the TQM talk’. For example the GebzeWG product development manager has spoken of creating ‘a new revitalised organisation supported by fully motivated and empowered employees’ and the (German) MD at CerkWG is no less evangelical: Last year was Quality Year. It was a great success. We filled the big canteen and clapped each other. We are getting there. They are beginning to understand it’s their company. Their company! In the beginning they were afraid of their managers. However, there is no need to regard the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ versions as a simple dichotomy and in the Turkish case it would be something of a departure if the ‘soft’ form were to predominate. Countries, which import new management ideas, do not do so in a historical and cultural void and early studies of Turkish management stress its authoritarian nature. In the mid-1960s Terrill reported of the Turkish manager: He was raised in an authoritarian atmosphere; he has not had much opportunity to learn its benefits by practice in school, community, and professional organisation since these are not yet common in Turkish society; he has not found delegation to be a common practice

96 The World of TQM

in his own work experience or that of his friends. Therefore he tends to resist. His typical reaction is that subordinates are incompetent and therefore cannot be trusted with any delegation of authority (Terrill 1965: 102). Again in the 1960s, Lauter conducted interviews with over 100 people who either held a managerial position or were representatives of banking and private industry. An important theme running through his account was that The applicability of modern management processes by industrial managers in Turkey is impeded by a set of key political, legal, sociocultural, economic and educational constraints generated by Turkish society during its historical development (Lauter 1968: 23). According to Terrill: ‘Authoritarianism has long been a characteristic of every phase of Turkish life’ (1965: 101). For Lauter, too, every phase of life from the family through the school and to the government was seen to be permeated by authoritarianism. Islam was seen to promote a static way of looking at the world, which in turn discouraged departures from orthodoxy and thereby promoted reliance on authority. Turkish managers were held ‘to feel that their employees needed continuous surveillance to perform’, that ‘their subordinates were incompetent and could not be trusted’, and employees themselves were seen to put up with this, the ‘high degree of centralisation of authority [not seeming] to disturb employees and [not resulting] in major organisational conflict’ (Lauter 1968: 94). Some elements of these formulations are contentious. In particular, supposing for the sake of argument that a static way of looking at the world exists, is this a function of Islam or of the way that the world in which Islam has emerged has been ordered historically? (This point is well made by Rodinson [1974: 113] in relation to Islam and fatalism.) And is it the case that authority does not disturb employees? We have no fixed views on the role of Islam but would point out that there was plenty of ‘organisational conflict’ in Turkey only a decade after Lauter and Terrill wrote (see Chapter 7). As always, it is necessary not to conflate compliance by employees and indifference by them to the way they are treated. The idea of ‘power distance’, as developed by Hofstede, is not free from the above sorts of problems. Hofstede developed the idea as part of his attempt to discover national values in different countries and

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defined power distance in terms of ‘the extent to which a society accepts the fact that the power in institutions and organisations is distributed unequally’ (Hofstede 1980: 45). He claimed Turks to be high on ‘power distance’ and generally implied that they were mostly autocratic and given to strictly obeying rules. However, the term ‘power distance’ does capture very nicely a traditional Turkish management style and as such we find it useful for descriptive purposes.

TQM meets power distance Some writers have challenged the main line interpretation of Turkish managers as autocratic at an empirical level. They have sought to supplant it with data derived from Turkish managers’ perceptions of themselves (Arbak et al. 1997: 87–103). Such a challenge is open to question. This is especially so in the absence of a consideration of the perceptions held of Turkish managers by managers from other nations and indeed of a consideration of the perception of Turkish managers by Turkish workers. Such alternative sources of information will be considered shortly. For the moment, it seems reasonable to assume the majority view remains that Turkish managers are apt to have a ‘forcing style’ with subordinates, and that centralised decision-making, authoritarian leadership and the display of power distance all make for a situation in which ‘the handling of differences is brisk’ (Kozan 1989: 795, 1994). Child and Rodrigues (1996: 46) have argued that foreign direct investment (FDI) provides an extremely important potential vehicle for the transfer of managerial and organisational knowledge in developing economies, as well of course for the transfer of technology as ordinarily understood. The previous chapter provides confirmatory evidence of this in the case of Turkey. But relevant here is that FDI in joint ventures can also provide the means whereby external observers, in the guise of foreign managers, can assess managers in a particular country. In the light of the above discussion, it is interesting to note that a survey for the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce which cites the views of Turkish managers held by over 50 expatriate executives, mostly from multinational companies, contains many examples of the long-established way of doing things (Oktay 1996: 41, 42, 43, 53): In general the Turkish management style is terrible. Most managers rule by fear. This is a sign of weakness. Their style is to separate the management from the workers. Most Turks are very flexible but they relate discipline with fear (British manager).

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The Turkish system is much more based on ‘autocratism’. With a management title you can dictate. In Western Europe you cannot easily say ‘do this, do that’ (Dutch manager). In Turkish companies all decisions are taken by the top. The top management decides and the staff cannot disagree (Japanese manager). Turkish managers are more ‘the boss’ type. They keep more distance with the people under them (German manager). FDI can also provide a means of comparison for those workers who can see both foreign and indigenous managers in their everyday work lives. It is therefore interesting to consider how a worker at the joint German owned CerkWG plant acted out for us the way German and Turkish managers came onto the shop floor. First, he played the German manager. He entered walking slowly, nodding to workers, greeting them, asking how they were, looking around him with interest as he went down the aisle and making occasional enquiries. He even smiled. The worker then played the Turkish manager. To do this he marched in, looked sharply from side to side, and barked commands: ‘Ahmet! Pick that up! Put it over there! Mehmet! What are you doing? Go at once to the end of the section!’ What Turkish managers say about themselves sometimes starkly underpins such imagery. One described himself to us as ‘The Cock of the Shop Floor’. What the foreign managers we interviewed have to say about their Turkish colleagues is no less pertinent. A German manager commented about some of his Turkish colleagues: They are arrogant. Give them power and they become terrible. They love hierarchy . . . When Turkish managers approach workers they just say “Do this!” There is no background information: nothing on the history; nothing on the future. Such management styles are not simply part of a diffuse cultural inheritance. Line managers, and indeed team leaders, are often appointed in part for their ability to be hard with workers. Even so, the cultural inheritance is difficult to deny. We asked managers an open-ended question in their survey questionnaire about problems with employees in Turkey (that is problems with workers in Turkey, not necessarily in their own factory). Considering their responses as a whole, lack of communication was the most frequently

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cited problem (Table 5.1). References to problems of communication were sometimes allied to further comments about workers’ lack of motivation or their lack of education. Complaints about lack of an educated and trained workforce were particularly prevalent among replies from managers in textiles. So were references to economic problems (in particular to the difficulty of paying sufficient wages and thus retaining workers). In the car and white goods sectors managers often pointed to the low wages available in the wider economy and, with respect to their own companies, several complained about their inability to reward workers on an individual basis. Sometimes managers represented lack of communication as a failure of management, sometimes as a deficiency in workers, sometimes as a result of problems on both sides. But it is clear that communication is a widespread problem, and recognised by managers to be such. The lack of communication. The lack of education and culture. The lack of knowledge and skill (BoluWG). The fact that both workers and managers didn’t internalise TQM has been leading to communication problems between them (BoluWG). Communication is the biggest problem. The fact that managers don’t spend enough time on the shop floor (GebzeWG). There is a communication problem between workers and managers. Managers find it difficult to motivate workers (GebzeWG). Managers don’t understand what workers want because of the lack of communication between them in some places. Therefore a pressure system of management instead of a participating one continues. This causes low quality and motivation (CerkWG).

Table 5.1

Managers’ views on particular problems with Turkish workers

Most frequent responses (N)

White goods

Cars

Textiles

All plants

Communication Lack of education Economic Lack of motivation Job insecurity

36 22 11 14 17

33 13 11 6 5

24 29 29 13 7

93 64 51 33 29

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Workers are afraid of managers. The relationship is not managed through respect and responsibility but fear of job loss and getting a dressing down (CerkWG). In Turkey, management is formed from the top to the bottom. This increases the distance between managers and workers (GebzeCar). Lack of communication and low level of education (GebzeCar). Firstly, workers don’t want to listen to managers. They have no patience at all. Secondly, since managers assume that they know everything, they don’t want to discuss things with workers. In theory, managers might accept this. But in practice, Turkish managers regard themselves as God’s gift to the company. But since the plant manager, HRM manager and some 15 other people are aware of the importance of Total Quality and change I am happy to work [here] with them (BursaCar). The biggest problem is lack of communication between managers and workers. Managers don’t trust workers and they are not open enough toward them. But these problems can be overcome through the efficient application of total quality management (Bursa car). Neither side understands the other. Managers don’t show workers any respect (BursaText1). There is a communication problem. Workers find it very difficult to express themselves (BursaText1). Managers keep all kinds of information in their hands and don’t share things with workers (BursaText2). As a manager who worked in Europe, I can see very clearly that there is a huge gap between them and us (BursaText2). Looking at matters from the point of view of workers, we asked an open-ended question during our interviews about whether they thought there were any particular problems with managers in Turkey (again not necessarily in their own factory). Their replies were somewhat more varied than those of managers. For instance, in addition to the issues presented in Table 5.2. – economic problems, communication and job security, inequality and pressure – less frequent responses specifically mentioned lack of education/training, working conditions and, amongst others, the practice in some of their own firms of forcing workers to take holidays at times of management’s choosing. Of the three problems

TQM from Above 101 Table 5.2 Workers’ views on particular problems with managers in Turkey Most frequent responses (N)

White goods

Cars

Textiles

All

Economic Communication Job insecurity Inequality Pressure

55 42 21 5 6

39 44 4 3 1

46 24 6 2 0

140 110 31 10 7

that figured most prominently, first, and with good reason, came economic problems, central to which were the prevalence of low wages and also late payment of wages. Even so, communication was ranked second, in precedence to problems about lack of job security and arbitrary dismissal of workers and other issues. As might be expected, responses that pointed to economic problems were most common (allowing for the number of plants in each sector in our study) in textiles. They were most pronounced of all at BursaText2, which had the lowest wages. However, lack of communication was not only the second most frequently cited problem overall, this was also the case in each sector. Moreover, in each and every plant the number of citations for lack of communication ranked either second or joint first, together with economic problems. Although we asked workers for their views on problems with Turkish management in general, in some instances workers contrasted the general with what they experienced in their own factories. This is noticeably so in the first two of the following answers from workers at BoluWG. The first explicitly contrasts the situation elsewhere with that at BoluWG, the second does so implicitly. But the general run of these comments does suggest that in the opinion of workers we interviewed in all the plants there are problems in Turkish industry about communication between managers and workers, and the nature of their social relations. Managers regard workers as inferior (but not in our factory) (BoluWG). The managers should be fatherly. There are few managers who are close to the workers (BoluWG). There is a cultural difference. We are at the bottom. They don’t understand our situation. There are different ways of life, different wages, different social rights and different work conditions (GebzeWG).

102 The World of TQM

They don’t listen to the workers’ voices (GebzeWG). There is no dialogue between managers and workers in Turkey. They are not genuine. They don’t treat workers with respect. They regard workers as inferior (CerkWG). Managers don’t see workers as individuals . . . they regard workers as inferior because their knowledge is superior (CerkWG). They don’t respect us (GebzeCar). There is too much distance between managers and workers (GebzeCar). They discriminate against workers. They think that they are a separate group to us (BursaCar). They are too far away from us (BursaCar). They are too harsh and rigid towards workers. They don’t want to listen to workers. They don’t respect our opinion (BursaText1). They put too much distance between themselves and workers (BursaText1). They regard workers as a lower class. They don’t even bother to talk to us (BursaText2). Oppression of workers at work. Too much scolding. There is no dialogue and exchange of ideas (BursaText2). The importance of power distance in Turkish management is evidenced in what these workers have to say about problems with managers in Turkey – but it is also evident in the previous quotations that reported managers’ views on problems with workers. Managers referred to lack of time spent on the shop floor, lack of respect for workers, the gap between managers and workers and so on. Such references make it clear both that there is an undesirable set of mainstream practices, and of course – and this may constitute an important indicator of change – that the managers quoted believe their own behaviour to represent a break from this. The idea that Turkish managers in general have a highly developed sense of power distance is endorsed in a recent study by Wasti (1998). It finds that employees lack autonomy and that they are afraid to disagree. Using terms developed by McGregor (1960), Wasti comments that the internal work culture is more conducive to ‘Theory X’ than ‘Theory Y’. To explain: Theory X is a philosophy of management according to which most people must be coerced, controlled, directed

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and threatened with punishment to get them to put forth adequate effort. Theory Y rests on more co-operative and participative assumptions. Wasti adds to the idea that Turkish managers operate more on coercive assumptions, the further idea that QCs might be expected to succeed in the Turkish context (Wasti 1998: 612, 620, 622). From the standpoint of those who equate TQM and ‘empowerment’, the link made by Wasti between Theory X and QCs might be taken as evidence of muddled thinking. In fact, though, Wasti’s speculation is a lot more plausible if TQM is considered in its ‘hard’ variant (or with the emphasis skewed towards this). Several other management writers have also suggested that TQM fits better in national cultures – including Japan - that have a high level of power distance (Masters 1996; Scully 1996; Katz et al. 1998). The linking of QCs and ‘Theory X’ is only a contradiction in terms if it is assumed that TQM must be as participative as some of its popularisers imply. For TQM’s leading proselytiser, Deming (1986), the main concern was more with management action and behaviour – the role of the employee usually being limited to problem identification (Edwards et al. 1998: 451; Wilkinson et al. 1998: 807), and this understanding of what TQM is about fits the Turkish case very well. Some idea of the hard elements that inform much of the modern management practised in these companies can be gained from unpacking some of the elements associated with Six Sigma. The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if the defects in a process can be identified you can then systematically proceed to eliminate them and get as close as possible to zero defects. Six Sigma equates to the target of 3.4 defects per million for any given product or service transaction and requires the application of statistical process control methods to analyse data, the monitoring of process capability and performance. The application of such a methodology entails the use of various techniques that are often used in these factories. DMAIC (define, measure, analyse, improve and control) is a process for continuous improvement that is intended to eliminate unproductive steps and introduce more productive ones. Root Cause Analysis is the study of the original reason for variance from perfection in a process. Pareto Diagrams are a method to focus effort on the problems that have the greatest potential for improvement. Tree diagrams are designed to graphically illustrate how broad goals can be broken down into different levels of detailed action. GebzeWG, BursaCar, BoluWG and BursaText1 all practise Six Sigma. CerkWG did not have Six Sigma at the time of the fieldwork but stressed kaizen (the continuous improvement which is integral to the DMAIC process) and by 2002 it was running courses and seminars in

104 The World of TQM

Six Sigma for engineers and managers. GebzeCar has its own Japanese in-house procedures that serve the same ends. These plants do not operate at the Six Sigma level. A manager at GebzeWG talked of moving forward to the Three Sigma level and then Four Sigma and not to the ‘miracle’ of Six Sigma. But the techniques are in place, continuous improvement is part of the management agenda, and the same process exists everywhere in the car and white goods plants. At all the white goods and car plants the shop floors display the slogan ‘QUALITY FIRST!’. For some managers, notably those in HRM, talk of ‘quality’ brings forth excitement and, quite probably, genuine commitment to the idea that workers should play an active part in driving forward the process and be empowered to act in various ways. For others, another possible reaction is formal compliance. When one manager told us that his plant had got BS 8800 we asked him whether it had reduced injuries. ‘We obtained our certificate’ he replied. ‘Yes, but did it work?’ we persisted. ‘We succeeded’ he replied with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Our objective was to obtain the certificate and we achieved our objective.’ Many of these managers pay lip service to ideas of worker empowerment in much the same way. There has been some movement from the power distance style of management practised in the past – in fact workers themselves often comment on just such a difference between these companies and other employers in Turkey. But it is the use of Pareto diagrams, Fishbone techniques and other statistical control techniques that predominate over the supposedly soft components of TQM. To the extent that these plants contain within them practices and styles of management that depart from the authoritarian tradition, the change is a matter of degree. ‘We give them responsibility’ says the German Managing Director at CerkWG. ‘Responsibility not power’ and a common feature of the application of such systems in these plants is that once the problem has been established, it is then given to workers.

So-called high-commitment work practices It has become common for students of management, management consultants and others to refer to ‘high-commitment work practices’. In so far as this term suggests a high commitment from employers to their employees it seems singularly inappropriate, given that some of the practices betoken a low commitment from the employer – for example the employment of temporary agency workers or putting employees on fixed-term contracts. In so far as the term implies (as it is supposed to) that employees subjected to these work practices will become highly

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committed to the employer this is something that is open to empirical verification and not to be assumed in advance. It is far better, then, to regard this hodgepodge of practices only as an indicator of what passes for best practice in modern management. It is in this way that such high-commitment work practices are regarded here (hence the term ‘socalled’ above). It has already been seen that TQM plays a prominent part in the management of the Turkish plants, most especially those in white goods and cars. In what follows, we make use of a list of so-called high-commitment work practices drawn up by Cully et al. (1999: 285, Table 11.5) in order to provide a brief guide to further aspects of modern management practices in the plants. Cully et al. refer to: temporary agency workers, employees on fixed contracts, personality and performance tests, formal off-the-job training for most employees, profit-related pay, employee share ownership scheme, regular appraisals, fully autonomous or semi-autonomous teams, single status for managers and other employees, and guaranteed job security.

Temporary, agency workers and other flexibilities The creation of a two-tier internal labour market, made up of permanent workers on the one hand and cheaper part-time or temporary workers on the other is sometimes seen to be a feature of the new management systems and to have important effects on worker compliance. Thus a permanent 80 per cent of the labour force may be protected by an expendable 20 per cent. Or, as the authors of an account of work methods in US Japanese transplants have argued, not only may the temporary workers be ‘very intimidated’ but their existence also serves to remind permanent workers ‘how good they have it’ (Kenney and Florida 1993: 280–81 cited in Wells 1996: 200). In all the Turkish plants, workers serve an initial probation period, usually of one year, and this provides management with an important source of potential flexibility. To some extent the obligation of workers to perform military service can also provide management with room for manoeuvre, both with respect to the employment of particular individuals and in terms of modifying the size of the labour force. There are also specific cases of temporary workers being hired in these companies. At CerkWG for example temporary workers are recruited to meet increased seasonal demand for refrigeration products over the summer months. Also, at GebzeCar 200 temporary workers were recruited in September 2000 to start a second shift. Generally, though, resort to temporary labour is rare on the shop floors of these factories (and part-time labour

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even rarer). Most years, discounting probationers, full-time permanent workers make up 85–90 per cent of the direct production labour force. Outside direct production there are ‘taseron’ workers. The term would seem to derive from the French ‘tacheron’, the spelling of which we follow. This has a variety of meanings, some pejorative, like drudge or toiler, and others industry-specific, thus a jobber in the building industry, a pieceworker in agriculture. In Turkey the tacheron is a subcontractor and a tacheron worker is one who works for such a subcontractor. They are usually employed for less than 11 months (the employer thus avoiding the obligation to pay compensation on dismissal) and they are only paid the minimum wage. They are not trade union members and have no holiday entitlement (Cam 1999; Sugur et al. 1999). Tacheron labour expanded following the weakening of trade unions after the 1980 military coup. It is estimated that the number of tacheron workers in state economic enterprises rose from 4 to 15 per cent between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s with nearly 25 per cent of the workforce in privatised firms being supplied in this way (Cam 2002: 96–97). Sometimes tacheron labour has been employed side by side with permanent direct production labour in the same factories, including in state economic enterprises but this contravenes Article 4 of Turkish Labour Code 26, which specifies equal pay for equal work. Successful legal action has been mounted on this basis, notably in the state iron and steel sector at Ereli and Iskenderun. However, whereas tacheron workers are to be found in the white goods and car factories and at BursaText1 they are recruited only to perform ancillary functions such as warehousing, cleaning, refectory and security work. There are no tacheron workers engaged in direct production in these factories. They remain a small part of the labour force and pose no direct threat to permanent workers’ jobs (very few crossing the divide to make it as permanent workers). Moreover, badly disadvantaged as they certainly are, they are not needed to remind the full-time permanent workers how good they have it, given the all too evident nature of the external labour market. Evidence is also lacking of attempts to re-engineer the whole production process in ways that reduce the permanent workforce. The white goods and car plants are essentially assembly operations but in none of them has the practice been instituted whereby subcontractors perform assembly operations on site in the manner that has attracted so much attention at VW’s modular production plant at Resende in Brazil (Abreu etal. 2000). Nor is there evidence in any of the plants of the substantial export of production from the employer’s own factory to external contractors who produce large prefabricated parts on their own premises (rather than

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small components) thus reducing the time and labour engaged in final assembly. In all of these respects, then, these Turkish workers have been deprived of today’s cutting edge organisational practices. Foreign managers tend to be impressed by the temporal flexibility of Turkish workers. A German manager at CerkWG told us that when a problem arose Turkish workers worked overnight to put it right: This is absolutely not possible in Germany. In Germany, there are unions and so on. In here, it is absolutely fantastic. This is really a big advantage. Expatriate managers in other firms also report delightedly that the preparedness of Turkish workers to work overtime is ‘unbelievable’ (Oktay 1996: 96). Such preparedness is easier to understand given that when managers lay-off workers or make them redundant those who refuse overtime can come high up on the list. In both the textile and car companies, management requires workers to do overtime when necessary. In addition at GebzeCar QCs meetings are usually held outside normal working hours or on Sundays and workers are required to attend these. In both textile companies, workers are asked to do overtime which usually lasts around two to three hours overtime a day. In BursaText1, workers do overtime most days in the week and are also called back to work on Sundays. Women workers are usually frightened to refuse management’s demand to do overtime as this may increase their chance of dismissal in case of economic downturn. They report doing overtime as amongst the worst things about working in their company. At the time of the fieldwork at CerkWG the company had varied when workers took their annual holiday entitlement, workers complaining about being forced to take holidays without notice, often in winter a few days at a time. Elsewhere the practice was not so pronounced but by the end of 2001 versions of annualised hours had been introduced into all the plants. By then, in response to the economic crisis of that year, about half the workers had been forced to take forced holiday breaks. Functional flexibility is not an issue at any of the plants because of the nature of their trade unionism. We consider this later in the book but, to anticipate, it is an interesting comment on the nature of this trade unionism that the German manager cited above who talked of things being ‘absolutely fantastic’ had forgotten that the factory did have a union.

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Personality tests There are no personality tests and some managers pride themselves on their ability to make judgements on the basis of the size of workers’ hands, their physical appearance and thus implied dexterity and vigour. But competition for such jobs is stiff. As noted in Chapter 1, in all seven factories it is still common for recruitment to operate through networks of family and friends. As for the rest of Cully et al.’s list of practices, there is no profit-related pay or employee share ownership scheme for the largest occupational group in any of the plants (the four times a year bonus paid under the collective bargaining agreement is not performance related). Single status for managers and other employees with respect to common uniforms or parking is found only in the Japanese joint venture at GebzeCar. To the extent refectories are used in common there is informal segregation. The following account therefore concentrates on three practices cited by Cully et al. which are often associated with TQM – training, teams and suggestion schemes.

Training All the plants had training managers at the time of the fieldwork except for BursaText2 which appointed one shortly afterwards to provide courses and seminars for blue- and white-collar employees. CerkWG had a particularly active and enthusiastic training manager who had been specially briefed by managers from Germany and who was in the process of developing training in TQM for suppliers as well as for managers and workers. The amount of training received by managers in any of the plants was limited. Managers’ replies to our survey suggest that over 40 per cent of them had received no training in the 12 months prior to the fieldwork. The proper figure is probably closer to 70 per cent, managers in textiles who had received no training preferring not to state this clearly (Table 5.3).

Table 5.3 Managers’ job training in the last 12 months, by industry (%)

Yes No No response

White goods N = 14

Cars N = 96

Textiles N = 115

All N = 353

41 59 0

33 66 1

26 0 74

34 42 24

TQM from Above 109

Training courses were also of short duration. Further information provided by managers suggests that less than a quarter of them had attended courses of more than one day, 32 per cent of managers in white goods having done so, 24 per cent of those in cars and only 16 per cent in textiles. It is difficult to be precise about the actual content of the courses. On the basis of a generous interpretation of the titles of the courses that managers listed for us we estimate that only about a dozen of them had attended courses that specifically addressed the ‘soft’ aspects of TQM – for instance ‘Team Performance’, ‘Team Training’, ‘Efficient Communication’, ‘Communication Techniques’ and ‘Positive Thinking’. It needs to be remembered that our information relates to one year only and therefore both reflects occasional specific adverse features (managerial reorganisation at GebzeWG for example) and also underestimates the total amount of training managers have received in earlier years. It remains the case that on the evidence of this one year, both the frequency and duration of courses attended by managers is low. What, then, of workers? Workers were asked what training they had received in the 12 months prior to interview and it can be seen from Table 5.4. that over 9 out of 10 claimed to have received some training, there being some industry differences. In particular, fewer workers received training in textiles and the training workers in this industry received was of shorter duration. On the face of it, the amount of training experienced is not out of line with that in British industry as a whole as can be seen from Table 5.5. which compares the Turkish data with that provided by Cully et al. (1999: 64, Figure 4.4). In fact, though, the British data is for all workplaces with ten or more employees, it does not report the results of an employee survey. It relates to all sectors of British industry except for agriculture, fishing and mining where, as reported by over 1600 managers, Table 5.4 Duration of workers’ job training in the last 12 months, by industry (%)

None One day 1 < 2 days 2 < 5 days 5 < 10 days 10 days or more

White goods

Cars

Textiles

All

6 43 22 16 9 3

0 33 10 25 15 17

27 60 11 1 1 0

10 45 15 14 8 6

110

Table 5.5

Content of courses attended by workers in the last 12 months (%)

Employee courses

White goods N = 462

Cars N = 243

Textiles N = 101

All industries N = 806

WERS98 workplacesa

Health and safety Operation of equipment and other technical job training b Computing skills Teamworking Improving communication Customer service/liaison Quality control procedures Problem-solving methods Equal opportunities Reliability and working to deadlines None of these Training courses reported per worker

43 17

33 12

4 31

35 17

62 50

5 1 1 0 21 13 0 0

1 3 13 0 34 4 0 0

1 0 1 0 64 0 0 0

5 1 5 0 30 8 0 0

42 41 41 38 38 24 18 15

0 3.0

0 2.4

0 0.6

Notes: a Data for WERS98 workplaces is weighted. b WERS category is for operation of new equipment only. Vintage is not specified for Turkish data.

0 2.2

5 N/A

TQM from Above 111

off-the-job training was provided in the previous 12 months and any comparison needs to be interpreted with extreme care. 1 Yet the comparative data do serve to underline the total absence of courses on equal opportunities in the Turkish plants, which points to an important difference between the two societies. And it also suggests the bias of courses in Turkey to what Cully et al. (1999: 63) refer to as ‘a hard quality management approach’ as evidenced by courses in quality control procedures, this confirming our broader understanding of the meaning of TQM in Turkey. The training provided in Britain includes courses on quality control procedures, problem-solving methods, reliability and working to deadlines but it also includes other courses on teamworking and improving communication which are much less in evidence in the Turkish plants. Although health and safety courses and those in the use of equipment are prominent in both countries our main conclusion therefore has to be that the Turkish firms seem considerably lighter on what Cully et al. refer to as ‘softer’ or ‘people-oriented’ skills. Milkman’s Farewell to the Factory (1997: 162–69) describes a new training programme instituted at GM’s Linden plant in the United States. She reports that the training curriculum for workers included various components, ranging from a plant tour of the new technology to presentations on sexual harassment and equal opportunities, safety and fire prevention sessions, JIT, statistical process control, problem-solving, decision analysis and quality issues. However, the largest single component of this training dealt with the psychology of motivation, with an additional whole day devoted to interpersonal skills. One of the trainers told Milkman of cases where people who had been exposed to courses on ‘constructive motivation’ and the like had said ‘I wish I would have known this twenty years ago . . . I can’t wait to show this to my kids’ and that some had cried in class saying ‘If I knew this, this wouldn’t have happened between me and my son.’ One worker at BoluWG did in fact tell us My home life changed thanks to quality circles. This training changed my relationship with my children at home. Now I don’t get angry with them. Very few other workers told us anything like this. Training in these plants was not generally about ‘constructive motivation’. Nor even about improving communication, much though managers complain of problems with this. Workers in the Turkish plants had a dearth of experience of courses on improving communication in

112 The World of TQM

the 12 months before we interviewed them. In fact, nearly all workers who claim to have been trained on courses that relate to improved communication in Table 5.5 come from one plant, the GebzeCar Japanese plant, with only a sprinkling from GebzeWG, CerkWG and BursaCar, and none from BoluWG or BursaText1 or BursaText2.

Teams and quality circles Teams and team leaders A study of nearly 6000 workplaces in ten EU countries found the application of group work to be ‘modest’; that group delegation was ‘in its infancy in European workplaces’ and that the appointment of team leaders was ‘in most cases, a matter of managerial prerogative’ this being true to a lesser extent in deciding who are to become group members (Benders et al. 1999: 51). A similarly subdued commentary on the extent and autonomous nature of teams in British industry comes from WERS98. In their report on WERS98, Cully et al. (1999: 43, Table 3.4) distinguish various degrees of teamworking. They found teamwork of some sort existed to some extent in 83 per cent of the largest occupational groups in the establishments that they surveyed (that is, in groups in which the majority of the workforce is employed). In 65 per cent of workplaces most employees in the group worked in teams. But only in 35 per cent of cases did team members work with one another and have responsibility for a specific product or service and make joint decisions about how work is to be done. In short, ‘fully autonomous’ teamworking was found by Cully et al. to be very rare in Britain. It was only in three per cent of cases that team members worked with each other and had specific responsibility for a specific product or service and jointly decided how work was to be done and appointed their own team leaders. The occupational group which had the highest percentage of fully autonomous teams consisted of sales workers – and only six per cent of these could be characterised in this way. Semi-autonomous work teams were most common in the professional job category (53 per cent) and least common (13 per cent) for plant and machine operatives (the category closest to most of our workers). In other words, in both the EU as a whole and in Britain, it is easy to exaggerate the extent of teamwork that is practised and what it actually amounts to. It therefore should come as no surprise that none of the plants in Turkey reached the semi-autonomous work team level – if that is defined as the case where members worked with one another and had

TQM from Above 113

responsibility for a specific product and jointly decided how work was to be done. The two textile plants do not have production teams and thus no team leaders. They have university-educated chiefs who serve as area managers. At BoluWG and GebzeWG there are ‘teams’ and ‘team leaders’ but their appointment is always from management’s own ranks. At CerkWG some appointments are from the shop floor and team leaders also perform ‘joker’ (relief backup) functions. At BursaCar the practice had been instituted of appointing some team leaders from the ranks of former technical school teachers. Only at GebzeCar does management appoint all team leaders from the shop floor and only at GebzeCar does the plant also operate a job rotation scheme. (Asked what was the most important thing that he had learned from an extended visit to Japan, a GebzeCar manager replied: ‘Teamwork. We Turks are not used to teamwork. We are too individualistic at work.’) Nowhere do team members appoint team leaders. For the most part, then, the typical team leader is a universityeducated engineer appointed by management at about three times the pay of the shop floor. The teams themselves vary considerably in size, from 7 to 150. Apart from CerkWG where a different system applies, team leaders do not do manual work, and there is usually a blue-collar assistant team leader in each production team. Each team leader reports to his own chief who reports to the Production Department manager. If scepticism is in order about the extent to which autonomous teams actually exist in countries like Britain, let alone in Turkey, recent research into the effects of membership of fully autonomous teams in the WERS sample (Harley 2001) also underlines the need for yet further scepticism about whether such teams that do exist actually work. This failed to find a link between team membership and employee discretion. This finding is important because it calls into question the assumption in the mainstream literature that teamwork enhances discretion, it being further assumed of course that it is because of this that employees who work in teams should be more satisfied, committed and well-disposed towards management. There seems no reason to doubt that this conclusion, reached on the basis of British evidence – that ‘team membership does not matter much’ (Harley 2001: 737) – applies with at least as much force to Turkey.

Quality circles As commentators on modern management techniques have noted, TQM typically purports to subsume QCs or teamwork arrangements

114 The World of TQM

into a more integrated approach (Ramsey 1991: 6). On an uncritical reading of the management literature QCs might therefore reasonably be assumed to mesh more closely with such integrated approaches than the production teams described so far and thereby, perhaps, induce higher commitment. A summary of the situation with respect to QCs is given in Table 5.6. Not all the plants had QCs in operation at the time of our interviews. As we have noted before, CerkWG had abandoned QCs in 1997, the new German management believing that they had proliferated to such an extent that they lacked focus. Looking back a manager at the plant recalled how ten years ago: We applied these methods from above and forced workers to obey the rules and regulations without questioning them. At that time, we would set up teams of five workers completely instructed from above. We would instruct workers ‘do this, do that’. Workers would not enjoy doing their own tasks at all. They would regard their own tasks as something out there, which they were no part of. A new beginning was being planned in 1999 when interviews were conducted. How far this will break from the forced and involuntary model of QC operation remains to be seen. In all the plants membership of QCs is generally decided by management. This was illustrated nicely by a worker who insisted on arguing to the contrary as we talked to a group on the shop floor at GebzeCar about QCs during a break. Three people were saying that membership was voluntary. Five or six were saying that it was not. One worker insisted that membership was voluntary and the argument went on for five minutes or so. Meanwhile a manager came into the room and wrote on the white board behind him a list of names for a new QC. Another worker said ‘Well, does anyone know who is a member of this new QC?’. Then he responded triumphantly: ‘Well my name won’t be there because I haven’t been consulted.’ Much to the amusement of everyone, except him, he found his name at the top of the list. There were no QCs at BursaText1 or BursaText2 and there never have been. But at both plants managers planned to introduce QCs within the space of one or two years. There are QCs in all the other plants. The number of QCs varies. In BoluWG QCs were first introduced in the early 1990s and there were over 15 set up in 1998. In GebzeWG there had been QCs since the mid-1980s and over 14 had been set up in 1998. At GebzeCar QCs had been set up when the plant went into production

Table 5.6

Quality circles and their characteristics, by plant

Plant

Management Team Duration Number Team Team leader Team QC Management Team (months) of QCs at size spokesman spokesman originates from leader appoints time of team elected team leader from shop management fieldwork floor

BoluWG

Yes Yes

Some

Some

Yes

GebzeWG

Yes Yes

Some

Some

Yes

Yes

Yes

4–6

4–6

15

Yes

Yes

4–6

4–6

14

To restart

CerkWG GebzeCar

Yes Yes

Some

Some

Yes

Yes

Yes

4–6

4–6

9

BursaCar

Yes Yes

Some

Some

Yes

Yes

Yes

4–6

4–6

72

BursaText1 No BursaText2 No

115

116 The World of TQM

in 1997 and there were nine in operation in 1999, the management then planning to set up 27 new ones that would cover a quarter of the labour force. At BursaCar QCs were introduced as early as 1984. There were 72 of them in 2000. The number of QCs differs between plants but in several other respects there are similarities. The QCs usually consist of four to six people and last from four to six months. Each QC is organised by a team leader appointed by management. The team has a ‘spokesman’ whom they elect who is a channel of communication with the team leader outside QC meetings. Not all workers are involved in QCs. They largely consist of more skilled and experienced workers. But there are more significant limitations than this. QCs operate by workers responding to management agendas, making their suggestions and by management unilaterally deciding what to do. QCs are particularly pronounced in the car companies, especially GebzeCar. But there is not much to choose between GebzeWG, CerkWG, GebzeCar and BursaCar as exemplars of the application of modern management methods in Turkish manufacturing and in all of these companies, QCs are a top-down affair.

Suggestion schemes Suggestion schemes did not exist at either of the textile plants but each of them planned to introduce one in 2002. At BursaText1 there had once been a scheme but it had been abandoned. As the HRM manager reflected: Some time ago, we did try to start a suggestion system but it didn’t work. Before you introduce the suggestion system, you must train your labour force about TQM and then you should expect some response from them. Without this, workers won’t be willing to make suggestions. First of all, you must provide an atmosphere, and then you can expect workers to make positive steps forward. All the car and white goods plants had schemes. At BursaCar, for example, a codified set of conditions required amongst other things that suggestions had to directly or indirectly reduce the cost of production, be capable of implementation within eight weeks, reduce the time taken for a specific work task, make best use of shop floor space, provide $2500 of material benefit to the company and improve things by at least 50 per cent. If the suggestion proved successful points were awarded. The points could then be converted into money or into a number of rewards in kind, like football match tickets and electrical household goods. Certificates were also awarded.

TQM from Above 117

The other white goods and car plants followed much the same path, with rules of different complexity and usually with a balance of rewards in cash and kind (though one manager seriously assured us that ‘money is too cold’). At CerkWG the scheme was slightly different. In an attempt to avoid the individualism commonly built into such schemes (which several managers themselves reflected cut across the attempt to foster teamwork) the management had introduced a rule that workers who made suggestions with up to two others gained additional points. Generally however suggestion schemes were prominently advertised in all the plants that had them. Notice boards displayed monthly information on suggestions submitted, outcomes and reasons for acceptance. Some managers spoke enthusiastically about the whole process of making suggestions. According to the GebzeCar HRM manager, for example: In order to reach a certain level of quality, you must take everybody with you and work for it. This is what these new management methods are all about. These methods make everybody responsible for producing quality goods. Now, not only managers and engineers but also workers have the responsibility to produce cars at the highest quality. Now, 500 people have the same responsibility. Our people not only try to improve their products but also the conditions under which they work. Then, the motivation of our workers is enhanced at work. This improvement includes things from the most comfortable and efficient position of a person’s table or chair, to the tidiness of the refectory. Everybody has got something to say about the improvement of all these things. We don’t order things from above. In general, we expect these things to come from below. They forward their own suggestions about everything to us. Then, we think about their suggestions and consider whether these changes will improve things at the company or not. Such a philosophy was not commonly recognised by workers. In all of the plants where schemes existed, there are stories, usually non-specific, about managers and engineers refusing suggestions and then later gaining the credit for themselves. True or not, these do not betoken enhanced motivation. Nor should unstinted co-operation be expected from workers for they are subject to several cross-cutting pulls. Grateful to have a job with the company, they are not necessarily appreciative of the way they are treated, as this account from a worker at CerkWG makes clear:

118 The World of TQM

It is the best company in which to get a job in this area. The company pays our wages regularly and on time, which is not the case for most companies around here. I am glad that the Germans took the company over. Since then, we have had new machines, which make our work much easier. I mean it takes less physical effort to do the same work. But the Germans have speeded up the pace of the work. And we have some other problems in the company. For example, the Germans failed to or did not want to change the attitudes of the Turkish managers towards us in this company. Our managers still have superior attitudes towards us and have little respect for us. When you have disdainful managers, you don’t feel like making constructive suggestions or share ideas that could be very useful to them. For example, Cevat Bey [manager], he is typical of these managers and I would never, ever offer suggestions about improvements to production [to him]. I know that we are all human beings, so anybody can make mistakes. But this rule does not apply where Cevat Bey is concerned. When he is there, nobody is allowed to make any mistakes. If you make a mistake, at best he shouts at you, if you make a second mistake he curses your mother. If you make a third mistake, you are out. One thing he really hates is if you don’t look him in the eye when he balls at you. If you don’t, you may be in trouble. If you pretend to listen to him, but instead look around as if you were ignoring him, you are finished. You must listen to him and look him in the eye no matter whether he is cursing your mother or not. The behaviour of some managers is the opposite of that which might be expected to elicit high commitment from employees and may play some part in the generally weak performance of suggestion schemes as judged by some international standards. In the plants that have schemes, suggestions run at roughly less than one per employee per year. This falls very considerably short of Japanese rates (Kaplinsky and Posthuma 1994). In 1989 for example Toyota claimed 35 suggestions per employee per year worldwide (Winfield 1994: 49, 32). Possibly this judgement is a little harsh. For example, at BursaCar a suggestion scheme introduced to about 2500 workers elicited 1232 suggestions made by 985 employees and 1012 or 82 per cent of them were accepted. This represented about 1000 ideas for improvement that management might not otherwise have had. An indirect comment on the effectiveness of these schemes is to be found in Table 5.7. The table shows that workers in textiles, where there were no such specific schemes in operation, were almost as likely to say

TQM from Above 119 Table 5.7 What would you do if you found a way to do your job that was easier or faster than the specified way? (%)

Keep it to myself Share with only a few co-workers Tell the team leader Make a suggestion

White goods N = 153

Cars N = 100

Textiles N = 103

All N = 356

12 8

42 7

13 12

21 9

31

26

18

26

48

25

58

45

that they would make suggestions to management as white goods workers and more likely to do so than car workers both of whom work in industries in which all the plants favoured such schemes (and in all of which managements conducted ‘open door meetings’).2 By contrast – and rather remarkably, when set against the important stress on such schemes at the GebzeCar plant – 56 per cent of workers at GebzeCar said that if they found a way to do their job that was easier or quicker they would keep it to themselves. This was twice the proportion for the next highest plant, BursaCar (at 28 per cent), and compared to an average for all seven plants of 21 per cent. As noted before, in some respects Turkish workers in these plants have benefited from their firms not following what is sometimes considered to be leading edge management practice. The overwhelming majority of the direct production workers in all of these plants are permanent rather than temporary. They have not been replaced with agency workers and nor have significant parts of the labour force been exported to contractors outside the factory who operate on tight margins and offer low wages and poor conditions. If some of the management textbooks were to be believed, workers should also be grateful for the fact that TQM is central to the way that these companies operate, most especially in the white goods and car sectors, and that the textile plants are in the process of catching up with this. To some degree they are grateful. When workers look at Turkish industry in general they see communication between management and workers to be a significant problem. Many managers take the same view. And there are managers in these factories, and not only foreign ones, who would like to see a shift away from the top-down method of doing things, both in Turkish industry as a whole and by way of further

120 The World of TQM

developments in their own plants. Yet even though these plants are generally regarded by workers as doing more to acknowledge their existence than is generally the case outside the joint venture and big corporate sectors, the main emphasis within them is on a ‘hard’ rather than ‘soft’ form of TQM. Writing of maquiladora factories in Mexico, Helper (1995: 270–71) coined the phrase ‘Kaizen from above’ to capture the practice of management in that country. ‘TQM from above’ would seem to fit the Turkish case very well. It is to a further exploration of how the situation looks from the shop floor that we now turn. In doing so, it should be remembered that even in the American factory studies by Milkman, where employees definitely were subjected to a ‘soft’ approach, workers who emerged from the training programme expecting things to change on the shop floor were ‘deeply disappointed’ (1997: 169). As we have seen, in the Turkish plants the management approach was by no means of the ‘soft’ rather than ‘hard’ variety.

Notes 1. Amongst other things it should be noted that training generally was cut back during the economic crisis of 2000 and 2001. 2. At BoluWG this process has extended to managers sometimes taking their lunch with workers. The HRM manager points out that in recent years there have been more attempts to actively involve workers, and explains: We need to know what problems we face in the production process. Without workers’ participation, engineers and managers do not recognise problems on the line. Thus, open door meetings are organised twice a week. We eat our lunch with ten blue-collar workers on each occasion. But everything they say about either production or their current problems including the things outside production can become an issue on the agenda. For instance they demanded an ambulance. We said all right to them and then bought one. Workers told us that the workplace was cold. So, we put automatic doors at the hangar entrance. They asked us to provide better work clothes and we provided them with jeans. Now they wear blue jeans and Lacoste T-shirts.

6 The View from Below

Accounts of the recent development of the world economy are generally in agreement that a turning point occurred at the end of the 1960s/ early 1970s which marked the end of the long boom that followed the Second World War. Brenner for example argues that a long downturn ensued from falling profitability which stemmed from competition between the major capitalist powers of the United States, Germany and Japan as the products of the latter two began to penetrate the American market, this leading to a lowering of margins and, by virtue of lower profitability, a decline in investment (Brenner 1998). This process affected advanced capitalist economies differently but it was generally the case that a heightened concern about profitability, allied to the opportunity afforded by the weakening of labour through increased unemployment, brought about increased interest in the ways in which labour could be managed. More or less coincident with this, there arose in the 1970s a concern among manufacturers about the rise of Japan, and most especially about the Japanese car industry, a concern variously expressed by social scientists in writings about ‘Japanisation’ and ‘Toyotaism’. Japan doubled its automobile production in the 1970s and by 1980 had become the leading automobile producer. In the first decades of the century (and indeed later, and especially after the Second World War) businessmen from Europe had flocked to the United States to discover the secret of that country’s success in production. In the 1970s and 1980s, as Dohse et al. (1985) observe, car makers made tracks for Japan. From this time the introduction of modern management methods into North American and European factories, both within and beyond the car industry was very often referred to in a quite non-specific way as a process of ‘Japanisation’. 121

122 The World of TQM

Dohse and his colleagues have distinguished two broad approaches to the explanation of Japan’s greater manufacturing success. The first approach is the Cultural one. This stresses the quasi-feudal nature of Japanese social relations and the group orientation of the Japanese, which amongst other things are held to contribute to a greater identification with the company and higher work morale. Although this approach lingers on, it has tended to be overtaken by interpretations that put more stress on the supposed philosophy of Japanese management, and Dohse et al. distinguish two main variants of this: the Human Relations approach and the Production Control approach. The Human Relations approach emphasises the importance of the creative involvement of employees in production. The tendency with this approach is to read off differences from a real or supposed Fordist template. According to this, Fordist workers used to perform standardised, specialised tasks which were rigidly defined. They were not encouraged to use their initiative and creativity, and they were fearful of their jobs. Quality circles and lifetime employment in Japan are then assumed to make workers in that country more trustful, more committed and more part of the production process. The Production Control approach puts the focus, not on the participation of the worker but on the manufacturing techniques practised by the management. Following Schonberger (1982) the view is rejected that the key to Japanese success was going beyond Taylorism to adopt a more humanistic approach. As Dohse et al. assert, Toyotaism is not different from Fordism in its goal but in the way in which the goal is achieved. The removal of buffer stocks in the JIT system has a parallel in the continuous improvement and labour intensification that workers are exhorted to impose on themselves. The precondition for this was not the presence of some quasi-feudal culture of acceptance but the defeat of militant trade unionism after the Second World War and the channelling of unionism into plant or company unions. On this view: Toyotaism is not a basic alternative to Fordism; it is simply the practice of the organisational principles of Fordism under conditions in which management prerogatives are largely unlimited. The interpretation of Toyotaism by Wood (1993) is in line with the above. Preferring the term ‘neo-Fordism’ to capture some recent developments, Wood nicely points out that the notion Toyotaism is characterised by worker autonomy fails to recognise certain important features of the Japanese context and the retention of power by management, and that a fixation with the idea that ‘flexibility’ is incompatible with Fordism overlooks that the system could be highly flexible, a capacity

The View from Below 123

engendered by the short training times that meant workers could be readily replaced. Wood also makes the obvious point – but a highly effective one – that it does not follow that workers’ tasks have been transformed simply because they are involved in QCs, use Pareto charts or brainstorming techniques. Because Toyotaism has attempted to overcome problems associated with Fordism without necessarily making changes in the fundamental work process, he argues, workers can indeed go to QCs and then return to their Taylorised jobs – or even return to jobs more successfully Taylorised as a consequence of their work in the QC. Very similar points can be made about the relation between Fordism and TQM generally. TQM is a feature of Japanisation in the West, and increasingly in developing countries and, as we have seen, it can have both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ aspects, our own supposition being that the ‘hard’ form will usually be the predominant one, and that this is indeed the case in Turkey. A key reason for the success of Womack et al.’s study The Machine That Changed the World (1990), which was based on research conducted in the International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP), is that it claimed there had been an astonishing advance on the hard and soft fronts simultaneously. Lean Production made possible production with ‘less of everything’. Yet it was also claimed to have made workers glad of it: Lean production is a superior way for humans to make things. It provides better products in wider variety at lower cost. Equally important, it provides more challenging and fulfilling work for employees at every level . . . It follows that the whole world should adopt lean production, as quickly as possible (Womack et al. 1990: 225). From the mid-1980s the introduction into North America of Japanese owned car plants – so-called ‘transplants’ – and Japanese joint ventures has stirred considerable interest in the effects of the pursuit of lean production and total quality on workers. An account by Besser of Toyota’s transplant car factory, which opened at Kentucky in 1989, provided a highly positive picture (Besser 1996). By contrast, the account provided by Rinehart and his colleagues of CAMI, a Suzuki and FM joint venture that opened at Ingersoll, Ontario the same year is highly critical (Rinehart et al. 1997). As matters stand now, some of the leading proponents of such production systems for workers’ quality of life, such as Kenney and Florida (1988, 1993) have encountered strong criticism (Dassbach 1996) and since the mid-1980s the list of critical studies has continued to lengthen in both North America and

124 The World of TQM

Europe (Parker and Slaughter 1988a, b; Garrahan and Stewart 1992; Graham 1993; Danford 1999). There is much that could be said about this growing literature. Is there really lifetime employment in Japan? Precisely what is supposed to be new about lean production? How extensive was Fordism as a shop floor production system? Are Japanese workers really committed? It is not our intention to examine these questions here. Another issue is worth raising however. This is that much research into HRM, TQM and other management techniques has been based on individual case studies. Compared to those who have material only from a single case study, we are fortunate to have data from seven plants in three industries. This not only permits an examination of workers’ views in more than one plant, it permits an examination of circumstances where modern management methods have been introduced to different degrees. The difference between white goods and cars on the one hand and textiles on the other has some relevance here but as will be seen this is not the whole story. How then do the workers in our seven plants view such methods? We begin by making a comparison of differences between the plants and in particular with the question of how workers evaluate the ‘climate’ of these plants, that is, the relation between management and employees.

Workers’ evaluation of ‘climate’ in the plants To assess ‘climate’, we asked workers ‘In general, how would you describe relations between workers and managers here?’ Figure 6.1 has the virtue of being easily intelligible when set against the diagrammatic presentation of the relation between plant and level of modernity in management set out in Figure 4.1. It presents the results of each plant for the combined ‘good’ and ‘very good’ categories for ‘climate’. These data demonstrate some pronounced plant differences but they are far from providing a neat demonstration of the effectiveness of modern management methods. Most noticeably, BursaText2, which is the least developed plant in terms of management method, scores higher than any of the four plants in the top line, which are the most advanced in terms of method, BoluWG, which also lags somewhat behind them in management method, also has considerably higher ratings than any of them do. These particular results make it very difficult to maintain that modern management methods have made for the best climate in the most advanced plants. The high ratings for climate at BursaText2 and BoluWG

The View from Below 125

BursaCar GebzeCar CerkWG GebzeWG BursaText1 +

48

40

60

49

49

Modern management

BoluWG 90

– BursaText2 78

– Figure 6.1

Level of technology

+

The seven plants and climate percentage ‘good’ and ‘very good’.

underline that the way workers view working in these factories is not only a function of their exposure to particular modern management techniques. It can also be a function of other management practices and dispositions and, beyond these, of other particular economic conditions, relative labour market opportunities and expectations. A number of features that might conventionally be considered in order to account for the high ratings for ‘climate’ by BoluWG and BursaText2 workers are presented in Table 6.1 – interest and skill in the job, training, perceived job influence, job security and pay. To consider the case of workers at BoluWG first, is to see that they are no more likely to be satisfied with the interest and skill in their jobs than workers in the other two plants in the white goods industry. Indeed, they are among the least satisfied in this respect out of all the plants and they clearly believe that their jobs require little skill. Asked how long it normally takes before new workers can perform the job as well as experienced workers, four out of ten of them estimated that it took two weeks or less. There was no other plant in which workers produced such a low estimation of the skill required. Although BoluWG workers are not skilled they are more likely to claim a lot of influence over the range of tasks in their job than workers

126

Table 6.1

BoluWG and BursaText2 compared to other plants on various criteria GebzeWG

CerkWG

GebzeCar

BursaCar

BursaText1

BursaText2

All

76

89

78

76

84

81

90

80

40

17

10

16

20

15

20

20

42 32 48

49 45 49

10 26 20

14 14 14

18 26 24

0 2 4

0 0 0

19 21 23

78

34

28

52

32

47

64

48

100

74

56

22

78

49

18

57

BoluWG Interest and skill in the job % satisfied or very satisfied How long to learn the job % 2 weeks or less Perceived job influence % ‘a lot’ Range of tasks in the job Pace of work How to do work Job is secure % very satisfied or satisfied Pay % very satisfied or satisfied

The View from Below 127

in most other plants. They are also more likely than workers in most other plants to claim a lot of influence over their pace of work and how work is done. Part of the reason that BoluWG workers rate their plant’s ‘climate’ so highly may therefore be that they have a reasonable degree of job influence for relatively unskilled workers. However, of key importance is what BoluWG workers’ jobs offer them compared to what they can expect elsewhere in their area. The salience of the local labour market to how BoluWG workers view their jobs is underlined by their exceptionally high satisfaction with the security of their jobs and their unanimous verdict that they are satisfied with their pay. They live in an area where there are no comparable sources of work and where to work for a big company spells relative security. These workers are in fact no more secure than those at the other white goods or car plants but they clearly feel that their jobs are secure compared to other jobs they might do. This belief is reinforced by the expectations of others in their community. Working for their big company – the only big company with a plant in the area – means that all the benefits associated with working in the big corporate sector take on an added significance – the regular pay, social security rights, credit in the local shops and the rest of it. In many ways, large and small, to work for BoluWG means an escape from the insecurity suffered by other manual workers in the area. The pay rates at BoluWG are no better in the other white goods plants or car plants. In fact BoluWG workers are subject to the very same collective bargaining agreement that applies to workers at GebzeWG, CerkWG and BursaCar (the pay rises for which are also copied by GebzeCar). But BoluWG workers gain additional benefit in two ways. First, they are older and generally have longer service and thus more seniority pay. Second, other things being equal, the agreement gives workers at all these plants the same pay, but it favours those at BoluWG since they live in an area where the cost of living is considerably lower. BoluWG constitutes a micro-zone of further advantage for workers employed in the large corporate sector, compared to those employed in the Izmit triangle itself. There is nothing fixed about the BoluWG workers’ position of course, which could be undermined by the termination of the industry-wide agreement. But the local advantages that BoluWG workers enjoy go a considerable way to explain their more positive stance towards their plant and its management. There is a further relevant factor. As was reported earlier, management at BoluWG has traditionally had a paternalist side. Among other things, this has meant that it has provided a coffee house for workers in the town and buses to take

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them to Friday prayers, that it has arranged picnics and even arranged for the circumcision of their male children. Although change was underway these practices were still in evidence at the time these workers were interviewed (later, both the picnics and the circumcisions ceased. Neither change was well received by workers). The reasons for the high average rating of ‘climate’ at BursaText2 are rather different. As can be seen from Table 6.1, the workers in this plant are most certainly not happy about their pay and they very definitely are not convinced that they have a lot of influence. Not one single worker who we interviewed at BursaText2 claimed a lot of influence with respect to the range of tasks in the job or pace of work or how work was done. Yet they rated the plant’s ‘climate’ highly. Moreover, as will be seen shortly, they were the most likely to rate management at their plant highly for the way it treated employees. There are those who might look to particular personal characteristics to explain the BursaText2 workers’, relatively generous estimates of their plant’s ‘climate’ and of their management. For example it might be thought significant that 54 per cent of these workers were women. Whether there is any inherent logic in such an attempted explanation is dubious. But in the context of this investigation it runs into a particular difficulty. There were even more women in the other textile firm (79 per cent) and ‘climate’ for that plant was rated less highly. BursaText2 did not recognise a trade union and this might be considered a more promising line of interpretation. This could only be so, however, provided it was not assumed these workers were anti-union and pro-management, as if by original sin (because they had in fact once had a union). The truth about BursaText2 is rather different than an interpretation that stressed either the importance of gender or of a lack of trade unionism might imply. Of central importance is that a process of selection has occurred that biases the present labour force towards management. As noted already, they, like some of their managers had sometimes been brought in by the owner from his home town in the Black Sea region. BursaText2 workers were under no illusion that their pay was good enough, but many of them felt close to the paternalist owner and they also felt relatively secure. An additional factor as far as their feeling of security is concerned is that the fieldwork took place in winter 2000 and January 2001. This was at a time when the textile industry as a whole was suffering badly. Many of these workers’ friends, neighbours and families in Bursa had lost their jobs or had not been paid for months or were searching unsuccessfully for work. But for reasons explained earlier, BursaText2 was actually taking on labour.

The View from Below 129

Consideration of the BoluWG and BursaText2 cases reminds us that workers’ attitudes and behaviour in the different plants are a function of more than the extent to which modern management is practised and that an important role is played by the local context and, related to this, worker expectations. What, though, about ‘management-by-stress’, a term sometimes used to describe the mode of operation and the consequences of TQM and its near relative, Lean Production (Parker and Slaughter 1995)?

Management-by-stress For workers, one important element of management practice is whether work is organised in such a way as to make them work very hard. We therefore asked workers whether their job required them to work very hard. About 13 per cent of all workers strongly agreed that it did but the results for the individual plants make interesting reading when considered in terms of the schematic diagram in Figure 6.1. The plants in the top line of this figure are those with the most advanced management methods. These are the very plants in which workers are most likely to report that their jobs make them work very hard. At GebzeWG 19 per cent strongly agreed that their jobs made them work very hard, at CerkWG 18 per cent, at GebzeCar 16 per cent and at BursaCar 20 per cent. At BoluWG where management methods were less modern only 12 per cent strongly agreed that their job made them work very hard. In the plants where modern management methods were still in the process of being instituted, the percentages were yet lower, at two per cent for both BursaText1 and BursaText2. Such results are of course in keeping with the views of those critics who argue that modern management methods actually do amount to management-by-stress. This is a fitting description of the GebzeWG and CerkWG white goods plants and of the two car plants. From the point of view of the managers in these plants the pursuit of ever-decreasing defects is an unproblematic and logical business. As a line manager at CerkWG explained: Our industrial engineers calculate how much time is needed to do a certain task by how many workers in the production department. So, if the workers do their work in the specified time, there is no problem. For instance, if you produce 400 fridges in a shift and if 400 fridges are passed through the band, if the worker doesn’t make any

130 The World of TQM

mistakes, it means the work is going well. The defective products always return at quality checkpoints and we record these statistically. For example, we have nearly 250 error definitions. We are actually in a position to know where those errors are coming from and who is responsible. Since, everybody has got his own tasks; we can easily address it to the person who has erred. In this plant, it’s always easy to know who makes a mistake and where the mistakes come from. Everybody can make mistakes once or twice, but if he’s continuously making mistakes, it means that he is no good for us. I mean, if they accurately do their work without stopping the conveyor at the speed that we determine and are careful enough to reduce defects, these workers will have no problem in here at all. But for workers, just doing the work with ‘no problem in here at all’ is itself a problem. In the words of a worker at GebzeWG: They monitor each worker’s performance by counting each piece produced in a specified production time. For instance, they calculate each production step by computer. They ask you to do a certain task in 23 seconds. At first you can do it in that time. And you may continue to do it in 23 seconds over a two- or three-hour period. Then, you get tried. But they pressure you to carry on this performance over an eight-hour shift non-stop. I am a human being. I am not a machine or a robot. I can get tried. How can a human being perform the same task within 23 seconds over a stretch of eight hours? A machine may not get tried, it doesn’t have a human body like mine. I cannot work at the same speed for eight hours. You cannot calculate the production time of a worker as if he was a machine. He is neither a machine nor a robot. He is a human who can get tried. Most of the time at work I feel exhausted. We cannot work like a robot. When we tell this to our managers, they get very angry with us. They say workers must do a job in 23 seconds. But I am not a robot. In all the plants, workers can be held accountable for any defects discovered by customers. In some of the plants workers are monitored by electronic links between their work stations and a central computer. At GebzeWG workers who fail to complete their tasks in the prescribed time are warned of this by an alarm, which also alerts management via the central computer system. Workers know that managers can monitor their performance in this way and in some plants they know, too, that managers can do this from their homes. As a worker at GebzeWG

The View from Below 131

reflected: ‘in the middle of the night, when you are on the night shift, after all the managers have gone home, you are still there to be watched over’. Again, all this seems very straightforward from the managers’ point of view. As a BoluWG manager pointed out: Employees can see all the necessary information for themselves on the monitors. A worker on the lid-line, for example, can find out all he needs to know from the monitor, such as what sort of front-lids will be produced, what sort of rim should be used, and the product colour. A worker can learn from the screen what he should do and what components should be added to the product. From the screens in the computer room, we can monitor the amount produced by the employee. The reason why we are doing this is because we want to know if and when there is a problem in any department. The pursuit of quality and the need not to create defects is one source of pressure. The imperative that the line must not stop is another. As a team leader at BursaCar explained: There is a strict rule at BursaCar: the conveyor can’t and won’t stop. Our biggest problem is to keep the line going at all times. Line workers are generally unable to leave the line unless another worker stands in for them or they work yet faster and get ahead of the line in order to win a brief respite. In fact, relatively good as the physical conditions in the white goods and car plants may be as far as light, ventilation and so on are concerned, workers in all the plants are reminded daily that the work they do drains them. Eighty four per cent of workers thought it not likely or not at all possible that they could keep up the pace of their current job when they were 60.1 Management-by-stress also means stress for managers and increasingly for other white-collar workers. Managers are driven to meet deadlines on projects and white-collar workers can be the subject of monitoring. At BoluWG for example recent changes in the management system have been accompanied by the introduction of a ‘360 degree’ performance measurement scheme for white-collar workers. They input information about their work tasks into a computer and their performance is measured accordingly – full completion of tasks is awarded with 360 degrees, lesser performance with 300, 250 or 175 degrees. A feature

132 The World of TQM

of the system is that people can access the computer to access the degrees attained by others and thus, as the management sees it, better assess their own performance. Sometimes the idea that modern management is management-bystress leads to the further idea that things are getting progressively worse, continuous improvement in production efficiency meaning continuous deterioration in the worker’s own position. In order to investigate this possibility, workers with five or more year’s service were asked whether stress had got better or worse over the last five years.2 About half or more workers in all plants, except BoluWG, claimed stress to have got worse, with generally lower proportions saying that workload had also got worse (Table 6.2). The lower proportions for workload makes sense since, as several workers told us, although pressure to work had increased, mechanisation and automation had removed some of the physical labour. However, Table 6.2 brings to light something that would have remained hidden had we conducted a study of only plants with the most modern techniques (as many investigators have done). Namely, that stress and workload tended to increase more outside the most advanced plants – in the textile sector. The emphasis in contemporary social science on stress increasing in companies that practise modern management techniques sometimes distracts attention from other realities – that, in many respects, things can be worse in other companies. This is confirmed from another direction in the lower part of the table with reference to changes perceived by workers in their chances of influencing decisions. Workers in the white goods and car plants were more likely to report that their chances of influencing decisions had improved. Of course things can improve to a greater or lesser degree and in Turkish industry, improvement in influencing decisions has to be judged

Table 6.2

Changes over the last five years (%) Bolu WG

Gebze WG

Cerk WG

Gebze Car

Bursa Car

Bursa Text1

Bursa Text2

Worse Stress Workload

28 23

48 31

57 39

68 58

51 64

89 73

73 41

Better Decisions

80

74

78

84

87

39

32

The View from Below 133

against a low starting point. In a historical context in which workers have been subject to a considerable weight of bureaucratic control, even relatively small changes can be experienced as improvements. This said, there is evidence here that three quarters or more of workers in white goods and cars felt that their chances of making decisions had improved.

Commitment and compliance In the social science literature the distinction between compliance and commitment goes back at least forty years to Etzioni’s work on complex organisations. In developing a schema for the relationship between types of power and involvement Etzioni made it very plain that compliance could take several forms. Among other things it could be moral (a positive orientation of high intensity, which signified commitment), or it could be calculative (Etzioni 1961: 12). More recently, further interest in what is now generally referred to as commitment and compliance has been generated by comparisons between Japanese and American workers (Cole 1979; Lincoln and Kallenberg 1990). For a considerable time interest in commitment/compliance has been further fuelled by the desire to know if modern management methods such as TQM and Lean Production have brought about in America and Europe the higher degree of commitment that supposedly characterised them when they were applied in Japan. In the early 1990s Rinehart and his colleagues investigated this matter in a particularly revealing manner in their longitudinal study of CAMI Automotive, a GM and Suzuki joint venture car plant in Canada. Rather than take a snapshot, Rinehart and his colleagues asked workers a standard set of questions and then followed up with three further rounds of enquiries (1997: 171). They found clear evidence of a continuous decline in workers who reported themselves ‘enthusiastic’ and ‘excited’ about management’s programme (44 per cent did so in round one; 33 per cent in round two; 18 per cent in round three; and only 13 per cent in round four). This suggests that there is reason to be on one’s guard against some of the more dramatic claims about what new management methods actually signify for worker commitment, especially if they derive from studies conducted early on in their implementation, which they often are. Yet it is not only the sellers of management prescriptions – the consultants, writers of management books and other wholesalers and retailers of ideas – who are in danger of exaggerating the impact of new management methods on workers’ commitment. Some radical theorists

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may also be in danger of exaggerating their consequences. In Europe the writing of Andre Gorz is a case in point. In his discussion of ‘the latest forms of work’ in Japan, the United States and Britain, Gorz argues that capital applies certain post-Taylorist principles only where it can be sure that it has ‘forearmed itself against the autonomous use by workers of the limited power conceded to them’. Firms take on workers who are young, carefully selected with no trade union past and offer them An identity derived from the ‘corporate culture’, the symbolism of which is developed by each firm at a number of different levels: the company’s own brand of vocational training; a specific in-house vocabulary and style of behaviour; a distinctive code of dress, to some degree approaching the company uniform favoured in Japan (Gorz 1999: 37). As Gorz sees it, the full horror of this is that workers’ relationship to the company and to the corporate work collective becomes the only social bond: It absorbs all the workers’ energy and mobilizes their whole person, thus storing up the danger for them of a total loss of self-worth if they were one day no longer to deserve the confidence of the firm and the consideration of their fellow team-members, both of which are earned by indefinitely improving their performance (Gorz 1999: 37, italics in original). Some of this account is recognisable in Turkey. In all of the plants, for example, there can be no doubt that the power conceded to workers is limited. And several aspects of work, most especially at the Japanese owned GebzeCar, tally with elements of Gorz’s description. Everyone at GebzeCar does wear the same uniform. There is an in-house vocabulary, including the attempt to develop a sense of belonging to a ‘corporate culture’ by calling workers ‘associates’. Then again the workers are young. They are carefully selected so that those with militant trade union histories or affiliations with political Islam do not get in – not if management knows about them anyway. But if workers at GebzeCar and the other factories gain a certain respect from other people for having such jobs, and perhaps a certain feeling of self-worth, this is not the only thing that they value about working there. As we saw in Chapter 1, there are fundamental considerations of a practical kind that inform

The View from Below 135

their thinking as well. As Ahmet, a young married worker at BursaCar who we met in that chapter explained, he could marry the girl of his choice because the job brought with it a ‘reasonable living’ and becoming a ‘proper man with a proper job’ meant not only respect but credit – the reference here to ‘credit’ being to the financial sort, the sort needed to buy commodities. As for the loss of such jobs threatening a total loss of self-worth, again there is something in this. At the very least, the loss of such jobs is a major lifetime event, a trauma that lives in the memory. Mehmet, another young car worker at BursaCar knows all about this. The firm sacked him a few years ago. He remembers everything that happened in considerable detail and he is worth listening to at some length because his story puts the generalities about ‘corporate culture’ in its place – which is to say in the context of his life as he has lived it: The day before BursaCar announced the dismissal of 1000 workers, everybody in the plant got very anxious. Nobody knew who would be dismissed. I couldn’t sleep till morning. My wife kept telling me that I was going to be one of those workers to be dismissed because I had only worked there for just over a year. She told me that it would be better if I was prepared for it. I said ‘No’. I thought that they had no reason to sack me since I had always done my work as instructed. Why should they sack me? I hardly slept till morning. I woke up very early and didn’t have any breakfast. On the BursaCar bus service, everybody was silent and looked depressed. When we arrived at BursaCar, we went to our workplaces and started working as usual. Throughout the shift, I was unable to concentrate on my work along with the rest of my workmates. At the end of the shift, we went to the changing room to take off our uniforms. Then, our team leader came in and told us that there was a dismissal list stuck on the wall in the main entrance. This is where we usually catch the buses to go home after the shift. When we arrived there, I saw policemen and security men in front of the plant. My legs began shaking. I was asking myself the question ‘Is my name on the list or not?’ When we got closer to the gate at the main entrance, some of my workmates were in front of me, passing through the security line where the dismissal list was stuck on the wall. I saw some of them faint after they saw their names on the list and some of them were shouting and swearing at the management. Those who kept their jobs were very happy. But they were trying to disguise their happiness and consoling

136 The World of TQM

those who had lost their jobs. The police took some of my workmates to the police buses, on the grounds that they were demonstrating illegally. I was in the queue to go through the security line. When I got there, I looked at the list and saw my name. I just couldn’t believe my eyes. I was shocked. I didn’t scream but said to my friend by me ‘May Allah damn those who gave my name for dismissal!’. I just felt so poor, weak and fragile. My friends were consoling me. I felt like crying at that time but controlled myself. You know, even when I lost my father, I wasn’t so close to crying. I began to ask myself questions, like ‘What have I done wrong to get dismissed?’ ‘Have I deserved this?’ ‘I gave everything to this company, why am I on the list?’. I didn’t cause any trouble and within five minutes I was calmer and got on the bus. I sat down and looked at the BursaCar car plant through the window. I said to myself ‘Allah is great BursaCar! Allah is great! I won’t let myself down and I will survive in this city!’. Then the bus left the plant. I began thinking ‘How am I going to tell my wife?’ On reaching my neighbourhood I got off the bus and went home. Then, you know there was a bit of emotion, tears and consolation at home. You know, my wife was great at easing my pain. I really appreciate her.

But to listen to Mehmet a little longer is to learn something more. For later, Mehmet went back to BursaCar:

After that I began working in a textile company where I was earning only a third of my salary at BursaCar. After a few months, we found it very difficult to survive on what I earned from the textile company, we were also spending my compensation. I soon realised that BursaCar was, in comparison, a great place to work. After a year, BursaCar began recruiting workers again. They gave priority to those of us who had lost their jobs a year ago. After a week, I received a letter from BursaCar inviting me to start working there once again if I would like to. When I lost my job a year before I swore that I would never work in BursaCar again, but I had no choice so I started working there the very next day. How could I refuse to work at BursaCar?

The View from Below 137

‘How,’ Mehmet asked, ‘could I refuse to work at BursaCar?’ And how indeed could he? Only by depriving himself and his family of their most basic material needs. ‘Ekmegimizi buradan kazaniyoruz’ say the workers (‘This is where we earn our bread’). Never mind Mehmet’s relationship to the corporate work collective becoming his only social bond – his other ‘social bonds’ – to the wife he appreciated so much, to his family – these other aspects of his ‘whole person’ meant that, in comparison to what was on offer elsewhere, BursaCar was indeed ‘a great firm’. When he was sacked, Mehmet asked himself the questions that millions of workers have asked: ‘Why me?’ ‘What have I done wrong?’ But to assume that he reacted like this because working at BursaCar had mobilised his whole person – because he has ingested the corporate culture and because he was committed to it – is to take a step too far. Whatever workers’ first impressions of the physical working conditions, and whatever the material benefits, the day to day experience of factory life can soon lower expectations. Arif is a case in point. In the beginning Arif was quite clear that working at CerkWG was, as we saw in Chapter 1, ‘really something’ and ‘the best job you can get here’. Ask him about actually working in CerkWG and whether it turned out as he had expected and he explains that things are not so simple. On the one side, he says, there is ‘the villager’s point of view’. On the other side, there is being inside the plant, and inside the plant his relationship to the company is far from mobilising his whole person – in fact, as with many millions of workers in other countries and at other times, when he is in the plant his ‘identity’ resides elsewhere: It is a difficult question to answer. From the villager’s point of view, I got what I expected. But when you talk together inside the plant, I can’t say that I got what I expected. First of all, you do the same work over and over again and it gets very boring. You may find it funny but I usually dream when I am at work. My mind dreams things that have got nothing to do with the work. I dream about my childhood, I dream I’m walking through a nice green valley, swimming in a blue, clean sea and flying like a bird over the clouds. Otherwise, I could easily go mad at work. Of course you can’t live in a dream all the time. Reality is there and you must get on with it. The reality in the plant is that my work is boring, managers are scolding and you are dreaming. The task is very repetitive. Managers expect us to work like robots. But we are not robots, we are human beings. Engineers seem to calculate each work task. So it is really very difficult to create spare time for smoking or to have a joke with your workmate next to you.

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Managers monitor us very closely. You know, in meetings they tell us that they believe us and rely on us to achieve targets. But after that they monitor us in such a way that they don’t trust us. If you don’t trust us, don’t mention it then. Don’t make fools of us. We are not fools. The GebzeCar worker who told us (Chapter 2) that the first time he saw the plant he thought he ‘could work there for ever’, has developed similar sentiments. As he sees it now: Managers and engineers inspect us all the time. They never give up monitoring us. This shows that they don’t trust us. If they did, they would not be around all the time. It’s odd because in our team meetings, they usually tell us that they trust the operators and respect them individually. When they talk about these kinds of fantasies, I begin to smile and think ‘Come on, man. You don’t care about us, do you? You wouldn’t give a damn for us, but you just need us to make things work OK.’ Another worker in the same plant tells much the same story: I had high expectations before I started working here. However, my expectations began to decline on the first day I started working at GebzeCar. Managers were talking about rules and principles and if we wouldn’t obey things, that would be the end of our work here . . . Look at us, I don’t even have a minute to talk to my friends in here. First, you don’t have time to talk to your friends as you have a heavy workload. Somehow, if you talk to your friends, managers will scold you. They tell you ‘You aren’t paid to talk to your friend in here, you are supposed to be in your workstation. Move on.’ I know that I am supposed to be in my workplace. But sometimes you need to see your friends for five seconds just to have some fun. That is all. I am not a robot. I am a human being just like them. Fikret, who works at GebzeWG, also says it is different when you are on the inside: When I tell people that I work here they reply very positively. They say ‘Well, what a good place to work.’ However you see things differently when you are on the inside. For example, there are regular

The View from Below 139

meetings here. In these meetings, the managers always say ‘Friends, we are having a hard time at present, but the future will be good for all of us.’ Some of my workmates still believe them. I used to believe them too. But I don’t trust them anymore, because when the time for a wage negotiation comes, we never get the money that we truly deserve. Workers expressed resentment and irritation about discrepancies they saw between managers’ promises about TQM and the reality. One worker who had been consulted by a manager about where in the workshop a new machine should be sited, remarked to us dismissively ‘Where else could it go?’. Another worker, noting the management’s desire to reduce the number of screws in a particular component, commented that this had everything to do with profit and nothing at all to do with quality. Even in the plant which is the least advanced in terms of management methods, BursaText2, managers talked about the need for worker commitment and here too there were workers who had developed their own jaundiced evaluations. Kemal: The deputy plant manager tells us: ‘People are at the centre of everything in this company. We would like you all to invent new ways of doing things and put into practice what you have discovered. We are all workers in this company, including me.’ I am no fool. If you are a worker, why is your wage ten times more than mine? Do you work 12 hours a day without sitting and talking to your workmates? No thanks, Sir! I have had enough. I am fed up with stories about motivation, commitment, hard work, etc. Those words don’t feed my children, or pay my rent or my instalments. So, what is all the fuss about? Those words go in one ear and out the other – I just let them go out of my mind. Then I relax and have another smoke. Not all workers express the same degree of criticism as Kemal but the theme that workers are not fools is common enough. So, too, that they are not robots. Many workers recognise that managers in these plants are better than in the general run of firms in Turkey but they have not lost their identity to a newfangled corporate culture. To claim they are ‘committed’ would be to misunderstand their position. They are driven by different considerations. As Arif puts it: ‘Reality is there and you must get on with it.’

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Notes 1. In white goods 75 per cent thought it not likely or impossible that they could keep going until they were 60; in cars 94 per cent; in textiles 88 per cent. The figure for white goods is in part a function of the lower percentage at BoluWG, which at the time of interviews was still to feel the full force of management reorganisation. Without BoluWG the white goods percentage rises to 85 per cent. Judged on the basis of these results, workers in the Turkish plants are less sanguine about their capacity to stay the pace than those whom Lewchuk and his colleagues have benchmarked in Canada and the UK. Only just over half of all workers in a variety of Canadian industries thought it unlikely they could keep up the pace until they were 60 (Lewchuk 1997: 20, Figure 31). If a specific comparison is made of the car industry the difference still looks pronounced. Compared to the 94 per cent of workers in each of the Turkish car plants who thought they could not sustain the pace until they were 60, 78 per cent of Canadian vehicle assembly workers thought they could not do so (Lewchuk et al. 1996: 11), a view taken by 68 per cent in the UK (Lewchuk et al. 2001: 76). Possibly the higher figures in Turkey are a function of a lower level of automation and more physical handling. But there may be other reasons. One possibility is that the Turkish workers are younger than those in the Canadian and UK studies and thus have to work longer to reach the age of 60. Even so, the data from Canada and the UK relates only to workers aged 50 or younger. Another, perhaps more likely, explanation is that Turkish workers’ assessments of whether they could work in these jobs until they were 60 were affected by a legislative change that occurred during our fieldwork. Prior to this, many of them had expected to retire at what, for Turkey, was the normal retirement age (forty two for men, thirty eight for women). With that prospect now dashed by a change in the pension regulations, the prospect of another twenty years work may not have seemed an inviting one. In fact, we know that it was not. Workers spoke of ‘retirement to the grave’. Generally, too, Turkish workers have lower life expectation. 2. The GebzeCar plant had only been in operation for two years at the time this question was asked. Workers were asked about the last two rather than five years.

Part IV Trade Unionism

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7 State, Law and Trade Unionism

Over the last quarter of a century trade unionism has declined in most countries. In the developed world an important reason for this has been the changing composition of employment, a consequence of which has been the decline of those very industries that had a high trade-union membership, for instance, coal mining, iron and steel, and shipbuilding. Further factors contributing to the decline include the increased power of capital over labour as facilitated by the rise of neo-liberal politics, legislative change and the deregulation of labour markets. At an ideological level, some part may have been played by the claim that employers are now impotent in the face of ‘globalisation’. Related to these developments, in particular as far as militancy is concerned, has been the fear of job loss. Other reasons sometimes invoked include assumptions about a decline in the importance of class and most especially of class consciousness and the rise of apathy. In the developing world it is by no means unknown for intellectuals to claim the importance of subjective elements of the above type in discussing the state of the labour movement in their own countries. In Turkey, an entire discourse exists that can be readily drawn upon in support of this apathy idea, which can be variously expressed by reference to the alleged persistence among workers of the village mentality or of innate conservatism or just plain ‘Turkishness’. Such views exist partly because in Turkey, as in many other developing countries, there is little contemporary research on workers. We hope to help rectify this situation, and, in so far as workers in Turkey do behave in a manner that may well appear, from the outside, as apathetic, we want to examine in detail how this behaviour is produced and reproduced. First, however, it is necessary to provide some background information on the historical development of trade unionism in Turkey. This is 143

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attempted in this chapter, which it is hoped will make plain the important role of the state, and in particular of the military at the beginning of the 1980s, in shaping the nature of contemporary trade unionism. After this, we will consider some of the legal devices and management stratagems that obstruct the development of trade union recognition at GebzeCar, BursaText1 and BursaText2. Then, in the chapter after this, Chapter 8, we will examine the question of ‘apathy’ directly with specific reference to Türk Metal, the trade union that organises BursaCar and all three white goods plants, BoluWG, CerkWG and GebzeWG.

Trade Unionism in Turkey The first bona fide trade union, the Ottoman Workers’ Union (Amele-I Osmani Cemiyeti) was founded in 1894 (Serce 1996: 40). The first largescale strike took place in 1908 in Istanbul and other cities, a leading part being played by dockers, bakery and flour workers, railway and tobacco workers (Gulmez 1996: 175–78). There is evidence of organised labour activity in earlier years. For example, in 1872 postal workers walked out against low wages and working conditions and in 1873 Istanbul dockers struck because they had not been paid for ten months ( Baydar 1996: 30). However, as with so much else in Turkey, in order to understand the situation today it is necessary to begin with the founding of the Republic in 1923. The modernisation project of the Turkish Republic was imposed on society. From the very beginning it was informed by a strong ideological commitment to a unitary concept of the Turkish nation, in which there should be no division on the basis of ethnicity, religion or class. Ensuring the harmony of interests and social solidarity was fundamental to the early period of the new Republic. Kemalism, influenced by the Turkish sociologist Ziya Gökalp, drew upon Emile Durkheim’s notion of organic solidarity in such a way as to deny the validity of class struggle. It sought to bring about a corporate capitalism that did not permit trade unions (Parla 1989: 212–16). Notwithstanding some early conciliatory noises about the right to form unions and to strike (Berik and Bilginsoy 1996: 40), it therefore was not long before an end was put to trade union activity and indeed all political opposition. The 1925 Establishment of Public Order Law, which was introduced following the Kurdish rebellion in the East, effected this. Then, in 1936, a new Labour Law was introduced, which made strikes illegal and, in 1938, a revised Law of Associations, which drew upon the fascist labour law of Mussolini’s Italy and banned all forms of associations based on social class (Gungor

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1996: 104). The subsequent history of trade unionism in Turkey can be divided into several periods, beginning with what is often called the ‘liberal’ period, which was ushered in by the end of the single party regime, in 1946, and which continued through the rest of the 1940s and the 1950s.

The ‘liberal’ period The ending of the single party regime in 1946 was followed by the abolition of the ban on class-based associations later in the same year. The number of trade unions grew and left-wing political parties such as the Socialist Party of Turkey also emerged with links being formed between some unions and the Left. However, the strengthening of the Left did not remain unopposed. Later the same year most of the unions, and two socialist parties, were accused of promoting class warfare and were closed down by the government (Ozturk 1996: 169–75). In 1947, further legislation then moved a little in the opposite direction and granted workers the right to set up unions but with no political affiliation and no right to strike. In 1950, the Democrat Party (DP) came to power. Ideologically opposed to statism and pro-market, its economic policy evolved under strong American influence. Shortly after this, in 1952, the first union federation, Türk-Is, was founded. This event has proved to be of lasting historical significance. Formed during the Cold War and opposed to class-based politics, Türk-Is was brought into being with substantial American support and was founded to prevent left-wing union movements in Turkey (Gungor 1996: 105). As Bianchi reports (1984: 217) Türk-Is received aid from the United States from its inception. In fact, between 1960 and 1970 the US aid it received was such that it equalled the income from membership dues (Isikli 1987: 319). This was used for the construction of a modern office complex and shopping centre for the new headquarters; for the salaries of officers and an enlarged professional staff; for a new labour college to train younger trade unionists from provincial organisations; and for visits to the United States by senior trade unionists. The adoption of what is commonly regarded as an ‘American style’ trade unionism was therefore no accident. Türk-Is declared itself to be independent of any political party but developed a clientistic relation with the DP, bringing personal reward to union officials in the form of parliamentary seats and, on some accounts, benefiting the membership, which was predominantly in the public sector (Berik and Bilginsoy 1996: 42).

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Meanwhile the DP became increasingly authoritarian. Increased political control was exercised over civil servants, the judiciary, military officers, universities and the press, with restrictions being imposed on political meetings. This led, in 1960, to a military coup, which removed the DP from office. Of the coups that Turkey has experienced, there are two – in 1960 and in 1980 – that have been crucial to the development of trade unionism.

The 1960 coup and the strengthening of the trade unions The 1960 coup marked the beginning of a new era for trade unions and prefaced two decades of increased union militancy. A new Constitution was drawn up which guaranteed the right to organise, to form trade unions, to engage in collective bargaining and to strike. In 1963 further legislation bent the stick the other way, banning general, solidarity and political strikes. However, whereas the legitimate activities of trade unions remained restricted, their overall position had been strengthened. Bulent Ecevit, then Minister of Labour, made much of the foresight and modernity of the Turkish elite when presenting the new trade union laws to Parliament: In almost all the Western democracies, the rights we are about to grant the Turkish worker with this law were only acquired after long and bloody struggles . . . There can be no doubt that by granting the Turkish worker these rights without necessitating such struggles, you will have rendered history and society a great service . . . In the countries of the West, application preceded the laws . . . with us, the laws will come first and the application will follow (cited in Isikli 1987: 317–18). There is room for doubt about how far the new laws were granted in the absence of previous labour struggle (Ahmad 1994: 147–48). But Ecevit was correct that the laws were a real step forward. Moreover, it was especially workers who worked in large-scale manufacturing firms that produced among other things consumer durables and cars with modern technology, often with foreign investment – in other words, those who worked in the sort of car and white goods firms looked at in this book (Keyder 1987: 160–61) – who benefited from such changes in the 1960s and 1970s. Union membership increased from 282,000 in 1960 to 834,000 in 1967 and to 1 million in 1971. At the same time, the state’s preferred

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union federation, Türk-Is, came under challenge. At the level of formal politics the challenge was played out in Parliament. Members of the Turkish Workers’ Party, which had been formed in 1961 by left-wing intellectuals and leaders of several unions, most of which were affiliated to Türk-Is, had gained parliamentary representation in 1965. Inside Parliament, they faced several Türk-Is union leaders, who represented the right-wing Justice Party, the successor to the authoritarian DP. Türk-Is also found itself challenged from within. It suffered a number of splits. First, and most importantly, in 1967 a new left-wing confederation was formed, Devrimci Isçi Sendikalari Konfederasyonu, usually known as DISK (the Confederation of Revolutionary Workers’ Unions). The new confederation had a close affinity with the Turkish Workers’ Party and pursued a class-based unionism. Further splits from Türk-Is then also took place. Those on the right wing founded MISK (Milliyetçi Isçi Sendikalari Konfederasyonu) in 1970. Those more identified with Islam, established Hak-Is (Türkiye Hak Isçi Sendikalari Konfederasyonu) in 1976. But it was DISK that was to become a major force on the Turkish labour scene in the 1970s. DISK organised predominately in private sector enterprises (the Türk-Is stronghold having been the public sector) and in 1970 it had over 88,000 members. There was growing tension and conflict, especially in the textile and food industries where workers tried to break away from Türk-Is and join DISK. Incidents in Adana, where workers tried to switch from Türk-Is to DISK in large textile plants owned by one of the biggest conglomerates in Turkey, resulted in clashes between left- and right-wing unionists inside and outside the plants in 1970 (Akkaya 1996: 107). The Justice Party (JP) government, which had been elected in 1965, saw the emergence of DISK as a threatening development. It regarded the rights granted to unions as having gone too far, as did employers. In 1970 it introduced an amendment to the law. The key part of this was the requirement that in order to be active nationally, a trade union should have in membership over one-third of the workers covered by the social security system in its own work branch (in effect, at national industry-level). A JP spokesman openly acknowledged that the purpose of this amendment was to eliminate DISK, for such a rule made it difficult for new smaller unions to challenge the pre-existing ones, which belonged to Türk-Is (Berik and Bilginsoy 1996: 48). This led to hundreds of thousands of workers engaging in mass demonstrations in Istanbul and Izmit, leading to mobilisation of the security forces and the army. Three workers were killed, as well as a policeman and a shopkeeper.

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A subsequent campaign of urban terrorism then led to further military intervention in March 1971 (Ahmad 1994: 153–55). The left and trade unions were subjected to further restriction. The Turkish Workers’ Party was closed down. From March 1971 to October 1973 strikes were banned by law. Among others, DISK union officials were arrested and prosecuted. A large number of workers lost their jobs and employers blacklisted active trade unionists. Even so, the 1970s saw a strengthening of the trade unions. DISK had reached 600,000 members by 1980 and compared to unions affiliated to Türk-Is, those in DISK were more actively involved in strikes, walkouts and demonstrations (Figure 7.1). As a result, between 1970 and 1980, the number of working days lost due to strikes rose from 220,000 days to 1.3 million days (Keskinoglu 1996: 493). Legislation protected workers from being fired at will and imposed heavy costs on companies in the form of severance payments awarded on the basis of seniority (Keyder 1987: 191) and in some larger factories employers complained that it was not possible to sack workers. A victory of another kind occurred in 1976 when May Day was celebrated for the first time in 50 years. But the celebration was short-lived. The next year, 34 were killed and hundreds injured at the Istanbul May Day meeting, shots fired from a government building having created a panic (Ahmad 1994: 155–56). The May Day incident was all of a piece with mounting political conflict on the streets. In the

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Figure 7.1 Strikes by Türk-Is and DISK 1970–80. Source: Adapted from Keskinoglu (1996: 494).

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second half of the 1970s, clashes between right- and left-wing militants escalated into a wave of urban terror in which nearly 4500 were killed. The so-called Grey Wolves of the ultra nationalist MHP (Milliyetci Haraket Partisi or Nationalist Action Party) were notorious for their violence and were protected by fascist elements in the police and security forces (Zurcher 1997: 276). At the end of the 1970s Turkey was in economic as well as political crisis. The strategy of import substituting industrialisation had been based on the selective protection of the domestic manufacturing sector, which made it possible for wage increases to be passed on in higher prices. This had now run into trouble. The shrinking world market for exports, rising oil prices and reduced remittances from Turkish workers in Europe all pushed towards a reduction in the imported inputs and technology without which higher levels of profitability and economic growth could not be sustained (Keyder 1987). Turkey was driven into the hands of the IMF in 1978 and into a major stabilisation and structural adjustment programme in January 1980. As in many other countries, the newly favoured policy of export-led growth required cutting real wages to cheapen production. In the midst of political turmoil, daily power cuts and other economic dislocation another military coup ensued on 12 September 1980 to carry this work through. Turkey was then ruled by the National Security Council.

The 1980 coup and trade union restriction The 1980 coup and its political aftermath marked a decisive moment in the modern history of democracy in Turkey. Intertwined with this, it also had long-term implications for trade unionism. It reversed the gains of the previous period. After the military coup, all trade union federations and independent trade unions were banned. Then in 1982 a new constitution placed major restrictions on the political activities of trade unions and further weakening of trade unions ensued through the 1983 Trade Unions Act. In mid-1983 there was some resistance from trade unions, including slowdowns and lunch boycotts at large factories but overall opposition was muted (Buyukuslu 1994: 223). The new union legislation was extensive and undemocratic. Unions were forbidden to pursue political objectives – in particular they were forbidden to engage in political activities, to establish relations with political parties, or to act together in any way on any matter with political parties; they were not to receive or accept any support, aid or contribution from any political party; nor to act together with associations, public professional organisations or foundations for political purposes

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or to use the name, sign or symbols of any political party. Politically motivated strikes, general strikes and sympathy strikes were all made illegal; so too were slowdowns, sit-ins, and similar forms of concerted action. Strikes and lockouts were not permitted during a state of war or full or partial mobilisation, and they could be prohibited in the event of major disasters adversely affecting daily life and temporarily restricted in the case of martial law or ‘extraordinary emergency law’ circumstances. In a catch-all move against free collective bargaining, and in particular of the right to strike, Act 2822 of 1983 on Collective Labour Agreements had stipulated that the right to strike ‘shall not be exercised in a manner contrary to the rules of good faith or in such a manner as to damage society or destroy national wealth’, the violation of these conditions inviting a court injunction to halt the strike. The new legislation also denied the right to unionise and to bargain collectively to particular groups – civil servants and certain public employees, including a newly created ‘contract’ worker category of employee in the state economic enterprises. The codified nature of the Turkish legal system meant that the new requirements relating to trade unions were complex and many in number. In order to join a trade union for example, five copies of a membership registration form, duly completed and signed by the worker and certified by a Notary Public had to be forwarded to the trade union. Applications were then considered approved, if not refused by the union, within 30 days. Then, after 15 days from the acquisition of membership the union concerned had to transmit a copy of the worker’s registration form to the Ministry of Labour. Resignation from a union was a similarly bureaucratised process. It required resigning, in person, in front of a Notary Public, who had to verify the identity and authenticate the signature of the member who wanted to resign and then to transmit copies of the notice to resign to the employer concerned, to the union, to the relevant regional directorate and to the Ministry of Labour. The resignation would then be effective three months after the date of the application to the Notary Public, the worker only then being able to join another trade union, which entailed them once again to undergo the procedure outlined at the beginning of this paragraph. A specific legal clause permitted ‘solidarity contributions’. Non-union members were allowed to benefit from collective agreements by paying a monthly subscription to the union concerned at two-thirds the normal contribution. Such a ‘cheap rider’ (rather than ‘free rider’) provision spells anything but solidarity as far as trade union organisation and development is concerned.

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New legal provisions relating to collective labour agreements were no less formalised and restrictive. The 1970 Amendment that required trade unions to have one-third membership at national level had been overruled by the Constitutional Court in 1972 – but such has been the ebb and flow of trade union repression and hindrance in the state’s relation to trade unionism that a similar measure now resurfaced albeit in a revised form. In this new version, in order to conclude a collective labour agreement covering an establishment, a trade union was now required to represent at least ten per cent of the workers engaged in a given branch of activity – for instance mining, textiles, metals – as well as more than half the workers employed in the establishment. This in turn meant that a trade union that wished to conclude a collective labour agreement had to apply to the Ministry of Labour for confirmation that it had met the requisite ten per cent membership in the industry branch (information on which is published by the Ministry twice each year). Further requirements were introduced to make collective agreements stick once they had been reached. Strikes were prohibited over grievances arising from the interpretation or application of collective agreements. Employers were required to remain bound by an agreement’s provisions even if relations with the trade union had subsequently been severed. Overall, the objective was very clearly to regulate industrial relations in a top-down bureaucratic manner; to attempt to reduce freedom of manoeuvre in all its aspects; and to create a more centralised union structure and reduce the number of unions (in which respect it succeeded, the number of trade unions falling from about 1000 in 1980 to 76 by 1990 of which only 41 had met the ten per cent representivity requirement [Dereli 1998]). The wider purpose though, was to smash the left and nail down the trade unions. In this also it succeeded. The 1980 coup reversed the gains made in the previous decade. The 1970s had seen the unions, and most especially DISK, manifest a new militancy. Between 1970 and 1979 overall union density had risen from 16 per cent to 27 per cent. By 1985 it was down to 9.5 per cent and by 1990 it was still only 10 per cent and by 1997 still only 14 per cent (Cam 2002: 108, Table IV). Moreover, whereas we have seen that strikes and days lost increased in the decade up to 1980, they fell in the subsequent decade. As for wages, it has been rightly stressed that the new measures were intended ‘to cause a significant decline in the value of labour power’ (Boratav 1990: 209). Nor was anything left to chance about the short-run success of this policy. During the first half of the 1980s it was effected directly by wage settlements being taken over by the

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government-controlled Supreme Arbitration Council, which systematically awarded increases below inflation. Between 1970–79 real non-agricultural wages in Turkey had risen 50 per cent, the largest gains being made in the second half of the decade. In 1980 they fell by 30 per cent. By 1984 they were back below the level they had been in 1975 a whole decade earlier (compare Figures 7.2 a and b). At the end of the decade they had still not recovered. In the 1970s the position of Türk-Is had been challenged from the left by the more militant federation DISK. When the coup came, Türk-Is publicly welcomed the advent of the military government, and its Secretary General took office as its Minister of Social Security. This led Türk-Is to be suspended by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). But the new legislation was such that Türk-Is came to enjoy a significant longer-term advantage compared to other unions, and especially DISK. The law conferred the right on individuals to freely choose the union to which they should belong. What is crucial is that in 1980 the National Security Council closed down all the trade union federations – except, in effect, for Türk-Is. Although the right to strike was not restored until 1983, this union federation was allowed to operate again within months of the coup. The Islamic federation, Hak-Is, was treated only a little more harshly. Cynically favoured by the secular Generals for its conservative nature, Hak-Is was allowed to operate without collective bargaining or the right to strike in 1981 and began to (a)

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operate fully as a confederation in 1983. The nationalist federation MISK was reinstated in 1984. But DISK was treated very differently. It remained banned until 1991. In the meantime most of DISK’s top union officials had been imprisoned and its property was seized by the state. In 1981 the Military Court had prosecuted 1477 DISK trade unionists, 78 of them being charged with offences punishable by death. Part of the Generals’ attempt to curb the power of the left, the case went on for five years, at the end of which 264 trade unionists were given prison sentences ranging from five to fifteen years (Pekin 1996: 220). A further component in the disadvantage suffered by DISK following the 1980 coup (and a further advantage for Türk-Is) derived from the requirement that trade unions must qualify as national unions with a presence throughout one of a number of specified industry groups. These rules – which as already noted are reminiscent of the 1970 Amendment, and which were introduced for the same purpose – made it yet more difficult for those unions previously affiliated to DISK to regain a foothold. In fact, it gave a great advantage to those unions that got re-established first following the 1980 coup – especially Türk-Is. Several things should be clear then. First, the effect of the 1980 coup was to weaken trade unionism in general but to confer advantage on Türk-Is – which, much to its discredit had lent its support to the military regime and its politics – and to its particular brand of American trade unionism. Second, in Turkey the law has been, in important respects, and especially after the 1980 coup, a structure within which the state has sought to fetter trade unionism. Testimony to this are some comments made by no lesser persons than a United States military officer and his colleague who were involved in the mid-1990s in drawing up an agreement between the United States forces in Turkey and a Turkish trade union in the defence industry. Commenting on the extremely detailed nature of the law – which essentially remains as we have described it above – they concluded: ‘it is difficult to properly execute a strike in Turkey, and without proper execution the State will intervene to shut the strike down’. And looking back to the 1960s Collective Labour Agreement, Strike and Lockout Law (No 275) they commented: ‘the law was more liberal than that in effect today, for it permitted such now forbidden activities as sympathy strikes and strikes over issues other than wages’ (Schmitt and Tanisik 1997: 21, 22). These authors had been encouraged to write their account because they felt that growing international interest in Turkey, particularly as a labour market, would generate new requirements for English translations of relevant Turkish

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legislation. Inward investors in labour will not have to study long to discover that Turkish trade unions inhabit a bureaucratised cage. Yet towards the end of the 1980s, there were demonstrations, walkouts, workplace occupations, slowdowns, and sympathy and other strikes. Despite the difficulties put in the way of trade unionism – and indeed because of these – workers also engaged in various ingenious forms of resistance. They made mass visits to the company doctor, shaved their heads, grew beards and went about barefoot in order to air their grievances. The more unusual acts of resistance, which were widely reported at the time, flagged up for the world labour movement that trade union struggle in Turkey lived on. In the aftermath of the 1980 coup the head of the employers’ association TISK (Turkish Employers’ Union Confederation) had reflected that for the last twenty years the workers had laughed and they, the employers, had cried. Now, he said, the time had come for the employers to laugh (Esin 1998: 241). In practice, the employers did not have things their own way to the extent that this implied. This was particularly the case in the second half of the 1980s. Following the end of military rule, strike activity increased as assessed by all the conventional indicators (Figures 7.3 a, b and c). At the turn of the decade, at the end of November 1990, the coal miners of the Black Sea town of Zonguldak went on strike. At the start of January almost a million and a half blue-collar and white-collar workers staged a general strike in defiance of a court order declaring it illegal. The next day, the Zonguldak miners, who were still out, began a massive march from Zonguldak to Ankara, a distance of over 280 kilometres. Joined by their wives and families, shopkeepers and others who lived in the locality, an estimated 100,000 people marched and were supported by the villages through which they passed (Kahveci 1996). The 1990s saw some improvements in the legal position of the trade unions. In 1995, in a move designed to pave the way for Turkey’s entry into the EU Customs Union, a vote was passed in favour of a number of constitutional amendments to extend democratic rights and to increase civil liberties. One of these proposed amendments permitted trade unions to participate in politics. Another permitted civil servants to engage in collective bargaining, although not to engage in strike action. Also in 1995 and again in part in an attempt to gain favour with the EU, an Economic and Social Council (ESC) was formed, which included trade union representatives along with those of the state, employers and others. This has proved to be a state-dominated organisation, however, and the unions have only a minor role. At its inception it was

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Figure 7.3 (a) Strikes 1984–2001; (b) Workers on strike 1984–2001; (c) Days lost by strikes 1984–2001. Source: State Institute of Statistics, various years.

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regarded by the state and employers as an attempt to counter the widespread public sector strikes that had arisen in response to the 1994 IMF austerity package, with its plans for extensive privatisation and a freeze on wages. It has not become a tripartite body in the ordinary meaning of that term (Yildirim 2001). In retrospect, indeed, although trade unions have been active in opposing privatisation in a variety of sectors (Soyak 1998) the level of industrial militancy fell in the second half of the 1990s. In the long term the legacy of the 1980 coup has been to set the bias against trade unionism. The lack of progress on real wages since the early 1990s, even in the big corporate sector, can be seen from Figure 7.4. As things stand today there are several different trade union confederations. The smallest, MISK (the Federation of Nationalist Workers’ Union), is a federation of far right-wing trade unions covering less than one per cent of those unionised (independent unions cover a similar proportion). It supported the MHP before the 1980 coup and continues to do so. Next in terms of size come Hak-Is and DISK. Hak-Is (the Confederation of Justice Seekers’ Trade Unions) currently has seven unions affiliated and about one-third of a million members. A federation of Islamic unions, its main base is amongst companies that belong to MUSIAD, the Muslim employers’ federation. Its constitution pledges to ‘respect national and moral values; to abide by the rule of social order and

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Figure 7.4 Minimum wage and wage in 500 largest enterprises 1987–2001. Gross wages at 1987 constant prices US$. Source: ISO 500 largest enterprises in Turkey, 2001.

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rights; to create peace and harmony between workers and employers; to upgrade the living conditions of workers and to enable them to fully utilise human rights and freedoms and to create a prosperous and developed Turkey based on national unity’ (Article 3, Hak-Is Regulations). Certain problems that are inherent in the pursuit of harmony between workers and employers on the one hand and advancing workers’ interests on the other have been encountered in its practice. For instance, the President of Hak-Is himself reports that some Muslim employers (themselves presumably wedded to the idea that Islam preaches harmony and peace), will not allow unions to organise in their establishments. He reports that in one episode in 1993 the owner of a MUSIAD-affiliated Bursa textile company employed bodyguards close to the ultra nationalist MHP to intimidate workers and chase the union from the factory (Bugra 1998: 533, 2002: 195). DISK has 28 affiliated unions, and it also has around a third of a million individual members. Whereas DISK was close to the Turkish Workers’ Party during the 1970s and at the centre of a militant socialist trade unionism, it now adopts a rather less radical stance but it is still regarded as left wing among the federations. Türk-Is, which is thus far the biggest union confederation, has 32 member unions and 2.2 million individual members. Politically Türk-Is claimed a centre and centre-left position in the 1970s with sympathies towards the CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi or Republican People’s Party) but it has had a pragmatic stance towards political parties, shifting with the political tide. Today it occupies a centre-right position. Its formally declared aims include a commitment to ‘a high level of national democratic secular and social and state structure based on Atatürk’s principles and the Constitution’ (Article 3, Türk-Is Regulations). Following the economic crisis of November 2000, Türk-Is formed a ‘Labour Platform’ together with DISK, Hak-Is, and other unions and professional associations. The Labour Platform has organised various protests against the IMF and free market policies and is an important attempt to forge some unity in what is an institutionally divided labour movement. Türk-Is itself includes unions of different political orientation. Some affiliate unions are left wing, notably the Petroleum, Chemical and Rubber Workers’ Union, and Petrol-Is, which received an influx of former DISK members in the 1980s when their own unions were banned. At the end of the 1980s Petrol-Is called for a general strike against privatisation, amongst other things drawing attention to the political dangers of monopoly in the economy. It has subsequently continued to develop a democratic political agenda that embraces government tax policy, the

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minimum wage, women at work, health and safety, environmental problems and other issues that extend beyond the narrowly economic (Buyukuslu 1994: 237, 247–49). But Türk-Is is mainly composed of right-wing unions. Notable among these is Türk Metal, which is the largest union in the metal industry, an industry that is a driving force in the Turkish economy, and a major centre of trade unionism with over half a million of Turkey’s three million trade unionists. Türk Metal has been described as the union ‘most willing to compromise with the government and employers’ and to make accommodations to management initiatives ‘in order to protect the established representative cartel of the union in the metal and manufacturing industries’ (Buyukuslu 1994: 244–45). We shall look at Türk Metal shortly, arguing that its current prominence is in part a function of the state offensive against trade unions in the early 1980s. We shall also examine what its mode of operation means for the ‘apathy’ or otherwise of workers at four of the plants that it organises – BoluWG, CerkWG and GebzeWG in the white goods industry and BursaCar. In each of these plants 100 per cent of permanent workers are organised by Türk Metal. There are however three other plants in our study where there has never been a union (GebzeCar) or where the union lacks full recognition (BursaText1), or where the union has ceased to operate (BursaText2). Having seen something of the formation of Turkish trade unionism at the macro level, in now shifting to the micro level we begin by considering how the situation in these three plants has come about.

Obstacles to trade unionism in three plants GebzeCar, BursaText1 and BursaText2 each stand in a different relation to trade unionism. At GebzeCar the story is only beginning. It is the only factory out of all seven that has no experience of a trade union operating in the plant. The question is: do the management want a union or not? There are managers at GebzeCar who claim that it is a matter of indifference to the company whether there is a trade union. ‘We don’t pursue a policy of either pro-unionism or anti-unionism’ they say. This has some credibility because a sister plant, owned by the same joint venture, is unionised. Managers also claim that they have given Türk Metal officials permission to talk to workers but that the workers did not want a union at the company. On the other hand, managers can also slip easily into saying that workers can sort out any problem by

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talking to them directly, with the clear implication that there is no need for a union anyway. As this might suggest, there is more to the story of why GebzeCar has not got a trade union than indicated so far. To begin with, when the company started recruiting (about two and a half years before we talked to workers there), it weeded out job applicants who had a trade union background and was trying to exclude devout Muslims. Then, before the company allowed Türk Metal into the factory to talk to workers about joining the union, workers report that managers told them not to join. A few workers who had been instrumental in encouraging the union to come in were later sacked. As a manager explained: We knew who they were. We didn’t dismiss them immediately. We took our time and fired them individually in a matter of three months. We don’t want or need a union in here. Workers don’t need a union to protect their rights. I am right here to help them. This company employs people on a permanent base. If you are OK, you can work here till you retire. So you have job security. We follow the collective bargaining agreement in this sector. So they get good pay as well. What more do you need? Most workers accept that the management has so far lived up to its promise to give them the same pay rises and social and economic benefits that result from the industry collective bargaining agreement between Türk Metal and the other car and white goods employers. They are well aware, though, that ‘when it comes to sack people there is nobody to protect you’. They also believe that ‘If anyone talks about unionism, this might easily be the end of his job.’ The general view is that management does not in fact want a union and that even to talk about this is dangerous because management has its spies on the shop floor (the finger is commonly pointed at workers from Bulgaria). The factory is however relatively new. If many workers are frightened even to talk about the trade union today, it does not follow that they will remain intimidated tomorrow. They know the sister plant is unionised and they watch carefully to see that what pay awards and other benefits accrue to its workers. Meanwhile, management for its part resorts to a variety of tactics to keep the union out, and, putting on its public face, proclaims that whether there is a union or not is of no concern to them. At BursaText1, there is a history of trade unionism and the way it has unfolded is testimony to the systematic biases against effective grass-roots

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trade unionism that are built into the post-1980 legislation. Prior to the 1980 coup the plant was unionised by Tekstil Is, an affiliate of DISK. As such, Tekstil Is was banned and unable to operate until 1991. In the meantime, another union, Öziplik Is, which belonged to the Islamic federation, Hak-Is, which was reinstated in 1983, stepped in to organise the plant. This situation came to an end in 1992 when Öziplik Is made an agreement with the employers that angered workers in the plant. Some workers recall that the agreement was so far from what they expected the union to deliver that union officials, not wanting to inform them directly, posted details of the agreement on the union notice board. Workers decided to leave Öziplik Is and rejoin Tekstil Is, the DISK affiliate. Guided by some of the older workers, who had previously been DISK members, they were successful in this. Initially management did not interfere and accepted the new union (one manager even now reflecting that ‘unionisation is a democratic right given by the labour law and the constitution’). Since then, however, management has not been helpful. Managers have told new recruits that they will be paid the same whether they are union members or not. Trade union officials say they do not attempt to recruit workers to the union until they have completed their probationary period because workers fear that they will not be made permanent if the company gets to hear that they have joined. For Tekstil Is to get to the point of actually representing the plant was no easy task. Such is the law that over half the workers (and in practice there were many more) had had to visit the Notary Public to quit the former union and to re-register as members of Tekstil Is. Then Tekstil Is had had to go through the process of validating its claim to represent ten per cent of workers in the industry, and even after this, it had still to wait two years before it could represent them at the next collective bargaining round. When it did so, in 1994, the union insisted on improvements to certain social rights and pay-related issues. The employers opposed the union’s proposals and the union subsequently called a strike. The strike was successful after 45 days but caused difficulty for BursaText1 management, costing them an important export order. One manager in particular has been very hostile to the union ever since. Another strike took place in 1998 over overtime pay during weekends. Workers in all these factories work a six-day week but overtime rates differ according to whether it occurs on Monday to Friday or on Saturday or Sunday. The management side offered double time for weekends, the union insisted on triple

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time. Failure to agree led the union to resort to strike action, again at a time when BursaText1 was working at full capacity, and management conceded the demand on the first day. Tekstil Is, then, is a trade union that has overcome state imposed disadvantage and reclaimed its membership in BursaText1. It is a union, which, from its members’ point of view is not perfect, partly because, as several workers made a point of telling us, the older shop stewards are now on the point of retirement. But generally it appears to be effectively run. It is also a union with 70 per cent membership – yet, since 2000, it has not been able to enter into collective bargaining with the employers. Why? The reason is again to be found in the legal minefield through which Turkish unions must tread. The membership of the three largest union federations in the industry works out like this. Türk-Is, through its affiliate Teksif Is, has 50 per cent of all union members. Hak-Is, through its affiliate, Öziplik Is, has 17 per cent. DISK, through its affiliate Tekstil Is, has 50,000 members. Prior to 2000 Tekstil Is had over 10 per cent of industry members but in that year the certified percentage of Tekstil Is members in the industry dipped to 9.5 per cent. This put it below the 10 per cent national threshold that entitles unions to enter into collective bargaining with the employers’ union at the national level. So, the union lost collective bargaining rights in the sector. In fact, over the last two decades the history of Tekstil Is at BursaText1 has been a battle against a legal system that first denied it the right to exist and then the right to bargain against employers on its members’ behalf. As the union now exists at BursaText1, it is considerably weakened. Such is the present state of play that when union officials want to speak to their members in the factory they have to be accompanied by an HRM manager. Excluded from collective bargaining at the national level, they have difficulty pushing management to implement the national agreement. It is worth noting, however, that the bias against the union has resulted from adherence to procedures that are entirely legal. The story of trade unionism at BursaText2 is an altogether simpler one to recount. It also illuminates another facet of the paternalistic style of the company’s owner. We have had cause to report workers’ positive views of the owner (as indicated by their assessment of climate at the plant) before. Here we shall see, in a rather more vivid fashion, how – in addition to the role played by the regular work that the company’s successful export record provides – this positive evaluation has been constructed. BursaText2 was unionised by the Türk-Is affiliate Teksif Is in 1985, following several earlier attempts. Even then the owner of the plant did

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not join the employer’s union TÜTSIS [Türkiye Tekstil Sanayii Isverenleri Sendikasi] and he bargained independently with the union until 1992. The union’s policy was to wait until agreement had been reached with the employers’ organisation in the national bargaining round between the employers and the union and then to insist on the same terms. This policy was successfully pursued in two bargaining rounds in the late 1980s. But in 1992, when TÜTSIS and the union reached agreement at national level, the plant owner informed the union that he could not follow suit. The union continued to demand the conditions agreed at the national level and the owner became belligerent. He told the union officials: I will throw you out of the factory. I am the father in this factory and workers are my children. Nothing should come between a father and his children. You are not needed in this factory anymore. You are finished. Having refused to deal any further with the union, the employer then embarked on a series of other measures. He sacked union activists. He not only encouraged workers to leave the union, he actually offered to pay the fee that workers incur when they visit the Notary Public in order to de-register their union membership. He also took care to keep out any potential troublemakers when hiring new workers, often recruiting from his home region. The high level of labour turnover that had resulted from his actions made this easier. In addition, this ‘father’ to his workers then lowered their wages, putting some of his ‘children’ (the women workers) on the minimum wage. But he did not rest here. Up until 1992 the plant had four main production units. The owner now officially registered these four main units as four different companies. This put a further difficulty in the way of any future attempt by the union to sign the workplace. As we have seen, in order to unionise a workplace it is necessary to be recognised in 10 per cent of the industry and to have the support of 50 per cent of the workplace. Four workplaces meant four recruitment campaigns. Four smaller workplaces rather than one also meant that the owner no longer had to comply with certain requirements that apply to larger workforces, for example to provide a crèche and sporting facilities. The union publicised what was happening at BursaText2, it criticised the owner in the local and national media and sought help from its confederation but the plant remains non-union. And, of course, the

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owner continues to seek to bind workers to him on a personal – and as he sees it – familial basis. In these three cases, then, we see several examples of how trade union recognition can be thwarted. GebzeCar is a company that pretends to be indifferent whether there is a trade union or not but it is careful about the workers that it recruits and has no qualms about sacking those it has employed whom it finds to be active in support of a trade union. BursaText1 is a company in which the struggle for trade union recognition has been a history of encounters with the disadvantages imposed on workers by Turkish labour law. BursaText2 is another example of how, caught in the bureaucratised cage which is Turkish labour law, workers have found difficulty in exercising their rights to union recognition and how, as at GebzeCar, employers can act illegally with impunity, sacking workers on ideological grounds. At BursaText2 such processes of selection – and de-selection through turnover and sacking – are major factors to be taken into account in assessing the high estimation in which the boss’s ‘children’ hold their ‘father’. But it should also be remembered that wages and conditions at BursaText2 are still superior to those generally found outside the big private sector of the economy. Outside this sector scope for the capricious exercise of management power is considerably greater, whatever the law says; and wages and other conditions are considerably lower. What, though, of the nature of trade unionism in those factories in the big private sector where there is 100 per cent trade union membership and where industrial level agreements are fully implemented? This is the situation at BoluWG, CerkWG, GebzeCar and BursaCar – all plants organised by the Türk-Is affiliate union Türk Metal. How does this trade unionism work? There is good reason to ask this question, given the state of current literature on third-world trade unionism. Studies have been produced on specific countries – among others for example, interesting contributions have been made by Adler and Webster (1999) on South Africa; Chossudosky (1988) on China; Ali, C. A. (1995) on Pakistan; and Beynon and Ramalho on Brazil (2001). There has also been discussion of social movement unionism (Munck 1988, Chapter 6; Waterman 1999, Chapter 15). However, it remains the case that interest in third-world trade unionism has diminished over the last two decades. At the beginning of the 1990s a review of research into industrial relations noted its ‘dramatic decrease’ in developing countries (Fashoyin 1991: 109). A more recently published introduction to comparative employment relations almost

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entirely neglects the subject of trade unionism in such countries (Eaton 2000). More pertinently, although the relation between democracy and trade unionism is discussed in some of the above studies, the issue of internal democracy is rarely addressed in detail, it only being observed for example, in cases where this applies, that union leadership tends to be oligarchic (Ali, S. H. 1995: 78) or the issue being skirted in the most general terms. Munck, for example, states in his account of globalisation and labour that ‘Trade unions can (and do) become bureaucratic, as well as conservative in their methods, and they can be co-opted by the state and capital. Trade unions can (and do) go through a process of renewal – in terms of organisation, strategy and methods – and combat routinisation’ (2002: 191). As a theoretical position this has much to recommend it but it does nothing to tell us how oligarchy is established and maintained. This issue is central to the next chapter.

8 Union Autocracy, Mechanisms and Contradictions

General arguments and assertions about the inevitable oligarchic nature of trade unions are of long standing in the social sciences (Webb and Webb 1897; Michels 1959) and debate continues to the present day (Waterman 1999; Voss and Sherman 2000). But particularly in the case of developing countries – in relation to which cultural stereotypes are so often deployed – we take the view that much is to be gained from analysis of the specific historical conditions and mechanisms through which such autocracy operates. It is from this standpoint that the case of Türk Metal is examined here. Türk Metal is only one part of the trade union federation Türk-Is, and it should not be assumed that all of the federation’s affiliates are organised in the same way and still less that they endorse the same politics. Türk Metal is none the less the biggest union in the metal industry, which is of major importance to the Turkish economy and its export performance. Any ranking of the trade unions that are important to the modern sector would have to put Türk Metal at the top of the list. As a trade union, it embodies the worst aspects of the corporatist ideology and practice that characterised the early years of the Republic. Workers at all the four plants organised by Türk Metal are critical of how the union operates: BoluWG There is no communication with workers. They aren’t interested in our problems. I haven’t seen the face of the union president. They don’t deal fairly in the elections. There is not enough notice to become a delegate candidate. They have their list of candidates in the elections. They are not successful in improving social rights. 165

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The trade union is inadequate. They should conduct a survey related to the problems of workers, but they don’t do this. I have no relationship to the union except for my membership. Our trade union is an employer’s trade union and does what the employer says. CerkWG I see the union here as a puppet of the employer. They don’t have any dialogue with the workers. A union must develop a dialogue with the workers and defend the worker’s rights. They just take the membership fee. Workers themselves must elect their representatives, not have them come from the top. The elections are showpieces because the representatives’ list is made from the top and this list is accepted. Most workers don’t know when the election is. There’s no difference if there is a trade union here or not. It’s an employer’s union. I have been here for six months. I haven’t had any contact with the union. A union should defend worker’s rights. The union here is finished. They make agreements in their own way. They support the employer. They don’t do anything about dismissals. There was a decrease in dismissals after the Germans came. This firm appreciates the workers, but the union doesn’t. GebzeWG Trade unions are very important organisations for workers. But union officials can make mistakes. The big mistake in this plant is that the representatives are appointed not elected. Our trade union is no good. They don’t deal with worker’s problems. They don’t treat everyone the same. They are politically biased. They are not open to criticism. They don’t tell us about elections for representatives. We don’t know when or how they are appointed. For me there is no trade union here. They don’t do anything. But they celebrate birthdays and marriage anniversaries with the company. The manager comes and congratulates them. The union must renew itself. We can’t elect our own representatives.

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The union isn’t democratic. The representatives are appointed. The union must integrate with the worker. The workers must elect the representatives. BursaCar It’s useless. I don’t think it has any function in here. It doesn’t really matter to me whether this union exists or doesn’t exist. It should respond to workers’ demands. I see this union as a parasite. A union should always keep in touch with workers. I don’t find this union successful. A trade union should be transparent, and all decisions should be taken together with the workers. They don’t know anything about trade unionism. They have become union officials through someone’s help. A union should always be on the side of workers when they discuss things with the management, because we pay their salaries. I think nothing about this union. Does it really exist? Where is it? What is it? I can’t see it. As these comments suggest, common criticisms of Türk Metal include its lack of responsiveness to workers’ needs, lack of internal democracy and dialogue. More systematic evidence points in the same direction. Workers were asked how good managers and their union were at keeping them up to date about proposed changes; providing them with the chance to comment on proposed changes; responding to suggestions; dealing with work problems; and treating employees fairly. As can be seen from Table 8.1 (bottom row), on average workers in each of the plants rated their management better than their trade union. On closer inspection it can be seen that they did so with respect to nearly every item in nearly every plant, so that whichever way Table 8.1 is read management comes out more highly rated than the trade union. As we have seen, management’s own attempts to consult workers and to involve them have not gone very far, the TQM that has been implemented being of the hard rather than soft variety. Even so, workers can see some attempt by management to acknowledge their existence. This is sometimes far from the case with respect to their union. Looking back at the situation in factories in Gebze in the late 1970s, Gunes-Ayata reported that ‘internally none of the union confederations had been particularly democratic’ (1987: 247n). It may well be the case

Workers’ evaluations of management and trade union

How good managers and union are at (% very good + good) Keeping everyone up to date about proposed changes Managers Union Providing everyone with the chance to comment on proposed changes Managers Union Responding to suggestions from employees Managers Union Dealing with work problems you or others may have Managers Union Treating employees fairly Managers Union Average management score Average TU score Percentage difference in favour of management

BoluWG N = 50

GebzeWG N = 53

168

Table 8.1

CerkWG N = 50

BursaCar N = 50

All N = 203

Percentage difference in favour of management

78 60

54 51

32 22

50 38

54 43

+11

63 46

35 30

36 18

48 32

46 32

+14

76 56

72 53

60 20

60 30

67 40

+27

94 70

77 68

76 26

72 40

80 51

+29

82 66

53 62

52 28

56 38

61 49

+12

79 60 +19

58 53 +5

51 23 +28

58 36 +22

62 43 +19

+19

Union Autocracy, Mechanisms and Contradictions 169

therefore that criticisms like these are not confined to Türk Metal in the present day.1 However, further evidence of the union’s relative failure compared to management comes from a question we asked workers about what they would do if they had a grievance. Our original intention in asking this question had been to assess the possible effect of relations with hemsehri (fellow townspeople), since research conducted in earlier years had shown this to play an important part in the lives of people in the expanding cities (Gunes-Ayata 1984, 1987). Interestingly, as can be seen from Table 8.2, the question revealed little role for hemsehri – but equally evidently, little role for the trade union. Those saying they would take their grievance to the trade union were a small, sometimes very small minority. In all plants the great majority of workers said that if they had a grievance they would take it to management. In no plant did more than one in five say they would go to the union and the proportion was sometimes very considerably less than this. The reliance on management is such that managers themselves sometimes complain that workers come to them for help with personal disputes, for example about getting fellow workers to pay back debts. This might imply a considerable deference to authority on the part of some workers and stands in contrast to that form of working-class consciousness according to which ‘you don’t take your problems upstairs’. However, workers’ criticism of their union does strongly suggest that they find it unresponsive to their needs. Although these workers generally benefit from higher wages than those available in all but a handful of other plants, these criticisms have also on significant occasions extended to the union’s performance on the economic front, as we shall see. How then did the union rise to its present prominence and come to be the biggest union in the metal industry and why do its members put up with the way it operates? Part of the answer to this second question is already suggested by some of the above quotations that refer to

Table 8.2

Source of support for workers in case of grievance (%)

Manager Trade union Relatives/friends/other

BoluWG N = 50

GebzeWG N = 53

CerkWG N = 50

BursaCar N = 50

All N = 203

76 20 4

64 15 21

64 14 22

92 4 4

74 13 13

Notes: This is in response to the question ‘If you had a grievance at work who would you go to first in order to try and do something about it?’

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internal union organisation and election procedures and a fuller account will be provided shortly. But to understand how the union came to its present prominence it is necessary to go back to the military coup.

The coming to its current prominence of Türk Metal Each of the four trade union federations has constituent unions in the metal industry. Two of them play no part in our account, the Hak-Is union, Oz-Celik, which has just under 100,000 members and the small MISK union, Türk Çelik Sen, which fails to reach the ten per cent bargaining threshold. However, the effects of the coup can be readily seen at the level of the individual trade unions by reference to the history of the Türk-Is and DISK unions in the industry. Their histories are to a significant extent the two sides of the same coin. Türk Metal was founded in 1973 in Ankara and immediately affiliated to Türk-Is. In 1975 Mustafa Özbek became its President, a position he still holds. This is not uncommon for the heads of Türk-Is unions. They tend to hang on to their power until they retire/go into politics/die. A former president of Yol-Is (a transport union) was there for 18 years before leaving for politics. The President of Sag-Is (a health union) has been in office for 37 years. Özbek comes from Kirikkale, as do some of the union’s other leading officials. Once a district of Ankara, and now a city in its own right, Kirikkale is renowned in Turkey for its right-wing politics and support for the MHP. In 1980 Özbek made a speech welcoming the coup, declaring that it had ‘torn away the masks of those speaking of a confrontation between capital and labour’ and that it had ‘initiated a period of national unity and harmony’ (Türkiye Sendikacilik Ansiklopedisi 1996: 361). In this he neatly paralleled the contribution made by the body with which his union negotiates, the Turkish Metal Industrialists’ Union (MESS, Metal Sanayicileri Sendikasi). MESS, whose previous leader had been Turgut Özal, the architect of Turkey’s journey to the free market, had welcomed the coup as ‘establishing an atmosphere of peace and security in the country’. The story of the DISK union in the metal industry, Birlesik Metal-Is (United Metal Workers’ Union), which has over 56,000 members, is more complicated because the union is the product of a 1993 merger between two unions, Maden-Is and Otomobil-Is. Briefly, though, Maden-Is was founded after the first Trade Union Act came into force in 1947 and it affiliated to Türk-Is when the confederation came into existence in 1952.2 Then, in 1967 Maden-Is withdrew from Türk-Is and joined with

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other unions to form DISK. Kemal Turkler, who had been the chairman of the union since 1964 also then served as chairman of DISK until 1977. Turkler was murdered by armed rightists in 1980. Also in 1980 Maden-Is, as part of DISK, was suspended by the military regime and was not re-opened until 1991. This left the door open to Türk Metal to make inroads into the metal industry. Türk Metal had grown considerably in the second half of the 1970s when it gained control of a few plants in big companies in the industry. But the military coup brought it rich rewards. Before the coup, in 1979, Türk Metal had over 60,000 members. The transformation in its fortunes that occurred as a result of the coup and its political aftermath was such that it had grown more than threefold to 200,000 members by 1987. Its membership now stands at 240,000. The consequences of the uneven nature of the banning of the different union federations can be seen, in one way or another, in each and every one of the four plants in the white goods and car industries. BoluWG was a relatively new plant. It was unionised by Türk Metal in 1983 – at which date this was the only practicable option. GebzeWG moved from Istanbul to its present location in 1968. It was unionised by Maden-Is, which had been formed the previous year and remained organised by this union until the 1980 military coup. The union was then closed down and, in 1983–84, DISK still being banned, the plant was unionised by Türk Metal. CerkWG had also been unionised by the DISK union Maden-Is in the 1970s and it had also remained organised by this union until the 1980 military coup. After the military coup, the pattern of events was the same. Maden-Is was closed and, in 1983–84, the plant was unionised by Türk Metal. At BursaCar the story is rather different but no less revealing. The plant had also been initially organised by Maden-Is and in the 1970s in the context of the strengthening of the left and of violent clashes between left and right on the streets, there were serious clashes between Maden-Is and Türk Metal. Two union members lost their lives. Others suffered serious injury. At one point rightists entered the factory to intimidate Maden-Is members. The management preferred to recruit those with right-wing connections and helped Türk Metal. The police intervened on a daily basis, also favouring Türk Metal. Türk Metal began to displace Maden-Is and gained control in 1978. When the 1980 coup came, Türk Metal, as part of Türk-Is, was not closed down and with its organisation and funds intact it had a clear field in which to begin to operate again in 1983.

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These events go a considerable way to account for the coming to prominence of Türk Metal. However, they cannot explain how Türk Metal has continued to represent workers in these plants, despite worker disaffection. How is this to be explained? Are the workers just apathetic? Just villagers? Just Turks?

The reproduction of union autocracy Turkey has experienced huge migratory flows from east to west over the last half century and a more general shift of population from the countryside to the growing urban areas. Many of the workers in these plants, if they did not have fathers who were peasants had grandfathers who were. The vast majority are Muslim; a considerable proportion of them pray. Attributes such as these are often considered a recipe for conservatism by promoting reliance on authority and unthinking acceptance. Whatever the plausibility of such general assumptions – and we have seen that most of these workers do not match up to the ‘peasants in the city’ idea very well – it is important to note that they have not blindly accepted their fate as far as Türk Metal is concerned. Moreover, it is far too easy to assume that the Turkish working class has always been quiescent. The rise of DISK in the 1970s makes nonsense of this. So does the history of particular plants. In the case of GebzeWG for example, there is evidence of political consciousness existing on quite a large scale among the workforce as far back as 1970. Several workers were interviewed in the factory that year. According to Makofsky’s account (1977: 70): The first was 26 years old with an eighth grade education, and he worked in a section where metal parts were coated. He said that no party served the interests of the working class, and that the kompradorlar ruled Turkey. He said that the radical confederation, DISK, stood for the workers and that the other confederation, Türk-Is, was under the boss’s thumb. Makofsky quotes several other workers to the same effect, even though management selected which workers he should interview. If there is no need to accept his somewhat mechanically arrived at conclusion – ‘In this factory 70 per cent of workers were class conscious’ – there is good cause to learn the larger lesson. The invocation of some timeless and supposedly quintessentially Turkish conservatism makes a poor explanation for changes in workers’ political consciousness over time.

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Relevant here is that in each of the four plants, there have been attempts to leave the union. BoluWG In 1986, three years after the plant was organised by Türk Metal, some workers tried to leave the union and join an independent union Otomobil Is (the breakaway from Türk-Is, which as we have seen was to help form Birlesik Metal-Is in 1993). The management sacked those who had been active in this move. From memory workers put the number involved between 60 and 100. In 1989 and 1990 another attempt at a breakaway from Türk Metal occurred, again with the intention of joining the same independent union. Again management sacked those active in this attempt. Again workers put the figure at between 60 and 100. Up till this date there had been no union branch in Bolu but only a branch office about 100 km away at Sakarya. The union set up a local branch. At the same time however new workers were recruited through the union from its stronghold in Kirikkale. Since then Türk Metal has escaped further challenge. GebzeWG In 1994 workers complained that when the company sacked around 200 of them the union did nothing. In 1998 following the results of the collective bargaining of that year workers began to resign from Türk Metal and attempted to join Birlesik Metal-Is. With inflation running at about 70 per cent, the union had promised a 90 per cent pay rise and gained only an initial 43 per cent. Hundreds of workers resigned from the union and walked out protesting at the union’s failure. Hundreds of gendarmes and police were drafted in to preserve order. Following this about 40 to 50 were sacked by management. CerkWG The top branch officials for this plant come from Kirikkale. In the second half of the 1980s Otomobil-Is started to make inroads into the factory but could not legally displace Türk Metal. Then, in this plant too, the results of the 1998 collective bargaining unleashed profound dissatisfaction with Türk Metal. Thousands of workers marched the three kilometres from the company’s various plants to the town centre where the office of the Notary Public (who, as we saw in Chapter 7, is charged with the registration and de-registration of union membership) is located. Management did nothing for a few days when union officials and the local Governor attempted to quieten things down and coax workers back to work. It then issued an ultimatum: workers either had to re-register their membership in Türk Metal or lose their job. Around a hundred lost their job.

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BursaCar In 1994 the company sacked thousands, the number employed reducing from about 9000 in 1993 to around 3000 by 1996. Failure of the union to intervene led to widespread disaffection. In 1998 BursaCar workers played a prominent part in the wider reaction to the deal struck by Türk Metal. There was a massive walkout. Thousands marched five kilometres to the office of the Notary Public in Bursa in order to resign and join the DIisk affiliated Birlesik Metal-Is. Management at BursaCar responded in the same way as management at CerkWG. Putting its weight behind the union, it threatened workers with the sack if they did not stay with Türk Metal. After workers had rejoined the union between 200 and 300 were sacked – according to management because of the world crisis of that year and, according to some workers to clear out the activists. In all the four plants, therefore, challenges were made to the union. Workers were not content and tried to act against it. According to Türk Metal, in 1998 at national level 8000 workers switched to Birlesik Metal-Is and then switched back. According to Birlesik Metal-Is, 40,000 did so. Either way, disaffection with the union was considerable. Apart from anything else, the above account once again serves to remind us that in interpreting workers’ responses to questions, as for example in Table 8.1, it is necessary to remember that the workers interviewed were not an unbiased cross section. Processes of selection and de-selection have been at work. First, those who had been active in seeking to switch unions were almost certainly under-represented by virtue of past dismissals. Second, and probably to the same effect, management in all companies sought to screen out potential militants when selecting new workers. As one of them put it to us in a discussion about selection methods: ‘Of course we have to consider “political issues” as well.’ Third, pro-Türk Metal workers had been deliberately recruited through the union from its ideological strongholds. In the late 1970s trade unions had been active in job allocation, some factory managements allowing unions to employ workers on their behalf (Gunes-Ayata 1987: 240). Two decades later, we have no evidence of such delegation being practised. Some union officials can clearly hope to place applicants with a reasonable chance of success however. In one case, for example, we heard promises being made to the effect, ‘I can get two in but not three’ and references from union officials are valued by potential workers. To establish that most workers are not happy with the union does not explain why the current generation of workers still joins. Nor does it

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explain why they have not reformed the union from within. Nor indeed why they do not leave it. To review these questions one by one is to begin to understand just what these workers are up against.

Why did workers join this trade union? In Turkey the Trade Unions Act of 1983 stipulates that the hiring of workers must not be made subject to any condition as to their membership of a union, individuals having the right to become a member of a trade union or not. These rights imply that there can be no ‘closed shop’. On the face of it, then, the question of why these workers joined the union is something of a puzzle. In practice, there is no mystery. Never mind the law, there is a closed shop. In all four plants 100 per cent of permanent workers belong to Türk Metal. New recruits are sent to the union office to sign on as part of the process of joining the company. In other words, the procedure is part of standard practice. It is as unproblematic as going to the hospital to register for social security purposes – in fact it occurs as part of the same routine. Why do workers put up with this? A metal industry manager put it like this: There is much unemployment. These are good jobs. Of course workers join. They dare not refuse. This, then, is why workers join, even though they have the legal right to refuse to do so. They join because they will not get taken on if they do not.

Why is it that workers do not fight more to change the union from the inside? One part of the answer is that the union President, Özbek, rules Türk Metal with an iron hand and union officials are Özbek’s men. A mixture of personal loyalty and nationalist ideology ties them to the union, and to him. Photographs of Özbek striking powerful poses dominate union offices. The grey wolf symbol of the right-wing MHP, the party closely associated with the street violence of the 1970s and attacks on the left, is part of the union logo (despite the continued illegality of unions displaying political symbols). The union publishes books about the emergence of the Turks from Central Asia and about the Turkic grey wolf myth (Caglar 1990; Poulton 1997, Chapter 5). Özbek is also President of the Federation of Eurasian Metal Workers. This pan-Turkish, pro-free market organisation was founded in 1994 and is based on the Turkic

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republics in Central Asia (Gungor 1994: 235). The political culture of Türk Metal is such that union officials talk in terms of ‘Our great President says . . . ’. The union’s name is symptomatic of its politics. It is one of the few trade unions affiliated to the main federation Türk-Is which does not include the suffix ‘-Is’ in its title. In this context ‘-Is’ signifies ‘worker’. There are also material interests at stake. There are visits abroad for officials on union business. The chairs of branches can be invited to union meetings usually held in five star hotels at holiday resorts. At rank and file level, Türk Metal organises holidays in the union education resort in Northern Cypress and on the Aegean and Mediterranean coast of Turkey for workers and their families, all expenses paid. There is a large education and training centre in Ankara. All these are mechanisms whereby loyalty can be bought and retained. Internal dissent can also be controlled by less sophisticated means. Workers report that the Kirikkale local branch of Türk Metal gives karate and boxing courses to some workers under the title of trade union education activities. The rewards on offer at Türk Metal are not of course for everyone – and this makes many workers resent the union and the way it operates. These feelings are particularly strong at CerkWG: It pretends to be active when collective bargaining comes round. Apart from that they do nothing. Strangers came to work here from places like Kirikkale and Yozgat. They [union officials] protect their own men and hemsehries (fellow townsmen) from the cities of Kirikkale and Yozgat. They get them to come and settle here and show favouritism towards them. I wish this union would leave here. Our union sends around 50 or 60 people to its holiday resorts in Antalya and North Cypress. But they’re all from Ankara – what a coincidence! I resent having to pay my membership fee. The potential for favouritism and an ability to ride roughshod over the membership inheres in the union’s internal structure. In fact, this same structure plays a key part in the reproduction of