ELİF AKGÜL

Istanbul- The report entitled “Women's Labor in the Grip of Market, Politics and Gender” prepared by Lülüfer Körükmez aims to understand the determinants and impacts of Turkish and Syrian women’s participation in paid work outside the home, focusing on gender and intergroup relations.

The 71-page report supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark (Danida) and in cooperation with the Kırkayak Kültür, Women Now for Development and the Women’s Solidarity Foundation, and the Women’s Solidarity Foundation has been published. The report aims to reveal the determinant of women’s paid employment outside the home and their decision on whether they will continue working or not and understand the dynamics and relationships that affect the lives of Turkish and Syrian women.

Interviews were held in Antep and Istanbul as part of the fieldwork to comprehend the impact of Turkish and Syrian women’s collaboration experiences on racism and xenophobia. While nearly 40% of the participants are in the 26-35 age group and 27% are in the 36-45 age group, 63% of the participants are married. Eighteen women worked in the textile sector, 18 served in the services sector seven managed their own business, seven worked as cleaning workers and five were unemployed at the time of the interview.

We spoke to Lülüfer Körükmez about the report. “One of the areas fueled by racism and xenophobia is the labır market,” she told us.

“People are classified by their ethnic and national groups such as Syrian and Turkish. However, the organization of the labor market is based on hostility at the beginning. Unfortunately, the policies in Turkey are not policies that will reduce this hostility and establish coexistence.”

Highlighting that people are “left alone” and continue to “struggle for life”, Lülüfer Körükmez said, “As there are no policies to fix this situation, the hate speech, stigmatizing and racist expressions widespread through politicians and media are repeated on social media and these expressions cause racist attacks, like in Altındağ.”

“The distinction between citizens and non-citizens makes their partnerships invisible”

Speaking about the refugee crisis, Lülüfer Körükmez emphasized that the distinction between citizens and non-citizens makes their partnerships invisible, “Everything is about being immigrants or refugees.”

Stating that the COVID-19 pandemic, which spread all around the world since the beginning of 2020, has reduced women's participation in the labor force, “The unregistered workers continued to work despite all the pandemic conditions.”

“We saw that the people kept working in windowless basement floors. For instance, hourly working is becoming more common particularly in the textile sector. Therefore, although people were affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, they took the risk and continued to work when they found a job,” she said.

“Seeing marriage as a guarantee strengthens patriarchy”

Underlining that the economic crisis, increasing poverty, and youth unemployment rate cause educated people to “lose their hope to find a job”, Lülüfer Körükmez said that this situation led to young women getting married and young men to look for a job immediately after graduating from university and increase the rate of child marriages.

“Because they don’t have hope for the future anymore. Finding a job as soon as possible and having a good marriage create hope for the future. Families think that a good marriage for girls and getting a job at an early age for boys is the best opportunity for their children’s future. But seeing marriage as a guarantee strengthens patriarchy,” Lülüfer Körükmez told us.

The findings of the report are summarized as follows:

According to 2020 data of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT), while the rate of participation in the labor force in Turkey is 54.9% for the general population, this rate was calculated as 74.6% for men and 35% for women, who are the citizens of Turkey; the rate of those working actively was calculated as 47.5%, 65.2%, and 29.7%, respectively. However, the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DISK) reports claimed that the Household Labor Force data of TURKSTAT is insufficient and does not reflect reality, and in November 2020, “unemployment and job loss rate with the revised broad definition due to the effect of COVID-19 was 43% for women”.

Although the rate of participation in the labor force increases as the education level of women increases, the gap between women and men remains constant.

As of 2015, approximately six out of every ten long-term unemployed are women.

According to the joint research of the International Labour Organization (ILO) Office for Turkey and the Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT), the gender wage gap in Turkey is calculated as 15.6%.

According to the data of ILO Office for Turkey (2017), Turkey is the country with the lowest labor force participation rate of immigrants. It is also shown in the same study that almost half of the immigrants, 46% in total, work under informal employment conditions. This was 52.3% for men and 31.8% for women.

Another striking data is that informality among the active labor force is higher among immigrant workers than citizens: only 17.2 percent of non-migrant wage workers in Turkey work in the informal economy, while approximately 43.1 percent of migrant wage workers are unregistered.

According to the study of ILO (2019), 930 thousand of the 2 million working-age Syrian refugees are working, and 97% of them are employed informally.

According to the 2019 labor force data, while the number of migrant women that are granted a work permit in Turkey is 50,690; it is seen that more than half of them are between the ages of 20-34 and nearly half of them have high school education. While the number of work permits given to Syrians is 63,789, it is seen that only 4,343 of them are given to women.

Despite the fact that all of the Turkish women we interviewed as part of the fieldwork were low educated and were working in precarious jobs, the majority of Syrian women even if they had a university education were working in similar jobs.

The duration of working life was calculated as 19.1 years for women and 39.0 years for men in 2019 (TURKSTAT 2021b). This figure can be even lower in the informal sector. Women tend to quit their jobs when the economic distress is over.