Can female participation in the labor force in the neoliberal era offer us a new perspective for a more inclusionary society?

Mustafa Sönmez reports in an article published in Hürriyet Daily News on June 22^nd, 2013 (http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/more-urban-women-join-the-workforce-in-turkey.aspx?pageID=238&nID=49240&NewsCatID=347) that the number of women employed in urban areas in Turkey has seen a 50 % increase and risen to 4.8 million in the past six years. He argues that this is due to the acceleration of the neoliberal capital accumulation process under the AKP government, which has led to a new wave of rural to urban immigration, with more people flowing into the urban labor market. According to him, women who were previously employed as non-paid family workers in the agricultural sector now search for jobs, and in an attempt to combat unemployment, the AKP government has offered employers an incentive by accepting to pay their share of female workers’ social security premiums. In addition, the author rightly suggests that women’s increased participation in the labor force has strengthened the hand of business, who has used this card to fight against demands from male workers for wage raises, and it has given the newly employed women a chance to meet the harsh reality of the market not only as unskilled workers but at the same time as individuals whose dignity is hurt due to their differences in religion, ethnicity etc. I think that it would be interesting to investigate the current differences in payment between male and female unskilled workers in Turkey who perform similar jobs; there must still be an important gap since, traditionally, men are regarded as the breadwinners of their families while women are considered to do their bit if they “contribute” to the family budget at all. I argue that rather than male workers resenting female workers for a decrease in the power for wage bargaining, both groups of workers can and should work hand in hand to improve their situation vis-à-vis employers. Now that increasingly more women are present in the workplace and welfare states are shrinking due to the global neoliberal turn, it occurs to me that there is an ample opportunity to incorporate issue-based struggles such as that of feminism in the organized labor struggle. This would enable the global public to combine different political struggles to re-enlarge the space for political debate, which has been confined mainly to identity issues in the neoliberal era. It would work not only to defend the rights of workers but also to offer societies a new perspective to create a more just, more inclusionary order.