Conditionality for Student Loans and Housing in Turkey

In the last week a number of media sources have reported that the Turkish Credit and Dormitories Institution for Higher Education has decided to stop all loan and housing assistance to students who engage, among other things, in “behaviors that violate the right to education such as acts of resistance, boycott, occupation, writing or drawing graffiti or chanting slogans.” (To see one of these articles, please visit https://t24.com.tr/haber/direnis-ve-boykota-katilan-slogan-atan-ogrencilere-ogrenim-kredisi-yok/235591.) I strongly regard the institution’s decision as an attempt by the government to put a hold on students’ political preferences and civil liberties. On the other hand, we need to be aware that this type of understanding of social policy is not entirely novel. It seems to me to be related to the nearly global trend for a shift from a rights-based to a conditions-based approach to social policy. In fact, this shift has often allowed social policy in Turkey to be reduced to some form of charity work or bribery in an attempt to create electoral loyalty among lower classes of society. I find this to be alarming. If we do not fight against such attempts promptly, we run the risk that one day they will become so firmly embedded in our culture that nobody can see why they should be harmful to democracy any more. We need to act now!

LGBT Murders in Turkey

For this week’s blog entry I would like to say a word or two about gender inequality in Turkey. Before I do that, however, please take a look at this news article on a Turkish-language portal: http://www.bianet.org/bianet/lgbtt/148371-kusadasi-nda-trans-cinayeti. In case you cannot read Turkish, it is about a transgender woman, by the name of Dora, who has recently been killed in Kuşadası, a popular summer town in Aegean Turkey, and it includes the dates and venues of the protests to be carried out against hate murders. Yet, although the story has been covered by most Turkish media outlets, I cannot help but notice that in a country that has just hosted the LGBT pride week for the twenty-first time, the mainstream media continue to treat LGBT murders as if they are "ordinary" crime stories and to avoid touching upon reasons that lie behind them. It seems to me that the role of news media cannot be considered complete when it merely reports us news; it needs to initiate effective debates to interpret them. Unless this function is fulfilled, the following inevitably takes place: I have been living with my aunt and her two teenage sons for some time now. The day of Dora’s murder, when we were watching evening news at the dinner table, I realized that my ten-year-old cousin thought that a transgender woman was necessarily a sex worker. Given that even most adults tend to think this way in Turkey, it did not exactly come as a surprise. I immediately corrected him and told him and his twelve-year-old brother that being a transgender individual is merely a sexual orientation. Fortunately, this is quite a liberal household, at least in Turkish standards, so I did not have to start from scratch and go through the trouble of explaining them what a sexual orientation is. On the other hand, it was still a bit of a surprise because I was hoping that since their mother and I had already talked to them about LGBT individuals, they would be more resistant to embracing the social bias that surrounds them. As I have already said, however, I cannot blame my lovely cousins when this is the way many adults seem to think about LGBTs, and especially about transgender individuals. Few people care to understand that they are forced into sex work since most other job areas are closed to them. It is possible to discuss the dynamics underlying this, but I will suffice it to say that those who deny the existence of gender inequality and biases in Turkey need to face the crude fact that our society is still embarrassingly ignorant about gender identity. It continues to equate being a queer individual with being a sex worker and it reproduces its biases so recklessly that individual attempts to remove them remain futile. Social policies such as more strict hate crime laws, affirmative action and job quotas are urgently needed!

Seasonal Workers of Turkey

Here is the link to a news article I have recently come across while surfing through the Birgün newspaper: http://birgun.net/worker_index.php?news_code=1366531687&year=2013&month=04&day=21. It is about the issue of seasonal agricultural workers in Turkey, whose number is estimated to be around one million and who probably constitute one of the few most disadvantaged socioeconomic groups in the entire country. According to the article, they find themselves in an extremely vulnerable position caused by a mix of factors such as the neoliberal policies of the Justice and Development Party government, decades of conflict between the PKK, the Kurdish terrorist/guerilla organization, and the Turkish state, and increasing competition from Syrian workers, who tend to be willing to work at even lower wages in the local jobs. The article mentions among their problems primitive housing options with poor sanitary conditions (lack of bathrooms and improper disposal of human waste), diseases and absence of healthcare services, interruptions in education due to the work calendar and thus low rates of schooling and literacy, exceedingly high rates of mother and infant mortality, lack of clean drinking water and marriage at a very young age. The author argues that seasonal workers exist in other countries of the world but their conditions are much better in countries of Europe and North America than they are in Turkey. In his opinion, the state plans for improvement of seasonal workers’ living conditions have not been implemented, the GAP, the Southeast Development Project, fails to address the problems with real effect, and the authorities constantly resort to culturally based excuses. Recently I have also read news that the Kemalist Republican People’s Party and the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party have offered the Parliament proposals to open the problems of seasonal workers to debate and both proposals have been denied. I should note that we only rarely find serious coverage of seasonal workers in mainstream news outlets and thus most people only rarely hear about them if they do not encounter them themselves. In addition, I believe that these seasonal workers face other problems when they want to make their voices heard by the general public. It is perhaps appropriate to consider them to be at the bottom of an underpriviliged regional community, one that cannot create widespread legitimacy and publicity for its problems because of armed conflict etc., thus they are far from having the ability to draw sufficient support for their cause. On the other hand, given the strong anti-neoliberal/anticapitalist current in the OccupyGezi protests and the newly-emerged sympathy on the part of many Turks for the problems faced by Kurds due to the same wave of protests, I wonder whether it might be possible to open up a channel in the political field that can offer any significant relief to these seasonal workers, who are in a situation reminiscent of some form of internal colonization. Why not? One can only hope!

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.