population increases caused the transformation of the traditional land tenure system (most
peasants were sharecroppers and small landowners) and created a widespread land polarization
between big landowners and small landowners/landless. Many people then, who could not
continue in agriculture even as wage-workers migrated to the cities. On the other hand, improved
transport and communication mobilized the rural population and brought a previously isolated
peasantry into contact with modern, urban society (Keles, 1985:57). In the following stages of this
6 The annual rate of population growth accelerated from 1945 to 1960. While it was 1.06 per cent in 1945, it had reached 2.17 per cent in 1950, 2.77 per cent in 1955, and 2.85 per cent in 1960. See Table 2.2.
process, ‘going to the cities’ became so widespread that it implies the institutionalization of migration. Levine and Uner (1978) describe the evolution of the migration process as follows:
The early migrants did not go to the cities reluctantly, but rather full of hopes and aspirations. Because of the existence of income differentials between the urban and rural areas, and because of the existence of greater social opportunities in urban areas, it has become rational (from ein individual migrant’s viewpoint) to migrate to the cities. Further, as more migrants went, residential settlements, job structures, and a whole range of kin and friend networks developed which helped new migrants adjust, even if unemployment in the urban areas was high. Once the agricultural equilibrium had been disrupted, the process of migration gained momentum (Levine and Uner, 1978:9).
During the massive rural-urban exodus of the 1950s and the 1960s, thousands of peasants migrated to the urban areas, mainly to big cities such as Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, and Adana. Yerasimos (1976:826) estimated that more than 200,000 peasants moved annually to the cities between 1950 and 1970. While a significant proportion of the labour force shifted from rural to urban areas, the urban economy failed to create jobs in the industrial sector for people who migrated. In fact, although the industrial sector was expanding quite fast, this was not having an equal effect in creating jobs. For example, between 1965 and 1970, the value added of the industrial sector increased with an annual rate of 10 per cent, while the workforce in the industrial sector only increased by 4.8 per cent per year (Levine and Uner, 1978:16). It is obvious that this was a period of ‘slow workerization’.
Because job opportunities, urban services, and infrastructure facilities did not develop fast enough to absorb these ex-peasants, the heavy migratory flow from the countryside contributed to the emergence of strikingly visible subcultures in the big cities, mainly developing through the social and economic segregation of the migrants in the city life environment. These migrants created their own adjustment strategies to cope with city life. They created their own jobs in so- called informal economies7. They responded to critical housing shortages by occupying land illegally and building squatter housing, called gecekondu which means ‘housing built overnight’. While over 4 million people, or more than one quarter of the total urban population, lived in the squatter areas during the early 1970s, in the case of Ankara alone almost two-thirds of its population lived in gecekondu (see Table 2.4).
7 For instance, some occupational categories were peculiar to the new urban formation in Turkey, such as kapici (apartment caretaker), degnekci (parking lot attendant), ayakkabi boyacisi (shoe-shine boy), sucu (water seller), or dolmus driver (the dolmus is a privately owned vehicle — usually mini-bus — similar to a taxi but hired up to eight or ten people at one time). On the formation of informal sectors see Kuran (1980:350).
Table 2.4: Squatter housing in the eight big cities of Turkey, 1969
Per cent by city Per cent of squatter
population living units in total
City in squatter housing housing stock
Ankara 65 65 Istanbul 45 40 Izmir 35 25 Adana 45 49 Bursa 25 22 Samsun 36 41 Erzurum 35 40 Diyarbakir 20 13 Sources: Geray (1968:28)
2.2.2. Articulation with International Labour Migration
In the late 1950s, the Turkish economy faced some serious difficulties: balance of payments deficit, very high inflation rates, and the devaluation of the Turkish Lira in 1958. During and after this period, the displaced labour force became a burden on the economy. Despite the difficulty of obtaining exact figures on unemployments in Turkey for the period of the rural-urban exodus, some estimates put the number of open-underemployed^ as high as 2.5 million people in the mid- 1960s (Hershlag, 1968:303). With the inclusion of disguised underemployment^, this figure was over 3.5 million. When the impact of the high level of unemployment was felt in urban areas, in the beginning of the 1960s, Turkish development policy attempted to solve this problem in two ways (Kolan, 1975:139). First employment opportunities were created within the country; second, bilateral agreements with labour-scarce countries were entered into for the export of labour. The second choice, emigration, was largely incidental rather than an actively planned government policy. As a matter of fact, Turkey had already formed a labour pool out of which the labour scarce countries could draw.
8 The ‘unemployment’ is defined as the nonavailability of jobs for persons who are able and willing to work at the prevailing wage rate (Stiegeler, 1986:441-442).
9 The concept of ‘open-underemployment’ refers to the employment of workers in jobs that do not fully utilize their abilities or skills, either because of genered unemployment (any job is better than no job) or because of the rigidity of the labour market, making 'good jobs’ inaccessiable to some workers (Stiegeler, 1986:440).
10 The term ‘disguished underemployment’ means the unemployment of those who are willing and able to work, but who are not actively seeking employment. For instance, in a recession there would be housewives who would like to obtain jobs but who have no opportunity to do so; there would also be pupils who had originally intended to leave school, but who now continue their education since no vacancies are available (Stiegeler, 1986:111).
Before going into a detailed discussion on the process of workers’ emigration from Turkey, there is a need to look at the international background of this movement. With this purpose in mind we should turn to the post-war experience of Western Europe. After the end of World W ar II, and more particularly during the 1950s and 1960s, Western Europe experienced large-scale labour migration from the underdeveloped areas of the world such as the Mediterranean, North Africa, and South Asia. The migration of labour power within, or to, Europe was by no means a new phenomenon. As Castles and Kosack (1985), and later Portes and Bach (1985) show, the consolidation of capitalism as the dominant economic system in the last century and early in the present one was accompanied by the migration of peripheral peoples to fill the demand for labour in the newly industrializing countries. For instance, in 1886 there were more than a million migrant workers in France, and by 1907 there was a total of 800,000 in Germany. The intra-European labour migration was mostly characterized by the flow from less developed, rural areas of the continent such as Northern Italy, and Poland to industrializing areas like France, and Germany.
After 1945, migration to Western Europe was distinguished by two major characteristics: increasing numbers and changing (enlarging) geographical scope. Until the mid-1970s about 30 million people entered the labour market in Western Europe, mainly from Algeria, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia, Turkey, Yugoslavia, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. There is no doubt that this was one of the greatest population movements in human history, increasing the population of Western Europe by nearly 10 million as a result of net migration (Castles, 1984:1). Table 2.5 illustrates the development of migrant populations in seven West European countries for the period 1950-1980.
The dynamics and characteristics of international labour migration to Western Europe were complex and varied. Although each country involved in the mass population movement, either as a sending country or receiving one, is a special case, there was a framework common to the whole migration process. In the broadest terms, the entry of migrants started by 1945, gathered momentum in the fifties, expanded dramatically in the sixties and early seventies, and then ceased in the mid 1970s (see Table 2.5). The causes of the mass population movement are to be found, as addressed from a theoretical point of view in Chapter 1, in the functional polarity’