The labor movement

Abstract

Proletarianization in the Ottoman Empire came much later than in Europe. At the beginning of the 20th century, the percentage of paid workers among the labor force was around 1%, numbering around 200-300 thousand. To understand this quantitative picture, we should look at similar processes in England of the mid-19th century. In those days, there were 3.3 million workers in England, and 42% of the eligible population were employed in industry. Yet in Turkey, even during the 1960s, industrial employment was only around 10% whereas agricultural employment was close to 70%. The capitalist-industrial shift-and therefore the emergence of the working class-began quite late here and followed a different course compared to the Western path. During the state-managed industrialization of the republican era, the Turkish working class appeared more in the form of public workers. Another difference was the lack of a strong federalist-corporatist tradition in Turkey, unlike in the West. This caused a delay in the organized representation of the social classes and in the development of industrial relations.