Today, paid employment is becoming more and more precarious; the foundations of
the quasi-social welfare state of Turkey are collapsing; and old-age poverty, besides
new forms of poverty, is programmed in advance. Those who depend upon a wage or
salary in full-time work represent only a minority of the economically active population;
the majority earn their living in more precarious conditions. People are travelling
vendors, small retailers or craft workers. They offer all kinds of personal service or
shuttle back and forth between different fields of activity, changing from agricultural
activities to homeworking. This nomadic multi-activity is not a pre-modern relic but a
rapidly spreading variant in contemporary Turkey.
The consequence is that the more work relations are deregulated and flexibilised,
the faster work society (or semi-work society, as in the case of Turkey) changes into a
risk society, making incalculable risks in terms of individual lives. State intervention
takes the form of a legal/economic policy of regime transition. Yet, the destination of
this transformation is unclear. Under these conditions, one trend is clear: a majority of
people, even the middle classes, will live in endemic insecurity.
Against this background, this article analyses the dynamics of Turkey’s labour
market in the 2000s and tries to shed light on the conditions of endemic insecurity.