Interns and Infidels:

The Transformation of Work and Citizenship in Turkey

and the United States under Neo-liberalism 1
Kaan Agartan, Framingham State University, USA
Cedric de Leon, Providence College, USA

ABSTRACT
How do the dispossessed remain governable under economic insecurity? What explains the
persistence of work as a prerequisite to social rights in a time when fewer formal jobs exist?
Drawing on a comparison of Turkey and the United States since 1980, we demonstrate that
the neo-liberal state deploys different versions of the “work-citizenship nexus” to manage
both the shrinking minority who enjoy the benefits of full citizenship and the rest who struggle
to attain the rights and privileges of the formally employed. We find that neo-liberal state
practices comprise a dual movement. On the one hand, the state in both countries reorients
itself toward the market in welfare provision and the regulation of labour relations, capitalising
on precarious work structures to bring their populations into the fold of neo-liberal
governance. On the other hand, the state directly intervenes in disparate ways to manage those
who cannot make it in the market. While the American state uses tactics of mass incarceration
and deportation, the Turkish state opts for a blend of social conservatism and
authoritarianism. This dual movement of reorientation and direct intervention results in what
we call “tiered citizenship regimes” that facilitate the management of the population in each
case.

KEYWORDS
neo-liberalism; work; social citizenship; governmentality; Turkey; United States

Introduction
Macro-historical accounts typically frame neo-liberalism as an economic doctrine that
has exploded the Fordist mode of capital accumulation and in doing so deepened economic
inequality. Thus, Harvey (2007: 33–35) writes that neo-liberalism has dispossessed the poor
and working class, and redistributed wealth upwards through privatisation, regressive taxation
and international loans, among other tactics. Macro-historical analysis, however, is largely

1 The authors would like to thank Kevan Harris, Brendan McQuade, Jessica Dianne Cook, Michael

Rodriguez-Muñiz, Diana Graizbord, Aisalkyn Botoeva, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful
comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 220

silent on an important puzzle about the neo-liberal order: how do the dispossessed remain
governable under these conditions?
Scholars of governmentality have sought to fill that gap by moving beyond neo-
liberalism as an economic doctrine, and examining it instead as a technology for managing the
population. Many in this camp hold that citizenship is a means by which the state and other
actors render disgruntled individuals and collectivities more docile. However, there are at least
three problems with the literature. First, it side-lines neo-liberalism’s economic implications,
especially for the transformation of work, as a vehicle for the inculcation of docility. Collins
(2013: 4), for instance, warns that research on biosecurity has largely sidestepped questions of
job security. Second, we find that discursive regimes by themselves do not explain the urgency
with which marginalised subjects struggle to succeed in the neo-liberal order (Lordon, 2010).
The neo-liberal transformation of work has meant that full social citizenship ceases to be a
right and becomes instead a cut-throat competitive process. Third, the literature de-
emphasises what some have called the “authoritarian” turn in state practices since the 1970s,
which manages uncooperative subjects who either reject neo-liberalism or lack the social and
cultural capital to participate in it (Hall et al., 1978; Poulantzas, 1978). Failing to acknowledge
this nuance leads the governmentality literature to ignore how the “Workfare State” operates
to stabilise market-based patterns of domination (Jessop, 2002).
Focusing in this paper on the relationship between the transformation of work and
social citizenship, we seek to synthesise macro-historical approaches and the literature on
governmentality with the Marxist literature on state authoritarianism to examine neo-
liberalisation in Turkey and the United States (US). As we demonstrate below, the
transformation of work under neo-liberalism is experienced in a parallel fashion yet with
different manifestations in these two countries. It is within this framework that we interpret
neo-liberalism not simply as the transformation of capital accumulation, but also of the
conditions in which one makes claims to full citizenship.
Under Fordism, 2 people were citizens provided that they worked in the formal wage
sector. The social safety net was linked to work: one “paid into” unemployment insurance,
social security and other such programmes during one’s working life, and was therefore
entitled to draw on those funds in lean times and old age. Under neo-liberalism, stable, well-
paying, guaranteed formal-sector employment remains a prerequisite to social citizenship
rights, yet fewer and fewer such jobs exist. Moreover, the state reorients itself toward the
market in terms of welfare provision and the regulation of labour relations, leaving wage
earners to compete for unregulated, laborious, insecure, and poorly paid private-sector jobs.
Alongside this market reorientation, the neo-liberal state directly intervenes to manage those

2 Our comparison of Fordism and neo-liberalism does not focus on the assumed success or failure of
the two regimes in serving large segments of the population. We are well aware that, despite what it
claimed, Fordism did not serve the vast informal economy in Turkey, while the racial contradictions
of the New Deal excluded people of colour from social citizenship in the United States. Nor could
neo-liberalism uphold its claims, that the creative and productive capacity of the individual in the
market could trump the state in delivering social justice. The story we tell in this paper is about the big
paradigmatic shift in the pretensions of governance under these two regimes in capitalism.

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 221

who are either unable or unwilling to submit to the whip of the market. For these groups who
have no inclination to join the ranks of the “precariat” (Standing, 2011), the neo-liberal state
innovates methods ranging from incarceration and deportation to various forms of repression.
In this paper we aim to shed light on this seemingly paradoxical advance of the neo-
liberal state – unleashing market actors to take over the provision of the means of social
reproduction on the one hand, and intervening to contain the resistance and uncertainty
resulting from marketisation on the other. The Turkish and American experiences of this dual
movement of the neo-liberal state result in what we call “tiered citizenship regimes” 3 that
facilitate the management of their populations by symbolically and materially privileging
sectors that bow to the coercion of the market, and stigmatising and punishing sectors that do
not or cannot.
As we will discuss later, our choice of cases is by no means accidental. Turkey, our case
for the Global South, offers unique insight into the interventionist mode of the neo-liberal
state because market relations are institutionalised, often through direct intervention in labour
regulation and social welfare policies, as well as the repressive and socially conservative
practices of the government. Consequently, newly groomed working and middle classes enjoy
privileged access to full social citizenship, while others are cast out as “infidels”. By contrast,
in the United States, our case for the Global North, the promise of full citizenship as a member
of the middle class is felt most at the frontiers of the emerging gig economy, where the
unemployed must now go in the hope that successive internships and odd jobs will convert
into permanent full-time jobs.

Work, Citizenship and Governance

Despite immense academic interest, the question of governance in the face of growing
inequality and dispossession has been addressed within what we see as discreet inquiry
domains. While the literature on the transformation of work does not address the governance
of wage-earners through social citizenship, the literature on new conceptualisations of
citizenship remains indifferent to organisational changes in the world of work. In what follows,
we point out the provincial character of these separate areas of inquiry, and offer a synthesis
to address the question of maintaining social order in the face of growing disfranchisement.

Transformation of work under neo-liberalism

Within the growing sphere of neo-liberalism studies, there is no shortage of interest in
the transformation of work. The literature addresses a wide array of issues, including: the
impact of de-industrialisation on the rise of the flexible worker (Standing, 1999); technological

3 These different tiered citizenship regimes are distinct from what Esping-Andersen (1990) has called
“conservative” welfare states in Germany and elsewhere, in which economic resources are redistributed
differently based on one’s occupational status in the formal wage sector. In our account, the neo-liberal
state presides over an intensifying binary in the informal sector between the precariat on the one hand
and unruly surplus populations on the other.

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 222

advances and new forms of work organisation (Smith, 1997; Beck, 2000; Head, 2003); the rise
of non-standard employment patterns and wage systems (Tilly, 1996; Kalleberg, 2011); the
changing meanings of work in the face of growing exhaustion and alienation (Schor, 1993;
Sennett, 2000); the swelling ranks of the working poor (MacLeod, 2008; Juravich, 2009;
Ehrenreich, 2011); and the emergence of “white-collar sweatshops” (Fraser, 2002). Studies on
the Global South in particular address issues such as: subcontracting and export processing
zones (Heller, 2000; Sainz, 2000); labour control in the informal economy (Hanser, 2007;
Rocha, 2004; Roy, 2007); and gendered patterns of home-based production (Gopal, 2007;
Dedeoglu, 2008; Beneria, 2010).
Despite its extensive scope, the literature is often silent on the implications of the
transformation of work for broader questions of governance. Two notable exceptions bear
mention, however. Bob Jessop (2002) focuses on the metamorphosis of the welfare state into
a new form in which social policy is subordinated to economic policy, resulting in downward
pressure on the social wage. Similarly, Colin Crouch’s (2011) approach to financialisation as a
disciplinary mechanism that compels low- and middle-income American workers to adapt to
the uncertainties of the neo-liberal economy provides a useful context for our discussion.
Incorporating the wider angle that Jessop and Crouch provide, we examine the ways
through which different strategies and modes of governance in the world of work take shape
in tiered citizenship regimes for stabilising, normalising and disguising relations of social
domination. This in turn guides us toward the literature on citizenship and governmentality.

Market citizenship and governmentality

Recently, scholars have turned their attention to a market-based notion of citizenship.
This holds that one’s rights ought to be commensurate with one’s success in the market, and
that citizenship entails only the protection of the individual pursuit of self-interest (Somers,
2001; Root, 2007). Though the concept of “market citizenship” helps us to understand how
citizenship is increasingly commodified, it stops short of explaining how those who cannot
make it in the market, are governed by the neo-liberal state. This limitation can be overcome
with the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, which centres on the discourse and exercise
of freedom, citizenship and rights as technologies of power. In this tradition, citizenship
becomes a mechanism through which the state convinces people to regulate their own conduct
(Foucault, 1991 [1979]). Thus, for Rose (1999, 2007), the discourse and practice of freedom
entails a code of conduct that serves as a checklist of civility and normality. A different take is
Aihwa Ong’s (1999: 217, 2006: 5–7) concept of flexible citizenship, according to which states
make divergent investments in different sectors of the population, conferring the privileges of
citizenship on “one gender over the other, and in certain kinds of human skills, talents, and
ethnicities”.

Towards a new approach: the work–citizenship nexus and the authoritarian

turn
To the extent that scholars of governmentality address work, they focus principally on
the discourse of work as a requirement of citizenship that cultivates a culture of self-blame

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 223

among the poor in a system where there is simply not enough work to go around. Yet the
approach fails to highlight both the ways through which the transformation of work itself
produces a more docile population, and the authoritarian practices of the neo-liberal state vis-
à-vis those who are unable or unwilling to brave the emerging economy.
In his work on post-apartheid South Africa, Franco Barchiesi (2011) points out that the
capacity of formal-sector work to act as a source of social citizenship is in steady decline for
many people, who are left fully responsible for their own predicament. Policies such as
“reskilling”, “self-activation”, “marketability”, and “workfare” then “operate at a
‘micropolitical’ level as institutional injunctions and pedagogical devices to promote virtuous
citizenship intended as individual spirit of enterprise” (Barchiesi, 2011: 10).
The Marxist literature on state authoritarianism theorises direct state intervention into
sectors of the population that are either socially excluded from the market or mutinous with
respect to neo-liberalism. For example, Stuart Hall and his associates (1978: 218) argued that
in 1970s Britain the state employed the fictive epidemic of mugging in urban centres to justify
an authoritarian state response to the crisis of Labourist capitalism, signalled by the mass
uprisings of the 1960s. Poulantzas (1978: 204, 220) similarly observed the emergence of
“authoritarian statism” in the 1970s, which he defined as “intensified state control over every
sphere of socio-economic life combined with radical decline of the institutions of political
democracy and with draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called ‘formal’ liberties”
(emphasis in the original).
In this paper, we bring together Barchiesi, Hall and Poulantzas to theorise the practices
of the neo-liberal state in Turkey and the US. First, we argue that far from dispensing with the
Fordist work requirement for access to social citizenship rights, the neo-liberal state in fact
applies it relentlessly so that only a shrinking minority can still claim social benefits. Whether
by laying the legal groundwork for precarisation (as in Turkey), or by giving market actors
licence to precaritise further (as in the US), the neo-liberal state reorients itself toward the
market in welfare provision and labour regulation. But secondly, we point out that for those
who are unable or unwilling to participate in their own subordination, the neo-liberal state
forcefully intercedes with other strategies, ranging from adopting a conservative and religious
rhetoric to demonising collective protest. It is the variations of this simultaneous reorientation
and intervention of the neo-liberal state in Turkey and the US that guide our approach to
theorising how contemporary changes in the world of work manifest themselves in “tiered
citizenship regimes” and become effective strategies of governance in the face of deepening
social inequality.

The Logic of Comparison

But why compare the United States and Turkey? The two cases are undoubtedly
different, yet their differences comprise a strength for the analysis of the relationship between
work, citizenship and governmentality. Our choice of the two countries is not arbitrary as each
offers unique insights into the dual nature of the neo-liberal state in the Global North and
Global South. They demonstrate how the transformation of work in each case engenders

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 224

particular strategy constellations to produce a tiered citizenship regime that renders a given
population governable. The analysis below will demonstrate that the Turkish and American
experiences reveal clearly the variety of ways through which the neo-liberal state manages its
population utilising the work–citizenship relation.
The US, as the centre and main engine of global capitalism, best exemplifies how the
livelihoods of a growing number of able-bodied unemployed or underemployed workers in
the Global North are becoming more dependent on the market status of their jobs under neo-
liberalism. The analysis of the US suggests that workers in the Global North who possess
devalued skill sets are exposed to an increasing risk of unemployment or precarious jobs
(Andersen and Jensen, 2002: 4), whereas secure and stable jobs that have social benefits are
being reserved for the shrinking minority of core employees (Standing, 2009: 41). Here, the
reorientation of the neo-liberal state towards unfettered market forces to determine who is
rewarded and who is disciplined can be observed unambiguously.
On the other hand, Turkey’s private-sector-led industrialisation since the 1980s
demonstrates how the “bifurcation of the global labour force” (McMichael, 2012: 88)
manifests itself in the form of more semi-skilled and unskilled labour concentrating in the
Global South. Similar to many emerging economies, Turkey has adopted a subcontractor role
for producing low-value, labour-intensive consumer or intermediate goods in buyer-driven
commodity markets (Kutlu, 2012). This has deepened insecurity and precariousness in mostly
family-owned, export-oriented, small and medium-sized enterprises located in socially
conservative regions of the country (Durak, 2011). Turkey’s experience with neo-liberalism
puts in stark relief the neo-liberal state’s advances in constituting a framework of social
regulation. This has been achieved mainly by recruiting different sectors of the population to
social conservatism, and in garnering ideological support to shore up a new citizenship regime.
With its new conservative breed of working and middle classes groomed by the AKP
government, along with the new outcasts of the society who are increasingly dependent on
government assistance for their survival, Turkey offers a distinct instance of the interventionist
character of the neo-liberal state.
Thus a careful comparison of the Turkish and American experiences of the
transformation of work helps to understand the development of precarious employment
patterns both in the Global North and Global South, and their far-reaching social and political
implications. The governability of the dispossessed in the United States is secured primarily
through precarious work structures imposed by the market, while the state keeps in the
background coercive disciplinary tactics of incarceration and deportation to contain those who
are unwilling or unable to fit in. In Turkey a distinct docility is inculcated primarily through
the unilateral restructuring of the labour market and a top-down imposition of social
conservatism by the neo-liberal state, while market-induced precarity operates in the
background.
In the following section we offer a closer examination of these cases with respect to
how changes in the world of work help to render their populations governable under a
transformed citizenship regime defined by a unique balance of direct state intervention and
market reorientation.

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 225

The Transformation of Work and New Citizenship Regimes
Turkey and the United States have experienced distinct yet related transformative
processes in their work structures in the last few decades. In the US, the neo-liberal state has
primarily enabled market forces to govern wage earners through the very structure of emerging
precarious work patterns. In Turkey, on the other hand, we observe the neo-liberal state in the
foreground, creating the conditions for precarisation. The resulting tiered citizenship regimes,
which are increasingly in tune with the logic of the market, are accompanied by unique yet
complementary authoritarian practices in the background.

The transformation of work in the American economy

We observe the rise of two types of work that are available to the unemployed and
underemployed in the gig economy: unpaid or low-wage internships, and “distributed
workforce” jobs in crowdsourcing firms like Uber and TaskRabbit. Novel relations of
employment within these types facilitate the management of the American population in a
context of high unemployment.
The situation of those actively seeking employment is the first empirical aspect of our
notion of tiered citizenship, in which the state continues to shield the shrinking ranks of the
gainfully employed from the vicissitudes of the market, while leaving the rest to fend for
themselves. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the poorest fifth of American
households consumed 54 per cent of social benefits in 1979; today they consume only 36 per
cent, while the lion’s share goes towards “maintaining the middle class from childhood
through retirement” (Appelbaum and Gebeloff, 2012: 1). After welfare reform became law
under the Clinton administration, the amount of cash payment to welfare recipients decreased
dramatically from $20.4 billion in 1996 to $9.6 billion in 2011 (Congressional Budget Office,
2011; Appelbaum and Gebeloff, 2012; Luhby, 2012).
In turn, the jobless must negotiate a terrain of low-wage or unpaid, insecure employment
due to the state’s simultaneous market orientation in the provision of welfare benefits and
regulation of labour relations. The effect of this shift in state practices has been to essentially
privatise unemployment relief. As an investigative reporter for Businessweek observed of
distributive workforce firms, “These companies may be building something significant: a
uniquely American safety net for the unemployed or underemployed, who can now have
somewhere to turn when they need money” (Stone, 2012). When they arrive in the private
sector, the unemployed are organised and managed in various ways: as interns by the promise
of a permanent white-collar job and as task rabbits by smartphone apps and the prospect of
micro-entrepreneurship.

Interns
The National Association of Colleges and Employers estimates that nearly half of
internships are unpaid and that about three-quarters of all college students will have worked
in an internship by graduation. This marks a shift in the pervasiveness and character of

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 226

internships: in 1980, only 3 per cent of undergraduates worked as interns. Further, internships
were once primarily training programmes, but they now appear to also be used as a source of
cheap labour. Tens of thousands of unpaid internships are actually illegal, because many are
not proper work-cooperative programmes and must therefore pay the statutory minimum
wage (Perlin, 2011).
The primary disciplinary feature of intern work is the hope for a full-time job either with
the host employer or with a future employer, who, workers hope, will be impressed with the
job experience that internships provide. Of course, this does not always occur. Despite
likening internships to “slavery” and having done seven of them in a row, Ivellise Morales, a
veteran of seven internships, continued to believe that work experience was the key to her
future employment: employers, she says, are “going to care what you’ve done in the past”
(Perlin, 2011; Sachs, 2011; NACE, 2012).
The hope that an internship will convert to a full-time position is animated by at least
two factors. The first is youth unemployment, which is at an all-time high of 20 per cent for
men and women aged 16 to 24. One indicator of the severity of youth unemployment is
“prolonged adolescence”: whereas in 1970 approximately 10 per cent of young adults lived at
home, the present-day figure is double that. The second factor is the discourse of “human
capital”, which is pervasive in corporate America. Coined by Gary Becker, human capital
theory suggests that an investment like a college education or internship sets the stage for
future benefits. Together, the prospect of joblessness and the imperatives supplied by human
capital theory keep young people compliant and coming back for more (Perlin, 2011: 128,
135).

The distributed workforce

In what industry insiders call “the distributed workforce”, web companies auction off
laborious one-time chores that workers then bid on or accept. Examples include Uber, which
crowdsources taxi rides, TaskRabbit, which auctions off odd jobs (e.g., weeding,
housecleaning), Mechanical Turk, which outsources online microtasks (e.g., tweets), and
Postmates, which assigns courier services (e.g., delivering sandwiches, coffee, groceries).
Again, a key disciplinary mechanism is the structure of the work itself. Companies using
Amazon’s online outsourcing marketplace, Mechanical Turk, pay workers anywhere from
nothing, to virtual currency, to $2 per Human Intelligence Task (HIT). Apart from the fact
that workers are classified as independent contractors and are therefore not subject to
minimum wage laws, companies are able to outsource for free because the rate of pay and
access to plum jobs increases with the number of HITs under one’s belt. An unpaid HIT is
incentive enough to perform a task.
In other cases, the work is organised by smartphone apps. For example, Postmates,
which bills itself as “Fedex within a city”, offers customers an app called Get It Now, which
they can download and use to have items delivered to them. Postmates broadcasts the job via
smartphone to couriers, who must hit “accept” before anyone else does to win the job. The
courier then has one hour to buy the goods with a company-issued debit card and deliver
them. Because smartphones have GPS technology, employers can keep track of workers’

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 227

whereabouts, while a timer on the phone ticks away the seconds.
Distributed workforce companies often construct a game-like environment. Reporting
on TaskRabbit, Wired Magazine writes, “To keep the rabbits scampering, the site employs some
serious game mechanics. A leaderboard ranks the top runners, displaying the level that each
has achieved and their average customer review” (Tsotsis, 2011). Another disciplinary
mechanism is discursive: distributed workforce jobs are framed as middle-class positions that
are flexible and entrepreneurial. Leah Busque, who started and runs TaskRabbit, says, “We are
enabling micro-entrepreneurs to build their own business on top of TaskRabbit, to set their
own schedules, specify how much they want to get paid, say what they are good at, and then
incorporate the work into their lifestyle” (Stone, 2012: 1). On the “Become a TaskRabbit”
page of the company’s website, various testimonials suggest that workers have internalised the
entrepreneurial spirit and flexibility articulated by the organisation.

The transformation of work in the Turkish economy

Although the roots of neo-liberalism in Turkey predate the Justice and Development
Party (AKP) government, it has taken significant steps to transform the “ecology of
employment” in Turkey in order to facilitate the institutionalisation of a new accumulation
strategy that courts the needs of a burgeoning export-oriented private sector (Yucesan-
Ozdemir and Ozdemir, 2008: 100–117). Unlike the US, where market forces are at the
forefront, in Turkey it is direct state involvement that primarily guides the trajectory of
employment relations.

Changes in Social Security Mechanisms

In the wake of World War 2, Turkey created a highly fragmented and overburdened
social security system; by the early 1980s, it could reach only about half of the population
(Topak, 2012: 197–218). An “inegaliterian corporatist” welfare regime (Bugra and Adar, 2008)
emerged when informal mechanisms emerged to complement the formal ones. These include
family networks connecting migrant families to their relatives in rural areas, clientelist
recruiting practices utilising ethnic and sectarian connections, and patronage relationships in
which local political elites often turned a blind eye to illegal activities.
The dissolution of the agricultural sector and the forced relocation of the Kurdish
population from eastern parts of the country intensified the migration from rural to urban
areas throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This severely strained the capacity of the urban
industrial sector to absorb the incoming workforce. Moreover, urban transformation
programmes and the formalisation of the real estate market under the pressure of global capital
made illegal housing on state land almost impossible. Traditional social protection mechanisms
“have lost their significance as it has become increasingly difficult for [the new immigrants] to
settle in the same neighbourhood with their family members and co-locals” (Bugra and
Keyder, 2006: 220).
In response to the emerging crisis, the AKP government began implementing

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 228

comprehensive social welfare reform in the areas of health, pensions and social assistance. 4
These changes were deeply influenced by the neo-liberal paradigm centred on privatisation,
marketisation and commodification of social services (Yucesan-Ozdemir and Ozdemir, 2008;
Cosar and Yegenoglu, 2009). Any form of social support for able-bodied adults was to be
conditional on participation in productive activity, since unconditional grants were believed to
foster dependency. The government adopted policies to mobilise civil society, delegating the
responsibility of addressing poverty and social exclusion to mostly religious charity
organisations with close ties to local governments that were expected (and redesigned) to act
as “charity brokers” (Bugra and Keyder, 2006: 224). Social welfare policies have often been
implemented within the party’s conservative framework, granting legal flexibility to loyal
philanthropic organisations for collecting donations, and utilising patronage networks to
compel the recipients of these services to its moral and cultural outlook (Kayaalp, 2015: 118).
Moreover, the AKP has often encouraged “volunteer citizens” to assume the role of social
workers and help those in need, which can be seen as yet another sign of the party’s socially
conservative neo-liberal agenda that aims to institute a social welfare model which minimises
the role of the state in tackling poverty (Eroglu, 2013).

Changes in Labour Legislation

While the reorganisation of the social security system had a significant impact on the
lives of wage-earners and their families, changes in the legal sphere of employment became an
even more critical factor in their precarisation. In the 1980s and 1990s, Turkey had witnessed
suppression of fundamental labour rights, sharp declines in wages and the expansion of the
informal economy. But it was only under AKP rule since 2002 that critical steps were taken
towards profoundly restructuring employment relations. The introduction of legal changes
rendered employment relations more flexible, enforcing restrictions on the rights of public
sector employees to organise, strike and bargain collectively. Privatisation and the
accompanying surge in lay-offs in state-owned enterprises were followed by the withdrawal of
employment-based entitlements, leaving workers increasingly at the mercy of the market.
The new labour law in 2003 (article 4857) was a milestone in instituting new practices.
The law introduced language that makes it easier for companies to offer their employees fixed-
term contracts, with significant limitations on the eligibility for pensions, health insurance and
other benefits (Koc, 2006: 40–44). Under the new law, companies with less than thirty
employees (an increase from ten) are not obligated to provide a legitimate reason, such as
economic hardship or disciplinary issues, for the termination of a labour contract. According
to a recent analysis, nearly 50 per cent of all workers in Turkey are no longer eligible for legal
employment security under the new law (Oker, 2014). Moreover, businesses facing bankruptcy

4 The extensive reform package included the establishment of universal health insurance managed
under a single agency, the restructuring of social assistance and services in terms of eligibility and
benefit schemes, the reform of the pension system by creating a single system and recalculating
retirement age and benefits, and unifying existing separate social security schemes under one centralised
Social Security Institution (Yakut-Cakar, 2007).

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 229

can employ workers for short terms, during which they are not obligated to pay social security
contributions. The employment contract can now be scripted to enable employers to easily
outsource parts of their core and peripheral tasks, and implement more flexible hiring practices
(Kutlu, 2012).
In 2011 a new set of regulations was introduced regarding the employment criteria for
interns, overtime work, shared work, telework and work from home. Under the new legislation
(article 6111), companies can now lease their employees to other companies for fixed terms
up to eighteen months. During this time, workers receive their wages from the leasing
company, and are not eligible for the benefits the hiring company offers to its own workers.
The language of the legislation is ambiguous with respect to the number and duration of
leasing, making it harder for workers to convert their temporary positions into permanent
ones. In other words, article 6111 has transformed Turkey into a gig economy in utero.
As a result of these legal changes, the official number of workers in subcontractor firms
increased from approximately 400 000 in 2002 to more than 1.6 million in 2012 (SSI, 2012).
The rise in the number of temporary workers from 1988 to 2010, and especially in the last
decade, is no less remarkable (see Goztepe, 2012). The government is reportedly working on
a new draft bill which further curtails job security for public servants, and subjects them to
performance criteria in order “to be able to distinguish ‘efficient’ employees from the
‘inefficient’” (T24.com, 2012). More recently, the government announced that it was preparing
to propose new legislation that would expand the scope of subcontracting relationships in
various sectors of the economy (Alp, 2014). All these steps reveal a clear move towards
instituting a legal framework which expands flexible, temporary and insecure employment
relations.

Governing through tiered citizenship regimes

Although the US and Turkey experience neo-liberalism in distinct ways, in both cases
precarisation processes become a form of social discipline and a technology for governing
disfranchised citizens. What seems to be taking place in both societies is a profound change
in the perception of the meaning of life and work, what to expect from the future, and the
state’s responsibility in the welfare of its citizens. What we have discussed so far reveals that
social citizenship is still strongly tied to wage employment in the US, yet the formal sector
itself is being supplanted by a gig economy that can only offer a highly precarious wage-earning
experience. The commodification of social services and the erosion of labour rights in Turkey
at the hands of the state bring about a similar outcome, where wage-earners become
increasingly dependent on the labour market despite the scarcity in stable and secure jobs in
the formal economy.
While the situation of interns and task rabbits is the result of the neo-liberal state’s
reorientation to the market, the story does not end there. The dual nature of the neo-liberal
state is fully exposed when groups with insufficient social and cultural capital to compete at
the margins of the formal wage sector, or those whose voice is silenced to prevent the
disclosure of their deteriorating rights and working conditions, are subject to aggressive
intervention by the same state. In other words, the emerging citizenship regimes are not simply

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 230

determined by unfettered market forces or by the state’s market orientation, but also by its
coercive practices, which often operate in the background.
One primary form of intervention in the US is mass incarceration. Loïc Wacquant (2002,
2009) links this particularly racialised governance practice to neo-liberalism. For him, mass
incarceration emerges as a technology for managing this unmarketable sector of the surplus
population, which he refers to as “the precarious and deproletarianised fractions of the black
working class” (Wacquant, 2009: xvi). Gilmore (2007: 111–112) corroborates this claim in the
case of California where the incarcerated population comprises growing numbers of the
precariously employed: “The percentage of prisoners who worked six months or longer for
the same employer immediately before being taken into custody has declined, from 54.5
percent in 1982 to 44 percent in 2000”. To be clear, then, those sectors of the population who
are disciplined via mass incarceration are both those who lack social capital to gain entry into
the precariat (as in Wacquant), and those who give up in favour of extra-legal forms of survival
(as in Gilmore).
Gilmore’s work is a fitting segue to another aggressive technique of managing the
surplus population under neo-liberalism, for among her core observations is that Latinos have
surpassed blacks as the plurality of California inmates. This, she argues, is due to the fact that
Latinos, stereotypically cheap labour though they are, have become increasingly disposable on
the lower rungs of the formal-sector ladder (Gilmore, 2007: 111). Drawing on this observation
and the work of Tanya Golash-Boza (2012), we argue that the neo-liberal state manages
Latinos in the surplus population by 1) deporting immigrants en masse; and 2) sustaining,
through draconian policy, a cheap deportable labour force in selective sectors of the economy.
In this respect, mass deportation is intimately connected to precarious work in certain low-
wage industries. De Genova (2005) argues that current immigration policy “serves to create a
deportable migrant labour force”, which ensures that some migrants will be deported but the
majority will remain as socially marginal and vulnerable workers (cited in Golash-Boza, 2012:
149).
The management of the immigrant surplus population through both deportation and
deportability is further expanded by related policies (most famously by Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals, or DACA) that generate and keep tabs on “liminally legal” immigrants:
those who are legally allowed to work in the United States but are unable to access political
and social citizenship rights (Menjivar, 2006; Cebulko, 2013). In this way, the neo-liberal state
“creates and recreates an excluded population and ensures its vulnerability and precariousness
by blurring the boundaries of legality and illegality to create grey areas of incertitude”
(Menjivar, 2006: 1002).
In Turkey, in order to maintain stability and order among discontented populations, the
AKP government not only carries out social redistribution through singling out “loyal
recipients” according to their ideological and religious orientation, but it also actively defines
the “virtuous worker-citizen” through imposing an authoritarian and socially conservative
agenda, which is best typified by its dealings with strikes and workplace accidents.
For more than a decade now, the AKP government has framed strikes as
“irresponsible”, “irrational” and a “threat” to national unity, propped up by “foreign powers”.

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 231

This strong nationalist and religious rhetoric brands protesting workers as “un-citizens”, and
presents them as puppets of unpatriotic and marginal political forces, or as moochers on the
national patrimony. The nationalist ideology in this context serves as an authoritative vehicle
to impose the market logic on workers by demonising their collective rights and presenting
them as contrary to “national interests” (Altan-Olcay, 2011: 62). This image of dissenting
workers as a lazy, undeserving mob exploiting the public’s wealth is often used to put them
against “the people”, the nation of “desirable worker-citizens” who are self-reliant,
industrious, obedient and grateful. Here, a “two-nation project” emerges in which “an
entrepreneur, active, responsible and hard-working citizen is clashed with irresponsible,
selfish, and lazy outsiders, therefore drawing the boundary between inside and outside,
between us and them” (Yedekci, n.d.: 11–12).
One such instance was in 2010 when the privatisation of TEKEL, the former state-run
alcohol and tobacco producer, led to the dismissal of hundreds of workers, for whom the
government wanted to introduce a temporary status with severe pay cuts and diminished
benefits. The workers, who initiated a 78-day protest campaign against the proposal, were
dismissed by the then prime minister Tayyip Erdogan as “instruments of opposition parties
and marginal organizations” (Today’s Zaman, 2010). He depicted the protesting workers as
“unneeded, redundant people”, accusing them of “infringing on [his] orphans’ rights”. By
doing so, Erdogan was drawing a clear line between the “deserving citizens” and “undeserving
and greedy individuals”, reminding the latter that they were bordering on becoming
“criminals” for working against the interests of the nation. The violence towards the workers
was not always symbolic: they were pepper-sprayed, dispersed with water cannons and harshly
beaten by the police (BBC Turkish Service, 2010).
Another example of the government’s authoritarianism and social conservatism
occurred in May 2014 when 301 miners were killed in an explosion in a coal mine in Soma, a
small town in Western Turkey. Before the accident, the owner of the mine, which was
privatised in 2005, reportedly took pride in lowering the cost of production from $120 per ton
to approximately $20 after taking over the company (Yeldan, 2014). Motivated by high returns,
subcontractors undertaking various critical tasks in the mine did not pay sufficient attention
to safety regulations (HaberVS.com, 2014). The resulting unsafe working conditions
deteriorated even further when the government rejected a number of parliamentary inquiries
into the company’s repeated failure to pass safety inspections – the most recent of which was
just two weeks before the explosion (Verstraete, 2014). 5
The government’s response to the tragedy was emblematic of its style in handling work-
related issues. Right after the incident, Erdogan argued that accidents like this one were takdir-
i ilahi (divine will) and happened all the time. He reminded the public that it was in the nature

5 While a tragic incident of such proportions is rare, Turkey has the highest rate of worker deaths in

the world (Eissenstat, 2014). The country’s poor record of industrial safety has in fact been a part of
Turkey’s recent “impressive” economic growth under AKP rule. According to the International
Labour Organisation, a total of 12 686 workers lost their lives due to work accidents in Turkey between
2000 and 2012 (Yildiz, 2014).

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 232

of this particular profession that accidents were unavoidable and unforeseeable (Yildiz, 2014).
The choice of a divine cosmology to describe the incident is not difficult to spot as a distraction
from a sober critique of insufficient safety measures in the mine. But going even further, the
government deployed eighty imams (Muslim clerics) from around the province to defuse
public discontent. These imams were later joined – according to some reports – by another
500, along with only ten psychologists (Tremblay, 2014). While it is not unusual to have imams
pray for the deceased and to give sermons to their families, these imams were reported to have
also advised the locals not to protest, but to remain calm and listen to the elders and leaders
of the country (Tremblay, 2014). They were, in other words, officially charged to convince the
public that what had happened was an unavoidable accident and that death was the
unquestionable destiny of miners. In this way, the victims of the explosion were framed as the
collateral damage of economic progress, thereby exonerating the government from any
wrongdoing (Yildiz, 2014).
When these socially conservative messages failed to stave off public anger, the
government resorted to harsher tactics, such as cordoning off the town to block the entry of
civil society organisations and journalists. AKP delegations, including Erdogan himself, were
met with angry crowds when they visited the town. Protestors – many of them relatives and
friends of the victims – were dispersed by tear gas and water cannons, beaten by the police,
and arrested, not just in Soma but also in other parts of the country (Eissenstat, 2014; Links,
2014).

Conclusion
In this paper, we have attempted to theorise what happens when there is “a radical
dissociation between ‘work’ as experienced by the post-Fordist labour force, and a system of
social citizenship still rooted in the Fordist concept of work as a full-time, life-long experience”
(De Giorgi, 2007: 15). For a growing number of people, productive activities are no longer a
gateway to economic inclusion and full social integration. Yet, the puzzle of governability
under neo-liberalism is complex and can only be addressed adequately if a two-fold analysis
of the transformation of work and citizenship is taken into account. By bringing together
macro-historical studies of neo-liberalism, the governmentality literature, and Marxist theories
of state authoritarianism, our research reveals that a dual movement of simultaneous
reorientation and intervention by the neo-liberal state is taking place in distinct yet parallel
ways in the US and Turkey. In other words, the processes of dissociation and exclusion that
emerge as a result of the changes in work and employment structures are handled differently
in these societies. In the United States, the transformation of the work–citizenship nexus has
led to the reorganisation of labour relations through the precarious nature of emerging service-
sector jobs such as internships and crowdsourcing, which lack state-backed social protection.
When this strategy of state reorientation falls short in managing some sectors of the society, a
heavy-handed intervention in the form of incarceration and deportation occurs. In Turkey, on
the other hand, state-led changes in social security mechanisms and labour law aim to render
market relations primary in determining the fate of wage-earners. This is coupled with a strong

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 233

authoritarian and socially conservative rhetoric that brand dissidents as “un-citizens” or
mystifies the work process as part of an unquestionable, divine order. Though distinct in terms
of methods and consequences in each case, the dual character of the neo-liberal state in Turkey
and the United States produces tiered citizenship regimes to contain the growing ranks of the
dispossessed under neo-liberalism.

REFERENCES
Alp, A. (2014) Milyonlarca dDOÖûDQD%\NúRN[Big Shock to Millions of Employees]. Hurriyet
Daily, 28 May 2014. Available online at http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/ekonomi/
26491509.asp (accessed 4 August 2014).
Altan-Olcay, O. (2011) Reframing the Ideal Citizen in Turkey: National Belonging and
Economic Success in the Era of Neoliberalism. New Perspectives on Turkey, 44 (Spring): 41–
72.
Andersen, J.G. and P.H. Jensen (2002) Citizenship, Changing Labour Markets and Welfare
Policies: An Introduction. In Changing Labour Markets, Welfare Policies and Citizenship, edited
by J.G. Andersen and P.H. Jensen. Bristol: Policy Press.
Appelbaum, B. and R. Gebeloff (2012) Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on it.
New York Times, 11 February 2012. Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/
02/12/us/even-critics-of-safety-net-increasingly-depend-on-it.html?_r=3&pagewanted
=1& (accessed 23 October 2012).
Barchiesi, F. (2011) Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in
Postapartheid South Africa. Albany: SUNY Press.
BBC Turkish Service (2010) 7HNHO LûoLOHULQH $QNDUD
GD VHUW SROLV PGDKDOHVL [Harsh Police
Intervention to Tekel Workers in Ankara], 2 April 2010. Available online at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/turkce/haberler/2010/04/100401_tekel.shtml (accessed 18 June
2014).
Beck, U. (2000) The Brave New World of Work. Cambridge: Polity.
Beneria, L. (2010) Globalization and Gender: Women’s Labour in the Global Economy. In
Globalization in the 21st Century: Labour, Capital, and the State on a World Scale, edited by B.
Berberoglu. New York: Palgrave.
Bugra, A. and S. Adar (2008) Social Policy Change in Countries without Mature Welfare States:
The Case of Turkey. New Perspectives on Turkey, 38 (Spring): 83–106.
Bugra, A. and C. Keyder. (2006) The Turkish Welfare Regime in Transformation. Journal of
European Social Policy, 16(3): 211–228.
Cebulko, K. (2013) Documented, Undocumented, and Liminally Legal: Legal Status During
the Transition to Adulthood for 1.5-Generation Brazilian Immigrants. Sociology Quarterly,
55: 143–167.
Collins, J. (2013) The Birth of Biosecurity? New Left Review, 81 (May-June): 145–153.
Congressional Budget Office (2011) Trends in the Distribution of Household Income

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 234

 Between 1979 and 2007. Available online at http://www.cbo.gov/publication/42729
(accessed 23 October 2012).
Cosar, S. and M. Yegenoglu (2009) The Neoliberal Restructuring of Turkey’s Social Security
System. Monthly Review, 60 (11, April). Available online at
http://monthlyreview.org/2009/04/01/the-neoliberal-restructuring-of-turkeys-social-
security-system (accessed 9 September 2016).
Crouch, C. (2011) The Strange Non-death of Neo-liberalism. Cambridge: Polity.
De Giorgi, A. (2007) Toward a Political Economy of Post-Fordist Punishment. Critical
Criminology, 15: 243–265.
Dedeoglu, S. (2008) Women Workers in Turkey: Global Industrial Production in Istanbul. London and
New York: Tauris.
Durak, Y. (2011) Emegin Tevekkulu [The Submission of Labour]. Istanbul: Iletisim.
Ehrenreich, B. (2011) Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. New York: Picador.
Eissenstat, H. (2014) 3 Reasons Amnesty is Concerned about Turkey’s Mining Disaster.
Amnesty International USA. Available online at http://blog.amnestyusa.org/europe/3-
reasons-amnesty-is-concerned-about-turkeys-mining-disaster (accessed 22 July 2014).
Eroglu, D. (2013) Sosyal Refah Devletinden Gonullu Vatandas Kalkinmaciligina [From the
Welfare State to Volunteer Citizen Developmentalism]. Birikim - Guncel <D]ÖODU, 4 May
2013. Available online at http://www.birikimdergisi.com/birikim/makale.aspx?mid
=943&makale=Sosyal+Refah+Devletinden+%22G%F6n%FCll%FC+Vatanda%FE%2
2+Kalk%FDnmac%FDl%F0%FDna (accessed 5 August 2014).
Esping-Andersen, G. (1990) Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity.
Foucault, M. (1991 [1979]) Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect, edited by G. Burchell, C.
Gordon and P. Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fraser, J.A. (2002) White Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Reward in Corporate
America. New York: Norton.
Gilmore, R.W. (2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Golash-Boza, T. (2012) Immigration Nation: Raids, Detentions, and Deportations. Boulder and
London: Paradigm.
Gopal, M. (2007) Revisiting Gendered Home-based Work in the Context of Reforms. In
Labour, Globalization and the State, edited by D. Banerjee and M. Goldfield. Oxford and
New York: Routledge.
Goztepe, O. (2012) Yeni Donemin Satirbaslari [Headlines of the New Era]. In Guvencesizlestirme
[Insecuritization], edited by O. Goztepe. Ankara: Notabene.
HaberVS.com (2014) 6RPD
GDNLIDFLD\DDûÖUցUHWLPLVWHøLGDYHWL\HoÖNDUGÖ>2YHUSURGXFWLRQ
crave caused the disaster in Soma]. Available online at
http://www.habervesaire.com/site/tool/popup/news_print.php?id=2709 (accessed 22
July 2014).

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 235

Hall, S., C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the
State, and Law and Order. London: Macmillan.
Hanser, A. (2007) A Tale of Two Sales Floors: Changing Service-Work Regimes in China. In
Working in China: Labour and Workplace Transformations, edited by C.K. Lee. London:
Routledge.
Harvey, D. (2007) Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction. Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, 610: 22–44.
Head, S. (2003) The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Heller, P. (2000) The Labour of Development: Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala,
India. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Ivry, B., B. Keoun and P. Kuntz (2011) Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed
to Congress. Bloomberg Markets Magazine, 27 November 2011. Available online at
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-28/secret-fed-loans-undisclosed-to-
congress-gave-banks-13-billion-in-income.html (accessed 23 October 2011).
Jessop, B. (2002) The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Juravich, T. (2009) At the Altar of the Bottom Line: The Degradation of Work in the 21st Century.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Kalleberg, A. (2011) Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in
the United States, 1970s–2000s. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Kayaalp, E. (2015). Remaking Politics, Markets and Citizens in Turkey. London and New Delhi:
Bloomsbury.
Koc, Y. (2006) AKP Iscilere Nasil Zarar Veriyor [How does the AKP Harm Workers]? Istanbul:
Kaynak Yayinlari.
Kutlu, D. (2012) Turkiye Isgucu Piyasasinda Guncel Gelismeler ve Guvencesizlestirme
Oruntuleri [Contemporary Developments in the Turkish Labour Market and Patterns of
Insecuritization]. In Guvencesizlestirme [Insecuritization], edited by O. Goztepe. Ankara:
Notabene.
Links, J. (2014) 7KH 6RPD WUDJHG\ .DGHUH NDUûÖ  $JDLQVW )DWH. LeftEast, 17 May 2014.
Available online at http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/the-soma-tragedy-kadere-karsi-
against-fate (accessed 9 September 2015).
Lordon, F. (2010) Capitalisme, Désir et Servitude: Marx et Spinoza. Paris: La fabrique éditions.
Luhby, T. (2012) Welfare Spending Cut in Half Since Reform. CNN Money, 9 August 2012.
Available online at http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/09/news/economy/welfare-
reform/index.htm (accessed 23 October 2012).
MacLeod, J. (2008) Ain’t No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood.
Boulder, CO: Westview.
Marvit, M.Z. (2014) How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine. The
Nation, 5 February 2014. Available online at: http://www.thenation.com/article/178241/

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 236

 how-crowdworkers-became-ghosts-digital-machine?page=full# (accessed 13 February
2014).
McMichael, P. (2012) Development and Social Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Menjivar, C. (2006) Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants’ Lives in the
United States. American Journal of Sociology, 111(4): 999–1037.
National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) (2012) 2012 Internship and Co-op
Survey. Available online at www.naceweb.org (accessed 21 October 2012).
Oker, I. (2014) Reform in Labour Code in Turkey: Changing the Nature of Labour Market?
Research Turkey, 3(9): 16–43. Available online at http://researchturkey.org/?p=6831
(accessed 12 December 2014).
Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Ong, A. (2006) Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Perlin, R. (2011) Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy.
New York: Verso.
Postmates. [n.d.] [Online] Available at: http://postmates.com/apply (accessed 14 January
2014).
Poulantzas, N. (1978) State, Power, Socialism. New York: Verso.
Rocha, E.P.R. (2004) Effects of Globalization on the Workers of the Electronics Cluster in
Jalisco, Mexico. Research in the Sociology of Work, 13: 125–140.
Root, A. (2007) Market Citizenship: Experiments in Democracy. London and Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage.
Rose, N. (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Rose, N. (2007) Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Roy, S. (2007) Unorganized Manufacturing, Flexible Labour and the “Low Road”. In Labour,
Globalization and the State, edited by D. Banerjee and M. Goldfield. Oxford and New York:
Routledge.
Sachs, A. (2011) Intern Nation. Time, 12 September 2011. Available online at
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2091366,00.html (accessed 21
October 2012).
Sainz, J.P.R. (2000) From the Finca to the Maquila: Labour and Capitalist Development in Central
America. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Schor, J. (1993) The Overworked American. New York: Basic Books.
Sennett, R. (2000) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New
Capitalism. New York: Norton.

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 237

Smith, V. (1997) New Forms of Work Organization. Annual Review of Sociology, 23: 315–339.
Social Security Institution of the Republic of Turkey (SSI) (2012) Response to the
Parliamentary Motion (no. 7/9123) by Istanbul MP Mahmut Tanal, 19 September 2012.
Available online at http://www2.tbmm.gov.tr/d24/7/7-9123c.pdf (accessed 4 August
2014).
Somers, M.R. (2001) Romancing the Market, Reviling the State: Historicizing Liberalism,
Privatization, and the Competing Claims to Civil Society. In Citizenship, Markets, and the
State, edited by C. Crouch, K. Eder and D. Tambini. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press.
Standing, G. (1999) Global Labour Flexibility: Seeking Distributive Justice. New York: St. Martin’s.
Standing, G. (2009) Work After Globalization: Building Occupational Citizenship. Cheltenham, UK
and Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
Standing, G. (2011) The Precariat. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Stone, B. (2012) My Life as a Task Rabbit. Bloomberg Business Week, 13 September 2012.
Available online at http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-13/my-life-as-a-
taskrabbit (accessed 21 October 2012).
T24.com (2012) Memura Isguvencesi Kalkiyor! [Job Security for Public Servants is being
abolished!]. Available online at http://t24.com.tr/haber/memura-is-guvencesi-
kalkiyor,214791 (accessed 4 August 2014).
TaskRabbit. [n.d.] Become a TaskRabbit. Available online at https://www.taskrabbit.com/
become-a-taskrabbit (accessed 15 January 2014).
Tilly, C. (1996) Half A Job: Bad and Good Part-Time Jobs in a Changing Labour Market. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.
Today’s Zaman (2010) PM Erdogan: “We assumed positive stance towards TEKEL workers”.
Available online at https://www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_openPrintPage.action
?newsId=199342 (accessed 5 August 2014).
Topak, O. (2012) Refah Devleti ve Kapitalizm [Welfare State and Capitalism]. Istanbul: Iletisim.
Tremblay, P. (2014) AKP advice to Soma: Don’t protest, just pray. Al-Monitor, 19 May 2014.
Available online at: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/05/turkey-soma-
minedisaster-akp-prayer-advice.html (accessed 22 July 2014).
Tsotsis, A. (2011). TaskRabbit Turns Grunt Work into a Game. Wired Magazine. Available
online at http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/mf_taskrabbit (accessed 23
October 2012).
Verstraete, P. (2014) Turkey coalmine disaster: accident or murder? Roar Magazine, 14 May
2014. Available online at http://roarmag.org/2014/05/turkey-soma-coalmine-disaster
(accessed 22 July 2014).
Wacquant, L. (2002) From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the Race Question in
the U.S. New Left Review, 13 (Jan-Feb): 41–60.
Wacquant, L. (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham and

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 238

 London: Duke University Press.
Yakut-Cakar, B. (2007) Turkey. In Social Policy and International Interventions in South East Europe,
edited by B. Deacon and P. Stubbs. Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
Yedekci, A. [n.d.] Governing Through Insecurities: Constituting the Neoliberal Citizen in
Turkey, the Case of Tekel Workers’ Resistance. Available online at
https://www.academia.edu/1619199/Governing_Through_Insecurities_Constituting_t
he_Neoliberal_Citizen_in_Turkey_the_Case_of_Tekel_Workers_Resistance (accessed 5
August 2014).
Yeldan, E. (2014) The Tragedy of the Soma Mine-Workers. Triple Crisis, 15 May 2014.
Available online at http://triplecrisis.com/the-tragedy-of-the-soma-mine-workers/print
(accessed 22 July 2014).
Yildiz, E. (2014) On Erdogan’s “Ordinary Things”: The Soma Massacre, the Spine Tower,
and the Corporate-State’s Fitrat in Turkey. Jadalliya, 18 May 2014. Available online at
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/17742/on-erdogan%E2%80%99s-
%E2%80%98ordinary-things%E2%80%99_the-soma-massacre-t (accessed 22 July
2014).
Yucesan-Ozdemir, G. and M. Ozdemir (2008) Sermayenin Adaleti [The Justice of Capital]. Ankara:
Dipnot.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
KAAN AGARTAN is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Framingham State University. His
authored and co-authored articles and reviews have appeared in Journal of Balkan and Near
Eastern Studies, Sociology Compass, European Journal of Turkish Studies, Journal of International Affairs,
New Perspectives on Turkey, and Capital and Class. He is the co-editor of Reading Karl Polanyi for the
Twenty-first Century: Market Economy as a Political Project (Palgrave, 2007). [E-mail:
[email protected]]
CEDRIC DE LEON is Chair and Associate Professor of Sociology at Providence College. He is
the author or co-editor of three books: The Origins of Right to Work (Cornell, 2015), Building Blocs
with Manali Desai and Cihan Tugal (Stanford, 2015), and Party and Society (Polity, 2014). His
research centres on the contradictions of liberal democracy, especially with respect to labour,
race and party politics. [E-mail: [email protected]]

Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(3), Page 239