In many regions of the world, womenâs work in export industries has been at the centre of interest since the early 1970s, and this interest has further grown with the world-wide trend of âfeminization of employmentâ. Although there is great variation in the degrees and forms of womenâs work from country to country, there is a strong association between womenâs employment and production for export. Turkey went through the process of export orientation of its economy and has registered a growing export performance since the early 1980s. However, womenâs work in export manufacturing remains highly invisible in the Turkish case, in the context of an overall decline in womenâs employment.
With the neoliberal turn in economic policies in the early 1980s, the garment industry became one of Turkeyâs most important export industries. The expansion of the industry is attributed to initial government support, the falling cost of labour, and the renewed capacity of the textile industry to support the rapid expansion in the manufacturing of ready-made garments.1 As elsewhere, the garment industry in Turkey draws heavily on womenâs labour, although womenâs contribution to the success of exports is largely invisible in official employment statistics. Women are the main suppliers of informal labour for the industry, through subcontracted and home-based piece-work. According to TurkStatâs Household Labour Force Survey, one-third of all home-based women workers were engaged in textiles-related work in 2016.
This chapter examines womenâs home-based piece-work in the Turkish garment industry and shows the gender inequalities that underlie the export success of the industry, wherein the organization of production and workplace relations embed and reproduce gender ideology and norms. Womenâs
1 Global Commodity Chains and Home-based Work
The commodity-chains approach has contributed to an understanding of the connections between global buyers and informal work in developing countries, and also offers a way of conceptualizing how labour market informalization affects women.2 Along the same lines, Carr, Chen, and Tate have pointed out that technological change has facilitated âlean retailingâ, which demands the âquick and timely supply of goods associated with the just in time inventory systemâ.3 The system is seen as a reason for the increase in home work in the garment sector, particularly in countries close to the main markets of Europe and North America, and points to how womenâs traditional informal work has been connected to the globalization of industrial production.
The increasing use of home-based work is associated with intensified global competition in industrial production, and with the drive of local exporters and producers to minimize costs and thus accumulate more capital. Home-based work is, therefore, linked to the international production system through a chain of dependent relations between multinational companies, their buyers, and local exporters, and between exporters and contractors and workers.
Although variations between countries exist, home-based work is an income-generating opportunity for low-income women in developing countries. Due to their limited mobility and the narrower range of options available to them in the labour market, married women especially make up the majority of the home-based workforce.5 Women do not leave the industrial labour force when they get married, but continue their income-generating activities at home by combining their domestic duties with home-based work.6 However, home-based work puts them in a vulnerable situation, as they hold very limited bargaining power to improve their working conditions. Also, subcontracting makes it very difficult to hold a single employer responsible for protecting workersâ rights due to the many layers of production chains.7 Thus, these home-based women workersâ earnings are lower than in the formal sector, and their employment is characterized by a lack of consistency of work contracts, difficult working conditions, and long hours of work.
Research has shown that gender norms and ideologies are instrumental in generating export success in developing countries. For example, Hsiungâs study of Taiwanâs âeconomic miracleâ shows how womenâs labour was drawn into export production in small-scale, family-centred, export-oriented satellite factories in local neighbourhoods.8 With factory production located either adjacent to or within family living quarters, proletarian men became small factory owners by harnessing the labour of wives, daughters, and women in the neighbourhood. Women may also use their informal work in the export industry as a
This paper contributes to the existing literature on womenâs home-based piece-work in Turkey by pointing to the major role of women in Istanbulâs garment industry and how this role ends up with an articulation of their subordinate position. It also shows that the mobilization of kinship relations has played a significant role in the integration of gender roles and ideologies into industrial production and in the social organization of garment production in Istanbul. More recent research on womenâs home-based piece-work in Turkey shows the continued importance of the garment industry in generating employment for women, and the ways in which the devaluation of womenâs work generates low-cost labour for the industry. In a study analysing why womenâs home-based work in Turkey remains invisible and hidden, Atasü-TopçuoÄlu10 identifies a process of deliberate obscuring and concealing of womenâs contributions whereby they gain neither public nor private recognition of their work. This is because women prioritize their roles as mothers and wives over their income-generating activities, which may signal that their husbands cannot provide for their families. Similarly, Balaban and SarioÄlu11 show that piece-workers regard themselves as housewives who just earn pazarparasi (money for weekly shopping at the bazaar). Although womenâs informal work is hidden and invisible in urban Turkey, these two studies also show that womenâs income-generating activities are an important source for the well-being of the family, helping to meet household expenses, pay bills and rent, and save money for childrenâs education. The next section of the chapter presents a description of the women who do piece-work in Istanbulâs garment industry and their working conditions.
2
The garment industry in Turkey is a classic example of decentralized production networks with the administrative centres of transnational corporations and international brand names playing a leading role in different segments of the commodity chains.12 The industry is organized to include different scales of production, whose connections and networks are based on subcontracting linkages. Representatives of international brands, integrated textile production factories, large-scale garment factories, and garment ateliers are the main constituents of garment production in Turkey. Mass and sweatshop production complement each other despite the great contrast between them in terms of market access, power, and competitiveness, as smaller and more informal businesses have less access to resources and markets with less decision-making power over production relations.13
An asymmetry between large and small firms governs the subcontracting relations wherein the small firms do not have control over the production process or power over the decision-making process. The findings in Istanbul show that large-scale producers have relatively more power over production processes as compared to small-scale firms, while ateliers are more dependent on orders coming from the large firms or international companies. Although orders are usually passed from large-scale firms to ateliers, horizontal subcontracting relations between ateliers are established if different specializations and skills are needed. For example, garment ateliers producing designer or branded products could subcontract to ateliers that do mainly ironing, packaging, and finishing of garments, or to ateliers acting as distributors of piece-work.
Underlying Turkeyâs garment export success are networks of subcontractors who help to reduce the fixed costs and provide lower labour costs. These networks not only exist between firms of different scales, but also extend to home-based garment workers. The majority of small-scale workshops operate informally without provision of decent working conditions and evade tax
Garment workshops stand at the heart of subcontracting chains providing backward linkages to factory production and enable the industry to reach untapped sources of low-wage women and children. The number of garment ateliers in Istanbul has recorded a phenomenal increase since the 1980s, most vividly observable in gecekondu neighbourhoods (shanty towns) where abundant cheap migrant labour is available.The location of workshops in basements and in gecekondu neighbourhoods allows workshop owners not only to take advantage of the low rents and low-wage labour in the area, but also to evade official inspections. Family ownership is a noticeable feature of these ateliers supported by family labour with the initial capital pooled through familial solidarity networks. Most of the ateliers specialized only in the sewing and trimming of parts of standardized products such as T-shirts and sweatshirts, while a few produced high-quality branded products requiring highly skilled labour and expertise in a certain aspect of production, such as embroidery, lacemaking, needlework, or stitching. The workshops were family businesses owned by men. The workers were immediate family members, more distant relatives, and neighbours, resulting in a high proportion of women working in these workshops.
Garment ateliers manufacture garments for export shaped by the demands of European and American fashion brand names. There are different categories of ateliers in Istanbul and they differ according to the type of market niche they serve. In table 5.1. we can see an outline of the features of these ateliers. A common underlying feature of all these ateliers is their reliance on the work of home-based piece-workers. Although reached in different ways, all the ateliers subcontract piece-work to women, and, in some cases, the number of piece-workers who work for ateliers could be higher than the number of those working in the atelier.
Garment ateliers in Istanbul
Ateliers working for brand-name exports |
Ateliers working for standard exports |
Ateliers working for domestic markets |
|---|---|---|
Specialized, quality-oriented products |
Production of standardized and simple products (T-shirts, sweatshirts) |
Lower quality than exported products |
Skilled and experienced labour |
Rapid shifts between different subcontractor firms |
More diversified product range |
Skilled labour |
Intensified utilization of family and kinship relations |
|
Greater extent of informalization |
Home-based work takes on three different forms in Turkey: piece-rated work (for an employer, subcontractor, or mediator), order-based work, and own account work.15 The first two forms are dependent on an employer or
3 Home-based Piece-work in Istanbulâs Garment Industry
Home-based work serves as a driver for the flexibility of the garment industry and its success in global competition. Gaining access to the labour of home-based workers and keeping them within the subcontracting network requires reaching out to the most secluded form of labour in Turkey, that of housewives, and opening the patriarchal lock of private households in the outskirts of Istanbul. The industry employs different strategies to attract home-based workers and retain their labour. This part of the paper identifies the main characteristics of Istanbulâs home-based workers and their role in global garment production.
4 Women as Piece-workers
Home-based women workers typically fall within the age range of 30â45 years, have lower levels of education (on average, five years of compulsory schooling), and are married with children. Piece-work is the main work opportunity for these middle-aged women with few qualifications and heavy child-care and domestic responsibilities. They belong to poorer households in their neighbourhoods, in terms of general levels of well-being. Women over the age of 45 are not preferred by intermediaries because speed at work decreases with age and they have deteriorating eyesight not suitable for fine needle and embroidery work. However, the women enlist their daughters to engage in piece-work during their summer holidays.
Life-cycle mobility is more apparent among piece-workers in Istanbul. It is common practice for a mother to be a piece-worker at the workshop where her daughter or other children work. Another form of mobility is for a garment worker to start work in a workshop when she is a young girl, and to become a home-based worker when she gets married or becomes pregnant. Women move in and out of employment, not only because they have weak connections to the labour market, but also because the fluctuating nature of the garment business creates a high turnover of workers. A woman may work in a workshop for a few months or for a year or so, and then, when there is no work and she is made redundant, she could stay at home for some time before looking for another place to work. In some cases, womenâs employment is interrupted by marriage or children.
Usually associated with the neediest women in the community, piece-work is done by women who have no economic support from husbands, such as divorcees or widows; women whose husbands do not provide for them for a
Piece-workers are involved in many different activities ranging from packing to cleaning the threads, to sewing beads, and embroidery. The working time of these women changes depending on the volume of work and the deadline. The women stated that they work longer hours particularly during holidays, stock renewal, and the beginning of the season, when orders come in high volumes with tight deadlines. During these periods, the working time increases to 16â18 hours per day. However, on a usual working day, the women said that they worked 12 hours, from 9 in the morning to 9 at night.
In Istanbul, piece-work is distributed to women through intermediaries, and the women usually perform their tasks in their homes. However, during the fieldwork it was observed that the intermediaries sometimes rented a small shop/workspace (dükkan) where all the piece-worker women came together to work, and these workspaces were preferably located close to or in the same neighbourhood as the womenâs homes. Their place of work is important for these women, and they prefer to work out of their homes or small workspaces located close to their homes. Piece-work is a manifestation of womenâs immobility, domestic responsibilities, and the unavailability of other types of work; âit represents a low-paid and labour-intensive work form primarily conducted by married women, where the productive and reproductive activities of women are juxtaposed both spatially and practicallyâ.18
How could I go out to work? I have two small children and my husband works all day and comes back late in the evening. I do not have anybody from my family who can look after my children while I work. My husbandâs family is far from where we live now. So I am doing piece-work and looking after my children at the same time. We live in a one-room flat which was transformed from a kind of storage room or dükkan (shop), so it is hard for me to have a relative with us to look after my children. I wish I had better-paid work so we could buy our own flat and live better.
5 Recruiting Piece-workers and Flexibility of Labour
A global surge in new forms of flexible labour relations and fragmentation of the labour force are often associated with feminization of the labour force.19 In both developed and developing countries, women seem to have been more affected by this trend than men.20 An increasing number of home-based piece-workers is another phenomenon related to feminization of the workforce. The characteristics of piece-workers and the nature of home-based work are better researched in Turkey than other components of the female labour force.21 Although some of this research has shown a high number of women engaged in piece-work, little effort has been made to highlight the relationship between industrial production and womenâs piece-work. This relationship is best illustrated by the recruitment strategies adopted to employ piece-workers, which also show that recruitment creates new forms of hierarchy between co-workers and further flexibility of production relations for employers.
Kinship and community relationships play a significant role in accessing subcontracted work and the labour of home-based piece-workers. In Istanbulâs garment industry, some tasks are subcontracted directly from a workshop to
I am good at maths and also a high school graduate. Most of my colleagues are primary school graduates and I was quick to learn every job at the factory. So, our manager (müdür) asked me to do this job when they decided to subcontract some tasks to women instead of doing them in the factory. Now, we have 50 women in different mahalles around here and some of these women have been working for more than eight years. What I do is very difficult because if a piece is missing or something is wrong with the quality of the work, I am responsible. I try to work with women whom I trust and have known for a long time. In the beginning, there were just a few women whom I reached through my own personal contacts and mostly from my own family and neighbourhood. We need to make sure that women have skills to do the job. Even though most women have skills of sewing and embroidery, it is more important to follow the designs and be precise, clean, and punctual.
The relationship between the women intermediaries and piece-workers was usually maintained on the basis of âfictive kinshipâ,22 which is a form of social relations that mimics kinship relations among non-kin. Since many women get to know about piece-work opportunities by word of mouth, and through existing kin and non-kin networks in their communities, a form of âmutual indebtednessâ is maintained between the middle-women and the piece-workers to manipulate social relations in order to ensure a steady supply of work. The important part played by middle-women in giving access to a regular supply of work was emphasized by many piece-workers. Thus, daily survival for piece-workers requires participating in social relations and community networks, and continuously nourishing a web of reciprocal arrangements.23
The irregular nature of piece-work and strict rules of work completion have resulted in a complex alliance between women piece-workers and middle-women, which illustrates the extra-economic relations underlying the social organization of piece-work in Istanbulâs garment industry. This irregular structure of work has developed a network of women in which a piece-worker, for example, is the main subcontractor of the factory, but also shares her quota with other women in her household or neighbourhood. In cases of surplus work and under time pressure, a piece-worker uses the help of her neighbours and pays them later. This practice of collaboration among women generates further flexibility in the organization of piece-work, and shifts the responsibility of middle-women, in terms of finding new subcontractors, to piece-workers.
I joined Serpil on one of her visits to her piece-workers during which she distributed some work and collected the finished pieces. In one of the neighbourhoods, there were two women piece-workers whom Serpil had known for a long time. When we arrived the two women were together making their garment pieces. Serpil gave them the new garments and explained what was required, and then a third woman suddenly appeared, carefully listening to
Another model used by garment ateliers is that by which they establish their network of piece-workers using the personal connections of the women in their families. Extended families always have some untapped labour of women that can be drawn into production whenever necessary. For example, the grandmother of the family is usually in charge of child care during the day, while other family members are working in the atelier. Sometimes she also does the finishing of garment pieces by cleaning stitched edges, or, in some cases, she acts as the middle-woman in their immediate environment by distributing garments to other women. Ateliers that are unable to utilize the labour of their own family usually have a number of piece-workers who have worked for them for a long time. These women establish a small network of piece-workers in which they have the leading role as distributor. The networks can be as small as four or five women.
6 Income from Piece-work: Charity or Survival?
We subcontract only to women and they sometimes come and ask us if there is any work. Most of the women are regulars and all are from this area. In the past, we hired women to do hand-work of the pieces as full-time workers but the garment business is irregular. Sometimes these women had nothing to do for weeks and we had to pay their salaries. Later, we decided to subcontract the women at home, so that we deliver pieces to them when there is work and pay them on a piece basis. For the women it is better to do piece-work than sit idle at home, so they can earn their pazarparasi. I think this work is good for women because fakir kadin (poor women) need to feed their children and at the same time they can watch over their children. Times are hard for families, so people are trying hard to make ends meet and everyone has to do something in
order to survive (hayattakalmak için). Piece-work gives the opportunity to live without depending on anybody (el açmadanyaÅama).
The women involved in home-based piece-work are usually pitied in their community. Workshop owners represent piece-work as a kind of charity to women in need, even though it is entirely a business matter for them.
7 Uneasy Definitions of Work
The piece-work activities of women, such as knitting, sewing, and packaging by women, is arranged around the demands of child care, housework, and other obligations of the home, and they see their income-producing activities as a mere extension of their domestic responsibilities. The type of work women do, the location of their work, and the social context and social relations of their work have tremendous implications for how they define themselves and the meaning of work in their lives. Jenny Whiteâs study (1994) of a group of squatter settlement women in Istanbul who engage in home-based piece-work or work in family and neighbourhood ateliers for export and local markets, demonstrates the concentration of married women in the informal sector due to its easy accommodation of womenâs family responsibilities. White presents a detailed analysis of why the women she studied, although intensely engaged in income-producing activities, maintain a fiction of ânot-workingâ. In this regard, womenâs labour is seen as the property of the group and a womanâs gender identity is largely defined by her labour, in the sense that her income-generating labour is conflated with her social roles. Thus the unpaid or poorly paid nature of womenâs labour is legitimized by the cultural construction of âgivingâ labour as a contribution to family and community, and an expression of identity.
Intentional concealment of their piecework as domestic work, was observable among the garment workers of Istanbul. Home-based workers, makers of traditional handicrafts, and some of the atelier workers described their activity as a hobby or help to the family business, and did not consider it as âworkâ. That is, women regarded their work as an extension of their traditional housewifely activities by perceiving it to be an expression of solidarity and group identity. Womenâs invisibility in the labour market, is thus also generated through the uneasy definitions of work that they themselves use.
Womenâs unpaid or underpaid work as an expression of their social and group identity was also seen by my informants as a means of earning money. Although the expectation of and demand for a fair financial return were not
No one pays you money for sitting idle at home. My husband and all the others know that I earn money for my children and my family. We even managed to save for the future. In case of illness or an emergency, we at least have some money, so we will not be in need of financial help from other people (elalem).
I know that it seems like petty work, but I make as much money as my husband earns every month. Without my contribution we would not have been able to support our sonsâ education. We have also built the house we live in with my contribution. Although it is very hard and irregular work, everyone knows that without it we would be starving out in the streets. My husbandâs income is only enough to feed us, the rest is done through the money that I make from the piece-work.
The significance of womenâs income for the survival of low-income families in Istanbul has not helped to change how womenâs work is perceived and valued. The uneasy definition of womenâs paid work as not âworkâ is also a result of the nature of garment work, which is mainly done at home or in family establishments. For women, the traditional meaning of work requires being present
Women manage to preserve a sense of self-respect and the identity of motherhood in the face of the perceived temporariness and marginality of their work by articulating the priority of their domestic roles and responsibilities over their paid work. In Istanbul, womenâs social identity as mothers and wives does not stop them from turning their skills into income-generating activities that contribute to making ends meet and make a significant contribution to the family budget. The pervasiveness of womenâs identity as âwomen of the houseâ, due to which women refrain from carving out a work identity for themselves, is also a result of the negative social image attached to working women.
8 EliÅi: A Path from Household to Labour Market for Women
The tradition of womenâs engagement with handicraft activity (eliÅi) makes it easy for them to acquire garment-making skills. EliÅi is a common activity covering knitting, embroidery, sewing, and needlework, to make a wide range of materials such as bedspreads, table covers, cardigans, and socks. Most working-class women enter adulthood from girlhood by acquiring the skills of embroidery, knitting, needlework, crochet, and sewing, at the same time as they also learn how to cook, clean, and serve. Making eliÅi has always been the basis of earning money for low-income women, and also builds a bridge to the labour market whereby women can earn some petty cash by making lace or other forms of eliÅi.
These skills, used to prepare an elaborate çeyiz (trousseau), are utilized to earn money in two ways. First, women make lace, embroidery, and knitwear for young girlsâ çeyiz; second, women use these skills to take on piece-work or to work in an atelier. Many women in the gecekondu areas of Istanbul live on incomes from either lace-making or needlework, similar to Miesâs study of Narsapur in India, where lace-makers working from their homes exclusively utilized their skills to integrate the Indian economy into world markets of export production.24
Hanife was a lace-maker who lived with her husband and two children in a one-room flat. Her husband had an irregular income and could barely support the family. Hanife kept her income from lace-making a secret from him, in
His salary is all right but just enough for rent and food. I want to buy carpets and curtains for my home. ⦠Making eliÅi is better than going out for work. I earn some cash and do my household chores (eviÅi) as well. My husband does not know that I make money with eliÅi. He thinks this is a thing I do to pass my time and entertain myself. ⦠If I work hard I can make 50â75 million tl a month and spend some of this money to buy things for my house. It is not that I want to hide money from my husband, but I do not want to make him feel like he is not capable of earning money to support his family.
Filizâs earnings depend on the price set in the local market for eliÅi among women. For example, there is an approximate price for a ball of yarn (yumak). Setting up the price of the lace-makerâs labour, two women, the buyer and the seller, negotiate and determine the price each time. A well-known fact among local women was that the prices for eliÅi are set very low. The low prices can be explained by the fact that customers and lace-makers are both from working-class families. If the price is low women can afford to buy, otherwise they would make it themselves since they all have similar skills of lace-making. Thus, low prices make income from eliÅi very low and marginal.
My interviews with women engaged in eliÅi-making show that there was always a demand for eliÅi, either from other women or from traders who specialize in marketing these products. The eliÅi trade took place through two different channels. First, there were shops that sell trousseau items and generate a demand for womenâs eliÅi. They buy the items from women and sell them in their shops. Second, there were middle-(wo)men who collected items from cities around Istanbul, such as Bursa, Balikesir, etc., and brought them to Istanbul. The second channel was more outward-oriented and internationally marketed, with Arab countries being the main destination especially for womenâs headscarves, which were tediously decorated with needlework or lace-work.
9 Conclusion
This paper is based on a study that dates back to the early 2000s; however, its findings are still relevant for an analysis of piece-worker womenâs work in the manufacturing sector in Turkey today. There are similarities between the situation of women described here and that in more recent research on the topic. Current research on home-based work in Turkey is focused mostly on garment production25 and womenâs role in the labour process of value chains in the garment industry.26 Women workers are dependent on mediators for the supply of work and raw materials. They also have no control over the means of production.27 Gendered control mechanisms make womenâs obedience easy and implicit, and resistance unnecessary, as they see their relations with the mediator as a part of patriarchal consensus. The gender division of labour is inherent in the organization of home-based work. In this sense, it is very important to understand the dynamics of the organization of home-based garment work in the value chains. Practices of control, in particular, are shaped by the varied patterns of gendered organization of work and the labour process.28
The garment industry has been the top exporting sector in Turkey since the early 1980s when Turkey started to adopt economic liberalization policies. Women are the main suppliers of informal labour in the Turkish garment
Piece-work in Istanbulâs garment industry is defined as womenâs work because of the assumed characteristics of patience, endurance, lack of mobility, and dexterity associated with women, and also because of the small amount of money paid for each piece. Networks of collaboration created among women are the main source of recruitment of piece-workers, and a further aspect of flexibility in garment production. Women manifest their roles as âgoodâ mothers and wives and express their loyalty to their community by keeping their work invisible and hidden from public eyes. Studies illustrate how patriarchal dynamics restrict womenâs job opportunities and compel them to engage in home-based work, which is defined by low pay, long working hours, and lack of benefits and job security.
Ayda Eraydin and Erendil Asuman, âThe Role of Female Labour in Industrial Restructuring: New Production Processes and Labour Market Relations in the Istanbul Clothing Industryâ, Palace and Culture, 6 (1999), pp. 259â72; Saniye DedeoÄlu, Women Workers in Turkey: Global Industrial Production in Istanbul (New York, 2012).
Gary Gereffi et al. (eds), Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Westport CT, 1994).
Marilyn Carr, Martha Alter Chen, and Jane Tate, âGlobalization and Home-Based Workersâ, Feminist Economics, 6 (2000), pp. 123â42, p. 126.
Lourdes BenerÃa and Martha I. Roldan, The Crossroads of Class and Gender: Industrial Homework, Subcontracting, and Household Dynamics in Mexico City (Chicago, 1987).
Lourdes BenerÃa, Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered (New York and London, 2013).
BenerÃa and Roldan, The Crossroads of Class and Gender; Jenny White, Money Makes Us Relatives: Womenâs Labour in Urban Turkey (Austin, 1994); DedeoÄlu, Women Workers in Turkey.
Lourdes BenerÃa, âShifting the Risk: New Employment Patterns, Informalization, and Womenâs Workâ, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 15 (2001) pp. 27â54.
Ping-Chun Hsiung, Living Rooms as Factories: Class, Gender, and the Satellite Factory System in Taiwan, (Philadelphia, 1996).
White, Money Makes Us Relatives.
Reyhan Atasü-TopçuoÄlu, âHome-Based Work and Informal Sector in the Period of Globalization: An Analysis through Capitalism and Patriarchy, The Case of Turkeyâ, Masterâs dissertation, The Graduate School of Social Sciences, Middle East Technical University (2005).
Utku Balaban and Esra SarioÄlu, âHome-Based Work in Istanbul: Varieties of Organization and Patriarchyâ, Working Paper, Social Policy Forum, BoÄaziçi University (2008).
A classic example of buyer-driven global value chains (Gereffi et al., eds, Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism). In garment production, mass production is only one type of business strategy, and sweatshop and home-based production act as complementary stages of subcontracting chains in the whole production line (Appelbaum and Christerson 1997).
DedeoÄlu, Women Workers in Turkey.
Hernando De Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World, (New York, 1989), pp. 11â12.
Åafak TartanoÄlu, âThe Voluntary Precariat in the Value Chain: The Hidden Patterns of Home-Based Garment Production in Turkeyâ, Competition & Change, 22 (2017), pp. 1â18.
Gülsüm CoÅkun, âBuilding women home-based workers, organizations in Turkeyâ, Global Labour Journal, 1, Special Issue on Globalization(s) and Labour in China and India (2010), pp. 212â16.
DedeoÄlu, Women Workers in Turkey.
Balaban and SarioÄlu, âHome-Based Work in Istanbulâ.
Guy Standing, âGlobal Feminization through Flexible Labourâ, Wold Development, 17 (1989), pp. 1077â95.
Maria Mies, The Lace Makers of Nasapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market (London: Zed Press, 1982).
Emine Mine Ãinar, âUnskilled Urban Migrant Women and Disguised Employment: Homeworking Women in Istanbul, Turkeyâ, World Development, 22 (1994), pp. 369â80; Dilek HattatoÄlu, âEveksenliçaliÅmastratejileriâ [Home-based work strategies], in Aynur IlyasoÄlu and Nebahat Akgökçe (eds), YerlibirfeminizmedoÄru [Towards a local feminism] (Istanbul, 2001), pp. 173â204; White, Money Makes Us Relatives.
White, Money Makes Us Relatives.
Ibid., p. 133.
Mies, The Lace Makers of Nasapur.
Esra SarioÄlu, âGendering the organization of home-based work in Turkey: Classical versus familial patriarchyâ, Gender, Work & Organization, 20 (2013), pp. 479â97; TartanoÄlu, âThe Voluntary Precariat in the Value Chainâ; DedeoÄlu, Women Workers in Turkey.
Saniye Atilgan, âEvden Içeri Bir Ev: Ev Eksenli Ãretimve Kadin EmeÄiâ, Birikim, 217 (2007), pp. 134â40.
Balaban and SarioÄlu, âHome-Based Work in Istanbulâ.
SarioÄlu, âGendering the organization of home-based work in Turkeyâ.