School of Social and Political Science

Description

Turkey’s recycling sector imports a significant amount of paper and plastic waste, with much of it originating in the United Kingdom. Based on research in an Istanbul recycling depot organised around these imports, this talk examines how workers grappled with the moral and political implications of their workplace’s business model. Owned by a Kurdish businessman, the depot had a diverse workforce that included undocumented migrant labourers from Syria, qualified Turkish workers recruited from the formal labour market, and ethnically Kurdish piece-rate workers who were also relatives of the owner. I focus on moments of severe frustration among the Turkish contingent, who believed that the owner was withholding their wages and redistributing them to his relatives. Rather than expressing their grievances through a class critique or opposition to the global waste trade, Turkish workers’ complaints took the form of ethnic prejudice against the Kurdish owner and his relatives, as if unjust business practices were attributable to Kurdishness itself. I use this case to examine how national frameworks of entitlement are produced through evaluations of profit and hierarchy in precarious work settings. Turkish workers understood their own insecurity not by critiquing abstract systems, but by assessing who is converting collective labour into illegitimate profit. Responsibility settled not on the most marginal people in the workplace, but on those who are proximate and imagined as obstructing the realisation of national benefit.