Women workers’ everyday experiences of social reproduction in Turkey: A relational, holistic approach

Social reproduction entails a large range of issues and activities, different social actors and various spaces. In my work, I use, and aim to contribute to the theorisation of, the term in the context of women’s unwaged reproductive work, mostly undertaken in the family. Focusing on women garment workers in Turkey and adopting Marxist feminist and feminist political economy perspectives, my work shows that women’s socio-material conditions of productive and reproductive work are significantly linked and co-constitute each other. The conditions and relations of women’s unwaged reproductive work are shaped by capitalist-patriarchal production and reproduction processes and the neoliberal-conservative state ideology in Turkey. My work is largely built on an ethnographic extended-case study, which was central to understand the complex everyday dynamics of social reproduction in women’s lives. As part of this methodology, I worked as a helper at different scales of Izmir’s garment production for six months and conducted 71 in-depth interviews. My research illustrates that despite working under exhausting conditions in the garment industry, women garment workers are still primarily responsible for reproductive work in their families and spend most of the time and energy they have left after they finish their paid work on housework and care work. Adult male family members “help” with reproductive tasks only rarely and very limitedly – if they do any reproductive work at all. And when men do provide help, it is almost never pro-actively offered; women have to request it, and even then, plan, organise and monitor it. As such, women garment workers’ reproductive obligations seriously shape the conditions of their garment work such as their ability to work outside the home, workplace choices, type of work, working hours and amount of overtime. More specifically, women’s reproductive responsibilities significantly restrict their employment opportunities, lower their bargaining power against employers and make their paid work more precarious. Some of these limitations are overcome thanks to what I term the “women’s reserve army of reproductive labour”. Members of this reserve army, usually women workers’ mothers, mothers-in-law, daughters, sisters, sisters-in-law and sometimes friends and neighbours, take over the reproductive work where women workers have to leave it. Most women, especially those married with children, are able to do paid work thanks to women’s support networks as there is no sufficient state provision of care and women cannot afford paid help due to very low wages in the garment sector. Instead of providing sufficient care services that would increase women’s participation in the labour market, the conservative-neoliberal state ideology and policies promote the flexibilisation of women’s paid labour and further feminisation of unwaged reproductive labour in the family. As such, women garment workers are exhausted under the double burden and experience feelings of injustice, oppression, insufficiency, unhappiness, anger, dissatisfaction and devaluation due to their heavy reproductive obligations and the socio-material conditions of the work. Therefore, women’s everyday experiences of production and social reproduction are tightly interwoven in emotional and material senses.