Global Management, Local Labour

‘Globalisation’ – at the start of the twenty-first century this term, with its diverse meanings, has become common in much social science and in the mass media. Sometimes it refers to the compression of time and space, typified by the increased velocity at which money flows throughout the world financial system or the speed at which news travels. Very often, it refers to the diffusion to each and every continent, country and seemingly, village, of western cultural styles – T-shirts, jeans, basketball caps, and to an extent, popular music and film. Sometimes it is the subject of detailed historical investigation, with consequent doubts about whether, say, some economies are more integrated into the world economy today than they were a century ago. Quite often, the idea fulfils an ideological function. For this it is well suited. It is invoked to justify both why those who are already rich have to be paid more and to justify why workers cannot be.

Statistically speaking, most workers in this study are men (77 per cent), of whom eight out of ten are married, usually with no more than two children, and in only just one in ten cases with wives who go out to work. The workers in these factories are not homogeneous however. Part II therefore moves beyond the general account attempted so far and provides a consideration of first gender- and then ethnic-specificities within the workforce.

In the last chapter it was recalled that feminists and others had sought to render visible the role of women in history and daily life and that the absence of women from hitherto historical and contemporary accounts has come to be recognised as an important form of bias. In now turning to consider ethnicity rather than gender this question of visibility/ invisibility takes an interesting turn. It concerns the position of Kurds.

The origins of Turkish private capitalism, which effectively dates from the 1950s, are in family ownership. This is very evident still today in the ownership of the large conglomerates that dominate many sectors of the economy. Both in these conglomerates and elsewhere there has been a tendency towards the emergence of professional managers. As one commentator sums it up: a younger generation of professional managers is emerging which has high education standards, no language problems, who are intelligent, willing to learn and work and who have a ‘Yankee style’ (Oktay 1996: 97).

Accounts of the recent development of the world economy are generally in agreement that a turning point occurred at the end of the 1960s/early 1970s which marked the end of the long boom that followed the Second World War. Brenner for example argues that a long downturn ensued from falling profitability which stemmed from competition between the major capitalist powers of the United States, Germany and Japan as the products of the latter two began to penetrate the American market, this leading to a lowering of margins and, by virtue of lower profitability, a decline in investment (Brenner 1998). This process affected advanced capitalist economies differently but it was generally the case that a heightened concern about profitability, allied to the opportunity afforded by the weakening of labour through increased unemployment, brought about increased interest in the ways in which labour could be managed. More or less coincident with this, there arose in the 1970s a concern among manufacturers about the rise of Japan, and most especially about the Japanese car industry, a concern variously expressed by social scientists in writings about ‘Japanisation’ and ‘Toyotaism’.

Over the last quarter of a century trade unionism has declined in most countries. In the developed world an important reason for this has been the changing composition of employment, a consequence of which has been the decline of those very industries that had a high trade-union membership, for instance, coal mining, iron and steel, and shipbuilding. Further factors contributing to the decline include the increased power of capital over labour as facilitated by the rise of neo-liberal politics, legislative change and the deregulation of labour markets. At an ideological level, some part may have been played by the claim that employers are now impotent in the face of ‘globalisation’. Related to these developments, in particular as far as militancy is concerned, has been the fear of job loss. Other reasons sometimes invoked include assumptions about a decline in the importance of class and most especially of class consciousness and the rise of apathy. In the developing world it is by no means unknown for intellectuals to claim the importance of subjective elements of the above type in discussing the state of the labour movement in their own countries.

General arguments and assertions about the inevitable oligarchic nature of trade unions are of long standing in the social sciences (Webb and Webb 1897; Michels 1959) and debate continues to the present day (Waterman 1999; Voss and Sherman 2000). But particularly in the case of developing countries – in relation to which cultural stereotypes are so often deployed – we take the view that much is to be gained from analysis of the specific historical conditions and mechanisms through which such autocracy operates. It is from this standpoint that the case of Türk Metal is examined here. Türk Metal is only one part of the trade union federation Türk-Is, and it should not be assumed that all of the federation’s affiliates are organised in the same way and still less that they endorse the same politics. Türk Metal is none the less the biggest union in the metal industry, which is of major importance to the Turkish economy and its export performance. Any ranking of the trade unions that are important to the modern sector would have to put Türk Metal at the top of the list. As a trade union, it embodies the worst aspects of the corporatist ideology and practice that characterised the early years of the Republic.

As we stated at the beginning of this book, few countries have been founded so deliberately in the image of modernity as the Turkish Republic that Atatürk brought into existence in 1923. In recent times there has been considerable debate about whether Atatürk and his successors conflated modernisation and westernisation and about the consequences of imposing the new society top-down. It is sometimes said, for example, that Turkey today is not one society but two – in effect a Muslim people dominated by a secular state (which in turn is steered and at times directed by a self-perpetuating officer caste that claims legitimacy as the guardian of Atatürk’s vision). Certainly, the officer caste fails to operate within the limits acceptable in a democratic state and in several important and inexcusable respects the Turkish state has been repressive, generally with respect to human rights, as widely noted in its treatment of Kurds, and, as we have seen, in relation to trade unions and workers’ rights. As even mention of Kurds and trade unions suggests, however, it is too simple to seek to understand Turkey as two societies.

Our starting point was that in recent years there has been a great deal of loose talk about ‘globalisation’ but that very little of this has related to one of the forces in the contemporary world that has been most affected by the increased velocity at which ideas and new practices circulate – management. Of course factory managers in Turkey are no more likely to implement modern management practice to the letter than those in any other country. They have a job to do and take what they think is best suited. It is our contention, however, that they speak, think and act increasingly like managers who do the same job in more advanced capitalist societies. This is not at all surprising. They read the same books and articles. They have listened to, or at least heard of, the same gurus and international consultants. They have experienced the same kind of formal business education. They have sometimes been directly exposed to managers from these other countries and the practices of the corporations that they run whether through direct foreign ownership or through joint ventures. Sure enough, there are cultural differences but the main reality is that in the modern sector of the Turkish economy management is part of a recognisable global force.