Informal sector and social exclusion : Antalya recycling workers

In the course of time, the basis of new world system has been composed by the economic changes, and this new economic ideology has revealed the distinction between formal and informal labour in labour life and labour relations. Meanwhile, the meaning of poverty has changed, the social exclusion in urban areas turned out to be more visible because of the economic structure and poverty. The first chapter of the present study focuses on the differenciating issues between informal and formal sectors and the theoretical approaches to the informal sector from the perspective of the functional and structural approaches. In the second chapter, the discussion of social stratification was discussed and the focus was on Marx and Weber's class discussion. In the third chapter, parallel to the class discussions, poverty literature was examined and it was discussed that poverty became a new state with the changes and formed a source for social exclusion. The field findings obtained from the in-depth interviews were discussed in the fourth chapter by linking the literature data with the aim of establishing the relationship between social exclusion and the informal sector employees and obtaining a holistic synthesis. In this process, the data were categorized and discussed by using theme and coding with theme analysis, descriptive analysis and content analysis, and each theme was interpreted with the support of the literature and differentiated from the literature. As a result of the in-depth interviews conducted with 37 people, the following conclusions are revealed: Recycling workers are primarily excluded from labor markets due to their lack of property and qualifications to participate in the labor market. On the other hand, some of the recycling workers have disrupted the theme of exclusion from the labor markets by expressing that the informal sector's working style matches their lifestyles. Most recycling workers consist of Kurdish workers and Afghan workers, and thus the most intense exclusion process has been observed in the cultural level due to their ethnic origin. In addition, they have been found to be isolated from the social sphere due to their poverty, life in informal networks, and consequently due to negative / irregular living conditions, to the general rules and assumptions of the society in which they exist. An important finding of the study is the transferability of exclusion. Recycling workers in a multi-dimensional exclusion process; In addition to their economic, social, cultural, politic and spatial exclusion, they also have a chained exclusion relationship due to their ethnic characteristics. Keywords: Stratification, Class, Poverty, Social Exclusion, Informal Sector, Recycling Workers, Transferability of Exclusion