Housewife or working woman? Survival strategies of home-based working poor women in the center of Kayseri

Under the conditions of globalisation, the forms of employment offered in the name of flexibility have largely isolated unskilled and semi-skilled women's labour from formal jobs and directed it to informal jobs, which are ascribed for their gender roles. Although it has existed since the Industrial Revolution, home-based work, which has become widespread in parallel with the deepening economic crisis since the 1980s and is expected to become more permanent with the addition of pandemic conditions to the process, has become a source of livelihood for women without overstepping the limits of gender roles deemed appropriate for them, but it has also turned women into working poor. In this study, the spread of home-based work is associated with the crisis, flexible accumulation policies that are implemented to overcome the crisis, poverty-increasing effects of these policies, and within this framework, the position of women's labour is tried to be discussed on the axes of the concepts of gendered division of labour and patriarchal capitalism. After the discussion of home-based work on a theoretical and conceptual basis, in the emprical part, the data obtained from the qualitative research method, namely in-depth interview technique is carried out with a sample group consisting of home-based working women in Kayseri/Kocasinan. Field research aimed at finding the reasons for women increasigly turning towards home-based working, their working conditions, how they make sense of this type of work, how they see themselves as women who do this job, their expectations and problems, and discussing what needs to be done to solve these problems. Thus, it is expected to contribute to increasing their visibility on the way to the recognition of home-based work as a profession, ensuring home based workers to benefit from the workers' rights, improving their working conditions in accordance with human dignity, and promoting their organisations under the umbrella of trade unions. Keywords: Home-based work, informality, gendered division of labor, patriarchal capitalism, women's poverty