Between empowerment and disappointment: Women workers' struggle for unionization in 2020s Turkey

Tis thesis investigates the experiences of women workers attempting to unionize against poor working conditions, low wages, and humiliating treatment at the workplace in 2020s Turkey. It focuses on women's mobilization processes in two textile and two metal factories in Istanbul, Kocaeli, and Bursa between 2021 and 2023. Examining women's motivations for unionization, the challenges they face, their subjective transformations, and their relationships with co-workers, union officers and families during their main form of resistance, which is picketing in front of factories, this study provides a gendered analysis of women's mobilization and resistance. Employing feminist methodology, the analysis builds on fieldwork, which included in-depth interviews and participant observation with 16 women workers and 2 women union officers. Tis study engages with the literature on mobilization, empirical studies on women's labor activism in the Global South and Turkey, and studies on the impact of social movements. Te thesis firstly argues that the demand for dignity is crucial in the mobilization of women subjected to the gender pay gap and patriarchal pressures. Secondly, the thesis demonstrates that women experience empowerment through unionization and collective action, but the bureaucratic and patriarchal structure of the unions limits this empowerment. Hence, this thesis contributes to the literature on women's labor activism by exploring women's agency in the labor movement and their intertwined struggles against patriarchy and capitalism in the triangle of family, workplace, and union.