Precariousness and working class formation: Precariousness as a class experience of tourism workers in Antalya

This thesis aims to examine the role of precariousness in the process of working class formation with specific reference to the experiences of tourism workers in Antalya. Historical materialist approach conceieves class as a dynamic term being formed within the historical and social processes and within intra and interclass relationships. Therefore, in order to come to terms with the class in a specific historical process, besides the structural characteristics of capitalist relations of exploitation, historical specificities of the given period should be taken into account so that the dialectical relations and forms of struggle in that period can be revealed. In this study, precariousness that is a product of neoliberal transformation of labour markets and that turns into a life style beyond a labour process is regarded as one of the constitutive factors of the working class formation process of the current era. Accordingly, manifestations of the precarious employment forms of the workers in the tourism sector which hold the representative characteristics of the neoliberal factors and its own specificities together in the labour processes are questioned by referring to the workers? own stories in their in their working life as well as daily life experiences and consciousness. Within the context of this study in depth interviews composed of semi-structured questions have been carried out with 42 tourism workers working in three or more star hotels of six touristic regions of Antalya which are Kemer, city centre, Kundu, Belek, Side and Alanya. Keywords: Class formation, historical materialist class theory, capitalism, neoliberalizm, precariousness, Antalya, tourism workers.