The effect of ethnic, religious and gender identities of textile workers to their class consciousness: Sample of Istanbul

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the effect of ethnic, religious and gender identities of textile workers working in Istanbul on their class consciousness formation. In the studies made on class nowadays, making a description of class just by basing it on economy is found to be deficient and it is put forward that class has a complex structure which is formed by such a lot of factors including its members' ethnic, religious and gender identities and age and educational situation. As a matter of fact, the term class that was supposed to be shaped by people's owning means of production by Marx was handled in-depth and was gained a different dimension including statue and politics by Weber. This proves that it is necessary to handle the topic class in a multifaceted way to gain efficient information. In this sense, starting from the idea that people are placed to an economic class related with their ethnic, religious and gender identities class consciousness is analyzed by handling together ethnic, religious and gender identities the other sides of class avoiding just giving theoretical or descriptive background of class and class consciousness. Firstly, in which class position workers see themselves was determined. Then, to what degree workers' ethnic, religious and gender identities affects them while determining their class positions was searched. At this aspect Istanbul, which is quite rich in terms of ethnic identities and comes first in textile, presents an ideal universe. The sample of the research consists of 508 workers with the representation of three per mille of textile workers in Istanbul. And, multi-research technique was applied in the study. Firstly, a questionnaire which is a quantitative research technique was applied. As gender is one of the main point for the study subject the number of women and men was equated and 218 women and 290 men were volunteered to take part in. During the application of questionnaire 15 voluntary workers were interviewed. After evaluation of the questionnaire and interviews results, five focus group studies were done. Therefore the data obtained from the research was supported by the results of interviews and focus group studies where questionnaires remained limited. The main argument of thesis is that while textile workers' class consciousness described on the basis of Marxist relations of production is low, other identities especially religious identities of them affect their class consciousness. Key words: Textile, Class, Class Consciousness, Ethnicity, Religion, Gender, Identity.