Turkey's unemployment problem gets worse

The fact that system parties are not able to give ambitious promises about solving unemployment problem is not surprising. They give only modest promises because it is impossible to even mitigate the problem under a capitalist economy let alone solving it
Friday, 01 June 2018 17:14

There are 6.2 million unemployed in Turkey today with an unemployment rate of 10.6. The unemployment rate is higher among women and youth. Two out of every three women are not in the labour force, so they don’t even count as unemployed. Election manifestos of candidates with hundreds of pages are being announced. The unemployment is one of the topics mentioned least in these manifestos, avoiding concrete proposals to solve it.

While unemployment, one of the most important problems of Turkey, becomes even more alarming under the crisis conditions, system parties don’t make any ambitious promises and only speak to the public with long term modest goals. To date, there hasn’t been any striking proposal to solve the problem in candidate’s speeches and election manifestos.

Muharrem İnce, the presidential candidate of Turkey’s parliamentary main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), declared his electoral manifesto on May 19. Based on his manifesto, titled the “Declaration of the Future”, İnce explained that unemployment rate will be reduced to 5% in 5 years with a new globally competitive economic model oriented towards production. In the same manifesto, Ince used a contractionary phrase, “our main goal is providing jobs for everyone”. The goal is going to be achieved by creating employment in areas suitable for global competition based on his explanation. He stated that they will increase women’s labour force participation rate to 50% and start a family insurance scheme. CHP included the goal of 5% unemployment in 5 years in their election declaration prepared under the slogan “we are coming for the nation”. While the declaration doesn’t have a clear roadmap to increase employment and reduce unemployment, it points out creating employment through supporting firms in the short-run to encourage private investment and through digital transformation, high value-added production and regional growth in the medium run. The declaration included “family insurance” proposal to mitigate the poverty created by unemployment.

When declaring the ruling AKP party's election manifesto, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan didn’t mention a concrete goal for unemployment but he said unemployment is created by lack of labour force participation among women and youth. The declaration included the following measures to address unemployment; increasing active labour market policies, setting up career centres for youth, encouraging entrepreneurship, bringing incentives for employment of women and youth, and strengthening the link between education and employment.

Both of the frameworks presented by the AKP and CHP’s candidate İnce to address unemployment reproduces the ongoing neoliberal agenda where the target is keeping unemployment at a socially sustainable level instead of eliminating it.

Another presidential candidate, Meral Akşener from fascist İyi Party, having a similar perspective, offers jobs to university graduates while promising “citizenship wages” to those who can’t find jobs.

Pro-Kurdish HDP and its presidential candidate Selahattin Demirtaş promise to reduce work hours to international standards to fight with unemployment and informal employment. Their election manifesto promises 1000TL ($224) wage to unemployed without any condition and time limit. Turkey’s work hours seem to be regulated by the international standards on paper. The problem is that regulation is not enforced. There is another statement saying, “collective firing of the workers due to economic crises will be banned”. Except from this, HDP’s manifesto doesn’t include any other concrete proposal to eliminate unemployment.

“This Social Order Must Change” Platform running with independent candidates and supported by the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) is the only political actor that includes the promise of eliminating unemployment completely in their election manifesto.

THE UNEMPLOYMENT PROBLEM IS GETTING WORSE

The unemployment rate has been in the double digits in Turkey since June 2016. The non-agricultural unemployment rate didn’t go below 12% since then. The labour force participation rate, fluctuating around 50%-52%, shows that a significant portion of the working age population is out of labour force. The labour force participation rate among women is barely above 30%. According to official statistics, the number of full-time homemakers is 11 million and 198 thousand and the unemployment rate among women is 13.4, above the 10.5% general unemployment rate announced in February. The youth unemployment rate is 19%. The young population that is neither at school nor holding a job was announced as 872 thousand in 2017. Without providing any job opportunity for women and youth, the Turkish capitalism doesn’t offer any future to these segments of the population.

These official statistics showing a deterioration in employment structure was masked by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) a few years ago. The TÜİK started to publish employment and unemployment statistics with a new data series starting from February 2014. The unemployment rate was lowered by this intervention on the paper and deterioration in employment was hid. For example, the unemployment rate in 2013 was 9.7% according to old data series, it became as low as 9% with the new data series.

Despite all the efforts of government and TÜİK to hide the facts, the deterioration in employment structure and the increase in unemployment rate didn’t stop. Most recently, “the employment mobilization” plan that came up with the goal of giving incentives to capital owners was a retouch to the unemployment problem. Turkish Employment Agency (İŞKUR) created some temporary and insecure employment through Public Work Programs (TYP) as an election bribe just like how they did in the past before every election. The policies conducted under the heading of on-the-job-training provided free labour (not even cheap labour) to the capital owners using the resources from the unemployment insurance fund. These people getting vocational training were not counted as unemployed, lowering the unemployment rate. However, the problem is still there. The unemployment problem has become worse especially since 2009 when they said global economic crisis “passed tangent to Turkey”.

The problem has another dimension. Official unemployment statistics are based on a narrow definition of unemployment. When we add disguised unemployment (taking into account people who are not included in the labour force and underemployed) to open unemployment (official statistics), the true unemployment rate increases substantially. While the official unemployment rate was 10.9% in 2017, the true unemployment rate was 18.2%. With the broader definition, the size of the unemployed population reaches 6 million and 200 thousand.

Using the broader definition, the true unemployment rate among women increases 26% which means that one in every four women who are willing to work are not able to find jobs. During the economic crises, women’s labour force participation rate tends to increase to compensate the loss in family/husband’s income (added worker effect). This is what AKP ministers refer to when they shamelessly blame women trying to find jobs under worsening economic conditions for increasing unemployment rates. The true unemployment rate for youth is about 30%.

The reason why system parties particularly mention women and youth unemployment under the employment sections in their election manifestos is that the problem is getting an intolerable level for those populations. Women are oppressed by either imprisonment to home or unemployment if they decide to participate in the labour force under Turkish capitalism.

An old AKP minister, Cevdet Yılmaz who is still working as vice president for AKP made a statement about unemployment in March. He said, “it is impossible to eliminate unemployment completely. There is a certain level of unemployment in the world, even in the most advanced countries. What matters is to bring the unemployment rate down”. He basically pointed out how the capitalist system works.

WHY CAN'T THE MARKET SYSTEM ELIMINATE UNEMPLOYMENT?

Unemployment can never be completely eliminated in this social order because capital accumulation under capitalism requires keeping a certain portion of the population unemployed. The size of the unemployed or the reserve army of labour might increase or decrease at different time periods depending on the needs and progress of capital accumulation, but this segment, also known as “surplus population”, never disappear. The presence of unemployment makes it easy to pressure the workers, lower the wages and increase the exploitation. Unemployment itself becomes a stick for capital owners to discipline workers.

The neoliberal period has seen an increase in unemployment everywhere in the world. After the 2008 crisis, the unemployment became much worse in many developing countries including Turkey, and the capacity of economies to create employment shrank. Under these conditions, we can’t expect a solution from AKP who has been implementing neoliberal policies in Turkey or the opposition who couldn’t resist AKP’s pro-business policies. They can’t eliminate unemployment. They can’t even mitigate the problem without disturbing capital owners.

Moreover, the oncoming economic crisis shows that construction and service sector which were responsible for much of the recent employment are going to be adversely affected. The employment will shrink in manufacturing. The austerity measures that no system parties are able to reject will include measures that will reduce employment and increase flexibility and insecure employment.

The Soviet Union in the past overturned capital owners’ plans by changing the ownership rights to eliminate unemployment in a socialist order. They banned unemployment with a constitution in 1936. They took historical steps to completely eliminate unemployment. Those courageous steps taken in the Soviet Union had an influence over any progressive labour rights we can talk about today.

Without showing the same courage and challenging the social order as a whole, unemployment problem can’t be solved. To eliminate unemployment, this social order must change.