Global trends, domestic institutions and contemporary organized labor: the case of Turkey

Abstract

Labor across the globe has been suffering a downturn in its membership which has been blamed on the process of globalization and more specifically on union’s inability to adapt to the realities of transnational capital. Opponents of this theory point out that this process has not been universal, and that unions in both advanced and new industrialized capitalist economies have proved resilient to the worldwide structural pressures. These scholars have argued that domestic institutions, rather than global pressures, maintain a decisive influence over the success of unionism in global capital. This thesis addresses their arguments through the case of Turkey, first exploring the domestic institutions in advanced capitalist economies and their unions’ relative experiences in global capital, then comparing these to the institutions common to the import substitution industrialization model used by Turkey previous to its shift to liberalized export-orientated growth. An examination of the historical and contemporary development of organized labor in Turkey comes to the conclusion that the domestic institutions needed to sustain unionization in the global economy were not developed by the unions, and this has led to their current weakness and decline in the face of global trends.