Navigating Wait Space in Uncertain Times: Young Women and Precarious Labour in Turkey

Abstract

Despite dramatic increases in university graduates over the last 30 years, unemployment rates among youth with advanced education in Turkey remain some of the highest in the world. With levels of unemployment among university graduates almost equal that of high school graduates, the promise of social mobility and formal waged work that higher education once promised, no longer holds credibility. Many young people, instead find themselves in waithood—a state characterised by uncertainty, joblessness, and obstacles to independent adulthood. Studies tend to view waithood temporally as a period of indeterminacy and frustrated futures, but we argue, waithood also encompasses spatial dimensions that are liberatory in so far as they communicate a demand for a liveable life. Examining how young women in Turkey navigate both the state’s conservative politics, and restricted employment opportunities, we use the term “wait space” to capture what an attentiveness to the intimate connection between space and time and work offers to our understanding of the politics and possibilities of work beyond the wage.

Menyokong Tenaga Kerja: Fenomena Waithood dan Kerja Perawatan Tak Berupah dalam Perspektif Reproduksi Sosial

“…Perempuan memiliki beban kerja produksi dan kerja keperawatan sekaligus. Inilah yang menjadi alasan perempuan melakukan waithood (Kara & Mullings 2023). Kebutuhan ekonomi yang tinggi, seperti rumah, biaya sekolah anak, dan sebagainya dari tahun ke tahun juga mengalami kenaikan.…”

Outside the Wage: Seeing Politics and Possibilities with Critical Comparisons

“…Along different but related lines, Goffe (2022) examines how Jamaicans have laid claim to space even as they are excluded from land ownership and the wage, drawing attention to the blurring and liminality within another continuum of unstable distinctions: between freedom and constraint, between withdrawal and exclusion, and between security of land tenure and outright displacement. In a similar vein, rather than treating waiting as unproductive time spent outside formal waged work, Kara and Mullings (2022) show how it instead enables young women to imagine lifeworlds beyond the wage and perhaps even stave off patriarchal conscription into a life confined to household and feminised labour. Forms of work within wait space blur boundaries between paid and unpaid work, reproduction and livelihood, dependence and freedom, and the necessity of income generation and the opportunity to refuse undesirable waged work.…”

“…While these labours improved the quality of life for residents, they can also “normalise inadequate public funding and tighten labour control”. Kara and Mullings (2022) trace the implications of the state's neoliberal Islamist project on the production of wait space, which they argue serves as a buffer from the forms of gendered precarity generated by anti‐labour and anti‐welfare policies targeted at women by the state in a moral mission to produce a new generation of pious, “palatable” citizens for a “New Turkey”.…”

“…For Goffe, the focus is less on the plot's liberatory potential than on the way the plot figures into the complex lived and structural spatial-temporalities, geographies of land and labour in contemporary Jamaica, which is just as much a story of possibilities for resilience and re-working as outright political resistance. For Kara and Mullings (2022), on the other hand, while wait space can be a site of oppression, it also allows young women opportunities to build networks, to experiment, and to refuse undesirable waged work.…”