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Low-Wage Workers of Bilkent: Class and the Sense of Place in a Changing Urban Landscape
Abstract
Turkey’s economic restructuring in the last three decades led to a substantial decrease in the level of labor participation in agriculture, an increased pace of immigration from rural to few major cities, downsizing of the public sector, an substantial increase in the number of low-skilled service jobs and an expansion of private business and wealth. These changes have a significant impact on the composition of cities such as Ankara. The expansion of the city to embrace squatter areas, resided by low-wage and unskilled immigrants and the legalization of these areas in the 1980s blurred the socio-economic and physical boundaries that separated them from the inner city middle and upper class neighbourhoods. The re-demarcation of boundaries is materialized in the exodus of upper classes to suburbs in the 1990s. Unlike the suburbanization that started forty years ago in the United States, the Turkish upper classes not only moved their homes but also their restaurants, cafes, stores and private schools. Bilkent is such a development in Ankara, designed as a self-sufficient city offering a life-style based on convenience, luxury, leisure and fitness to upper class families. Bilkent created not only a new life-space for the rich but also many minimum-wage service jobs for young people. This paper examines these service sector jobs in Bilkent, social characteristics of workers, and what it means to serve to rich people in contemporary Turkey. The paper argues that their jobs create complex emotions in workers. In comparison to their relatives and friends who have hard time finding jobs, given the high unemployment in the current Turkish economy, young service workers feel ‘lucky’ to have regularly paying jobs in the formal sector. Moreover, they consider working at Bilkent as a cultural advantage in terms of 'seeing new things' and interacting with ‘civilized’ people. However, their feeling of advantage is constantly undermined by their interactions with rich customers and residents that remind them what they lack. Their experience of class and sense of worth are further complicated by their perception of social progress and of moral judgments about the customers. By analyzing economic, cultural and emotional dimensions of social hierarchies in Turkey, the paper aims to contribute to the understanding of polarization of urban landscapes and labor markets.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
None
Sub Area
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