Middle East: Women Still an Untapped Labor Force in Turkey

 

ISTANBUL — Until she gave birth to her first child three months ago, 29-year-old Gulsen Cigdem worked at TransOrient International Forwarding, handling sales and logistics for moving goods by air, truck and sea.

Now, her days are spent caring for her son, Doruk, while she and her husband, Tarik, who works in the technology sector, try to find an affordable baby sitter so she can return to work when her maternity leave expires. She wants to avoid becoming one of the hundreds of thousands of Turkish women who, armed with a university degree, find a well-paying and interesting job but do not return to the work force once they marry or start a family.

“I got an education,” Mrs. Cigdem said during a recent interview. “I worked hard for that, and to just drop it because I became a mother is not my style.”

Creating more economic opportunities for women like Mrs. Cigdem is among the goals of the 2011 Global Summit of Women meeting through Saturday in Istanbul as a sort of Davos for women, mirroring the annual gathering of world economic leaders at the Swiss resort. Held for the first time in Turkey, the conference is taking place in a country where women, once they find jobs, often struggle to stay in them.

Researchers say that nearly half of all Turkish women enter the labor market at some point in their lives, but most end up quitting because of family obligations or poor working conditions. Raising rates of employment by women is “instrumental in building capacity for economic growth and poverty reduction,” a report by the Turkish State Planning Organization and the World Bank said.

While 64 percent of adult women in the European Union were employed in 2007, the figure was 23.5 percent in Turkey as of 2009, according to the Turkish and World Bank report. Of the women employed in Turkey in 2008, 35 percent worked in the service sector, 13 percent in industry and 49 percent in agriculture, according to the International Labor Organization.

Part of the problem is that most of the Turkish women who migrate to larger cities like Istanbul from rural areas in the south and east lack sufficient education to find anything but marginal, low-paying jobs. They are also likely to have several children and to find work that is outside the bounds of legal employment and therefore also outside the national social security system, making them more dependent on their spouses.

But it is marriage itself, some studies say, that appears to be the main factor in whether a Turkish woman stays on the job, regardless of her level of education.

“A common explanation suggested for Turkey’s low level of female participation in the labor force is that cultural attitudes that do not approve of women’s presence in the public sphere,” Ipek Ilkkaracan, a professor of economics at Istanbul Technical University, said during an interview by e-mail this week. “But a close look at data does not confirm that. Prior to marriage, women’s participation in the labor market in Turkey is at very high levels.”

Among never-married women age 25 to 45, the rate of participation in the labor force for university graduates is about 90 percent, the same as their male counterparts, Ms. Ilkkaracan said. For never-married women who graduated from high school, the figures are about 55 percent and for primary school graduates, 40 percent.

“By contrast, the figures for married women in Turkey are substantially lower,” she said. “Seventy percent for university graduates, about 25 percent for high school graduates and only 15 percent for married women of prime working age with primary school education.”

“In other words,” she added, “Turkish women participate in large numbers — no matter what their level of education — prior to marriage, but end up leaving their jobs upon marriage and having children.”

Ms. Ilkkaracan, a founding member of the nonprofit Women for Women’s Human Rights and the author of “Toward Gender Equality in the Labor Market: Work and Family Life Reconciliation Policies,” said one reason for the flight was the lack of childcare solutions for working women.

“There are hardly any subsidized childcare centers, crèches or preschools,” she said. “The few that existed have been closed down under the current administration. Given the low wages for women with high school or primary school education, it is hard for them to afford paid childcare.”

The problem is not lost on many of the high-ranking women executives in Turkey, where 12 percent of chief executive positions are held by women, about the same as in Germany according to the World Economic Forum.

Umit Boyner, president of the Turkish Industry and Business Association, or Tusiad, told a conference on working women earlier this year, “We must focus on altering the status of women in education and labor force statistics.”

“I regard the lack of educated women able to take their place in working life of their own free will as a serious loss,” she said. “Let us not squander our resources.”

Guler Sabanci, chairwoman of Sabanci Holding, who ranked third last year in a Financial Times list of the 50 most prominent businesswomen in the world, spoke at the same conference. (She became the first female member of Tusiad in 1984 and for many years was its only female member.)

After hailing the advances made by Turkish women in the era of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Ms. Sabanci said “the present situation is unfortunately not very bright” in terms of women in the work place. “There is still a lot to be done for women in employment, social and political issues.”

“There is an election process ahead of us,” she said, referring to elections set for June. “Our political parties need to show sensitivity in this matter.”

Of the 550 members in the Turkish Parliament, 48 are women.

But for those like Mrs. Cigdem, the new mother, such lofty goals are a distant concern. She is more focused on finding a way to return to work by the end of this year.

“I am entitled to four months of paid leave,” she said by telephone. “Then I can take another six months unpaid. After that I have to go back to my job, or lose it.”

“Some of my friends are even saying that it’s the husband who has to work and that I should just stay home with the baby,” Mrs. Cigdem said. “But I used to live in England where I worked as an au pair. I saw that all the women went back to work after having children, but in Turkey we don’t have an au pair system.”

“I want to work because one income is not enough: Istanbul is very expensive,” she said, “but it’s also important for me socially, because these days I’m just home, home, home, looking after the child. I want to work, first for myself and second to earn enough money to provide a good education for Doruk.”

 

Labor Board Case Against Boeing Points to Fights to Come

These fears and hopes were stirred this week when the labor board’s top lawyer filed a case against Boeing, seeking to force it to move airplane production from a nonunion plant in South Carolina to a unionized one in Washington State. Boeing executives had publicly said they were making the move to avoid the kind of strikes the airplane maker had repeatedly faced in Washington; Lafe Solomon, the labor board’s acting general counsel, said the company’s motive constituted illegal retaliation against workers for exercising their right to strike.

The agency’s unusually bold action angered business groups and some politicians, who said it was an unwarranted attempt by the government to interfere with a fundamental corporate decision.

But under President Obama’s appointees, the agency, including Mr. Solomon and his staff, has sought to reinterpret and more vigorously enforce the rules governing employers and employees, from what workers can say about their bosses on Twitter to the use of Internet and phone voting in union elections.

How much ultimately changes will depend in large part on the decisions made by the five-member board, led by Wilma Liebman, that sits atop the agency. That panel hears cases brought by the board’s regional offices — overseen by Mr. Solomon — after employers, workers or unions file complaints.

Democratic-dominated boards often tilt toward unions and reverse the decisions of Republican-leaning boards, which usually tilt toward management, and vice versa. The current board — made up of three Democrats and one Republican, with one vacancy — is expected to reverse a Bush-era decision that stripped graduate teaching assistants at private universities of their right to bargain collectively. Labor experts also predict that the board will adopt a policy that makes it easier to organize nursing home workers by allowing unions to go after smaller units of workers inside those homes.

The biggest surprise has been the activist stance taken by Mr. Solomon, a career civil servant at the board for 39 years. He became acting general counsel in June 2010, and President Obama nominated him to be the permanent general counsel last January. The Senate has not yet confirmed him to the post.

In the Boeing case, Mr. Solomon charged that the company had illegally moved some production work of the 787 Dreamliner passenger plane to South Carolina to punish workers for past strikes and to avoid future ones. The remedy proposed by Mr. Solomon has been denounced as extreme by many business leaders: that Boeing essentially abandon a $2 billion investment and 1,000 nonunion workers it hired in South Carolina and move the work back to its unionized Puget Sound facilities.

Outraged, the National Association of Manufacturers warned that if the agency won this case, “no company will be safe from the N.L.R.B. stepping in to second-guess its business decisions on where to expand.”

Senator Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican, complained, “This is nothing more than a political favor for the unions who are supporting President Obama’s re-election campaign.”

The Boeing case was not the first time that Mr. Solomon has riled the business community and its Republican allies. Saying it is federal domain, he recently threatened to sue four Republican-heavy states — Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah — in an effort to invalidate recent constitutional amendments that prohibit private sector workers from choosing a union by signing cards, a process known as card check.

He has also sought to extend the labor board’s reach into the world of the Internet. He approved requests from regional labor board officials to bring complaints against businesses that punished employees for Facebook and Twitter posts, including one case against Reuters. Mr. Solomon has also proposed that electronic voting be used when workers decide whether they want to unionize their workplace — a proposal that business groups maintain will make it easier for unions to coerce workers.

In an interview, Mr. Solomon, a 61-year-old Arkansas native, insisted that he was no radical.

“My goal is to enforce the National Labor Relations Act,” he said. That law, enacted in 1935, governs private sector workers’ right to unionize as well as relations between tens of thousands of companies and employees.

Mr. Solomon, who has worked for board members of both parties, said this case was straightforward: Boeing had retaliated against workers for exercising their federally protected right to strike. “They had a consistent message that they were doing this to punish their employees for having struck and having the power to strike in the future,” he said. “I can’t not issue a complaint in the face of such evidence.”

 

Labor Board Tells Boeing New Factory Breaks Law

In its complaint, the labor board said that Boeing’s decision to transfer a second production line for its new 787 Dreamliner passenger plane to South Carolina was motivated by an unlawful desire to retaliate against union workers for their past strikes in Washington and to discourage future strikes. The agency’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, said it was illegal for companies to take actions in retaliation against workers for exercising the right to strike.

Although manufacturers have long moved plants to nonunion states, the board noted that Boeing officials had, in internal documents and news interviews, specifically cited the strikes and potential future strikes as a reason for their 2009 decision to expand in South Carolina.

Boeing said it would “vigorously contest” the labor board’s complaint. “This claim is legally frivolous and represents a radical departure from both N.L.R.B. and Supreme Court precedent,” said J. Michael Luttig, a Boeing executive vice president and its general counsel. “Boeing has every right under both federal law and its collective bargaining agreement to build additional U.S. production capacity outside of the Puget Sound region.”

It is highly unusual for the federal government to seek to reverse a corporate decision as important as the location of plant.

But ever since a Democratic majority took control of the five-member board after Mr. Obama’s election, the board has signaled that it would seek to adopt a more liberal, pro-union tilt after years of pro-employer decisions under President Bush.

Although the board has not yet issued many major decisions reversing Bush-era policies, it has begun requiring private sector employers to post a notice about workers’ right to unionize, and Mr. Solomon has begun moving more aggressively to win reinstatement of union supporters fired illegally by management during unionization drives.

In a statement Wednesday, Mr. Solomon said: “A worker’s right to strike is a fundamental right guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act. We also recognize the rights of employers to make business decisions based on their economic interests, but they must do so within the law.”

South Carolina’s two senators, both Republicans, Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint, denounced the board’s move. “This is nothing more than a political favor for the unions who are supporting President Obama’s re-election campaign,” Mr. DeMint said.

The labor board said that in 2007, Boeing announced plans to create a second production line that would make three 787 Dreamliner planes a month in the Puget Sound area to address a growing backlog of orders. That was to be in addition to a line already making seven Dreamliners a month there. In October 2009, Boeing said it would locate its second line at a new, nonunion plant in South Carolina.

The N.L.R.B. asserted that on numerous occasions Boeing officials had communicated an unlawful motive for transferring the production line, including an interview with The Seattle Times in which a Boeing executive said, “The overriding factor was not the business climate. And it was not the wages we’re paying today. It was that we cannot afford to have a work stoppage, you know, every three years.”

Mr. Solomon brought the complaint after a union representing many of Boeing’s Washington workers, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, complained that Boeing had decided to move production to South Carolina largely in retaliation for a 58-day strike in 2008.

“Boeing’s decision to build a 787 assembly line in South Carolina sent a message that Boeing workers would suffer financial harm for exercising their collective bargaining rights,” said the union’s vice president, Rich Michalski.

Mr. Solomon said that if he failed to settle the dispute, an administrative judge would begin hearing the case on June 14 in Seattle. Mr. Solomon said he was not seeking to close the South Carolina factory or prohibit Boeing from assembling planes there.

Boeing criticized the timing of the N.L.R.B.’s complaint, saying it came when construction of the factory in North Charleston, S.C., was nearly complete and after 1,000 employees had already been hired there.

Boeing said on Wednesday that none of the production jobs in South Carolina had come at the expense of jobs in Washington. It noted that its unionized employment in the Puget Sound area had increased by 2,000 since it announced its decision to expand in South Carolina.

The company also said it had decided to expand in South Carolina in part to protect business continuity and to reduce the damage to its finances and reputation from future work stoppages.