İlknur Başer – LEFT Party Spokesperson
The patriarchal capitalist system socialises political-cultural organisations that sanctify motherhood and normalise the exploitation of care labour for women, under the pretext of ‘protecting’ women and children. With the one-man regime declaring this year the ‘year of the family,’ we have seen in seminars, meetings, and advertisements that the ‘rules’ women must follow, endure, and fulfil for the family to survive are being listed.
According to the political Islamist one-man regime, women must live for the family. In the labour market, women are expected to work in insecure, flexible jobs without childcare facilities and without occupational health and safety measures. Women who work to bring additional income to the household are condemned to endless hours of care work and domestic labour at home. Recently, accompanied by the regime’s rhetoric of ‘three is not enough, five children,’ women’s labour of all kinds is being opened up for use by capital and the regime.
NURSERY RIGHT HAS BEEN MARKETISED
According to the Labour Law, employers with more than 150 female workers are obliged to open nurseries for the children of female workers aged 0–6 or to cover the costs of nurseries. However, this condition can only be applied in workplaces where there is unionisation and supervision. Although childcare is a parental right, historically, the struggle for public childcare rights has been largely led by women. Today, however, the right to childcare has been opened up to the market; childcare has been shifted onto the shoulders of female workers.
In Tokat, 987 workers employed at the Şık Makas factory were dismissed without compensation and without receiving three months’ wages at the beginning of October; moreover, they were dismissed under Code 22. Most of those dismissed were women. Workers dismissed under Code 22 were deprived of their rights to work in another job and receive unemployment benefits. One of the demands of the workers protesting in front of the factory was the abolition of Code 22.
Şık Makas, which employed 1,500 people, had agreements with nurseries and kindergartens and covered their fees. However, after the workers were dismissed, their children were not admitted to school because their fees were no longer paid. The children were suddenly deprived of their rights to two meals a day, socialisation and skills development. Those who glorify motherhood and childcare with religious obligations, extolling them to the skies, ruthlessly destroyed children’s right to education in the blink of an eye. Once again, it became clear how ‘sacred’ rhetoric evaporates when money and obedience are at stake.
MASTERED THE EXPLOITATION
When I attended the rally of the Şık Makas workers in Tokat on 16 November, the female workers, recounting the injustices they had suffered, asked, ‘Have these people no conscience?’ They were looking for the benevolent bosses of old Turkish films, or they were asking the question with the preconception that ‘the boss is human too.’ Yet capitalism, especially in its authoritarian form, is precisely a mechanism that operates by spreading ruthlessness. The slogan ‘women and children first’ had once again been used in moments of victimisation, turning into a meaningless ethical gesture. Of course, solidarity was the refinement of the oppressed, and the problem was temporarily solved; but the true face of capital and the one-man regime that protects it was revealed once again. This system is becoming more and more adept at exploiting the labour of women and children every day.
The right to childcare, a historical achievement of the working class and women, is too important to be left to the market and the initiative of employers. In these times when women workers are being squeezed from all sides, we need women to fight together for all the rights they are trying to take away from us, starting with the right to childcare. We women must also become skilled in the struggle.
Note: This article is translated from the original article titled Şık Makas’ta kadınlar ve çocuklar önden!, published in BirGün newspaper on November 25, 2025.
