CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Giresunlu, Goker |
|---|---|
| Title | Steel for the Nation, Misery for the People: Living Conditions and Coping Strategies at Karabuk Iron and Steel Works during World War II |
| Summary | This thesis investigates the living and working conditions and coping strategies in and around the state-owned iron and steel works at Karabük during World War II. Recent literature on state-owned industrial enterprises in Turkey suggests that conditions were unsatisfactory for workers during the 1940s, which led to high labor turnover and absenteeism rates. These high rates were interpreted as resistance or a defense mechanism, as opposed to the previous literature’s contention that workers lacked political agency, and high rates were rooted in their peasant characteristics. This study demonstrates that a combination of limited state capacity and urgency to produce iron and steel created a highly exploitative, unsatisfactory, and unequal setting around Karabük Iron and Steel Works (KISW). Many employees were unable to cover their living expenses and suffered from inadequate housing, malaria, pneumonia, and other diseases. However, it also challenges the homogenization of employees’ conditions by arguing that unequal distribution of wages and welfare services created opportunities for upward social mobility. To that end, it identifies a variety of coping strategies among the employees and other residents of Karabük, ranging from collaboration to anti-proletarianization. Whereas collaboratives improved their living conditions through climbing the ladder without disrupting the system, peasant-workers, entrepreneur-workers, and people who used KISW as a stepping stone undermined the factory’s efficiency through rejecting becoming stable employees. KISW was gradually compelled to recognize these coping strategies to consolidate the necessary workforce. The management both improved available welfare services and wages and changed their content in accordance with the people’s coping strategies, albeit insufficiently and unequally. Hence, this study argues that an uneasy compromise between KISW and people was reached, in which both improved conditions towards their goals gradually but insufficiently. |
| Supervisor | Wilson, M. Brett; Zimmermann, Susan C. |
| Department | Historical Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/giresunlu_goker.pdf |
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