Divided but Together : Migrant Labor in the EU and in Turkey

© European Union 2016 – European Parliament

The political landscape of Europe during the Cold War was defined by a seemingly simple conflict between the left and the right. Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc however, the political center has shifted to the right and a new kind of antagonism has come under the spotlight, that between the anti-immigration euro-sceptic conservatives and the more “humanitarian” open-borders liberals. Moreso than anything else, the migrant question dictates the debate around the continent. This is as true in the EU as it is in Turkey, where the economic and ideological impact of immigration are felt deeply by the inhabitants. 

That said, there is a clear lack of substantive analysis of the effects of immigration in the mainstream discourse. Insults on the person, accusations of racism, and treason are plentiful but the real questions always get sidelined. As orthodox economics has been unable to dig itself out of this whole it has created, one must as always turn to socialist political economy to find the answers needed for a real solution. Once the theory of immigration has been examined, it can be used to understand the current state of affairs in the EU and in Turkey and propose a plan of action. 

Migrant Labor in the Socialist Framework 

In Marx’s theory, a major factor determining the distribution of wages is his concept of the reserve army of labor, that part of the population not part of of the proletariat that can be absorbed into it [1]. Marx distinguishes between three different types of reserve armies, with the latent reserve army being part of the population living in agricultural and underdeveloped regions that migrate to the cities in search of work as wage laborers. The resulting competition for jobs reduces the bargaining power of labor as opposed to capital and drives down wages. A large latent reserve thus serves as a barrier blocking substantial increases in wages. The reserve being finite however, it ultimately exhausts itself, leading to the creation of a tight labor market where workers can organize more easily and press for better wages. 

What is the role of immigration in all this? As mentioned earlier, the latent reserve eventually dries up after a certain stage in the development of the productive forces within a given country — but what about other countries? Immigration serves to maintain the latent reserve and its depressive effect on wages by letting in foreign workers who have to compete with domestic workers in the same labor market. During Marx’s time, this phenomenon manifested itself most clearly in the Irish question. As he put it, “the English bourgeoisie has also much more important interests in the present economy of Ireland. Owing to the constantly increasing concentration of leaseholds, Ireland constantly sends her own surplus to the English labor market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class.” He continues, “And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial center in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians.” [2] 

This brief overview by Marx perfectly summarizes the two basic functions of migrant labor as it is employed by capitalists: The economic effect is to drive down wages for the whole and the ideological effect is to put a wrench in class solidarity by creating animosity between the different groups of workers. This is certainly of advantage to the capitalists but it alone doesn’t explain the initial embrace of pro-immigration policies by the neo-liberals back in the 70s. There is a much deeper contradiction within capitalism that necessitates the need for migrant labor: the falling rate of profit. Capitalism needs a constant supply of new hands entering the workforce to keep the rate of profit up, but as countries develop their fertility rates level off and the labor supply depletes, leading to the inevitable decline in the rate of profit. Immigrant labor was and still is an easy way to counteract this tendency, and its employment was what got capitalist Europe out of the roadblock it faced at the time of the OPEC crisis [3]. 

It is not an understatement to say that a good part of the current economic system of Europe is based on the efficient exploitation of migrant labor for the purpose of keeping a steady rate of profit. While the EU has a more institutionalized and “gentlemanly” way of managing its supply of migrant labor, Turkey has profited off the sudden turn of events in Syria to create its own labor pool. Regardless of the differences between them, the two are still expressions of the same basic system which debases labor on all fronts. 

The EU 

There are two aspects to the question of immigration regarding the EU. The first relates to immigration from one member state to another. As is well known, the EU was conceived as an internal market marked by “the abolition, as between Member States, of obstacles to the free movement of goods, persons, services and capital”. This neo liberal framework, which gives capital all the tools it needs in order to maximize its profits, opens up the eastern member states as an extended latent reserve for the west. Eastern Europeans who had their local industries destroyed and were left unemployed after the transition to capitalism were absorbed into countries like Germany to be chewed up as cheap labor. 

Although European law does give full protection to foreign EU workers, it nonetheless allows employers to transfer low-pay union contracts from low wages countries to high-wage countries and outlaws industrial action against this practice. The Court of Justice of the European Union has repeatedly upheld the right of employers to move labor from one country to another to lower wages and circumvent collective bargaining agreements, as exemplified by the Laval and Viking cases. This framework creates a very strong illusion whereby the Western economies, who’re net beneficiaries of this system, appear as benevolent allies who’re helping uplift the poor easterners. Demographic changes in places like Bulgaria or the Baltic however paint a much less flattering picture. 

The other aspect regarding immigration concerns people coming from outside of the EU’s own borders. As one would expect, the treatment they receive is considerably more brutal as they can’t benefit from even the basic legal protection EU citizens get. The European authorities are also much more picky with them. They’re willing to accept Syrian doctors and engineers while sending the rest of their countrymen to limbo in Turkey. Worse so is the fate of the people who try to cross the Mediterranean on makeshift boats only to be lost at sea because of the neglect or complicity of the Greek and Italian coast guards. 

These two different kinds of immigrants show the peculiarity of the ideological aspect of the European project. Many see the EU as a way for European nations to shed themselves of the nationalism that brought them so much pain in the last century. What’s actually happened instead is the creation of a new kind of European national consciousness. The debate between the conservatives and the liberals is thus not a conflict between nationalist and internationalist worldviews but rather a conflict between local nationalism and European nationalism. 

At the end of the day, it is a cultural issue that feigns economic consequences. Capitalism needs a certain quantity of migrant labor to keep the rate of profit up, regardless of how racist the individualist capitalists are. This is why the supposedly anti-immigration movements in Europe are ultimately a farce, as they would never be able to fulfill their campaign promises without drawing the ire of the capital that funds them. Scapegoating immigrants, inciting hatred against them and putting their lives in danger are all things politicians would do, but expelling them all outright would never be on anyone’s agenda. 

Turkey 

For the EU, Turkey serves as a buffer between it and the Middle East, a way for it to filter qualified labor from the rest. For this purpose, it gives Turkey money to house the unwanted immigrants within its borders. As expected, many people in Turkey are unhappy with this setup and see it as the EU using Turkey as its trash can. This anger is directed towards Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (the AKP) but it is also directed towards the immigrants themselves, who are for the large part made up of Syrian refugees. Within public discourse, Syrians are frequently characterized as freeloaders who eat up government and EU funds without doing anything for the economy. Rumors abound that Syrians are paid salaries even though they do not work, that they receive free treatment in hospitals, that they do not pay for medicine, that they enter universities without exams, and so on. 

This idea of the easy-going, smooth criminal Syrian is of course a fantasy. In reality, the majority of Syrian refugees work unregistered, without any legal status or rights, and are subjected to low wages and poor working conditions. According to recent data, only 145 thousand Syrian refugees out of nearly 3.7 million live in 25 “shelter centers”, while almost 3.5 million of them live in different provinces of Turkey. It is estimated that there are over a million unregistered Syrian workers employed in agriculture, construction, textiles and some labor-intensive industries, especially seasonal work [4]. This has of course had the effect of driving down wages for the whole of the workforce, as expected from the theory of the latent reserve [5], but the conditions of the Syrian workers themselves are particularly wretched. In a study conducted on the conditions of textile workers in Turkey, nearly one hundred percent of the Syrian workers interviewed said they didn’t have insurance [6]. 

Turkey already has a very low wage share (part of the national income going to labor) compared to other OECD countries [7] but there is yet a tendency for firms to further reduce labor costs [8]. The large-scale use of unregistered Syrian labor surely contributes to this downward trend but blaming it all on the Syrians is an opportunistic and dishonest way of framing the current situation. An example of such opportunism and dishonesty comes from Ümit Özdağ, the hot new far-right politician in Turkey, who says that the economic crisis the country is facing can’t be solved without the expulsion of the Syrians. This kind of rhetoric gets the attention of the angry young man demographic but it only serves to create a smokescreen that obscures the real reasons behind the crisis such as economic policies aimed deliberately to polarize income [9]. 

In underdeveloped countries like Turkey, where labor is already cheap, refugees from countries less developed than Turkey are a way to increase competition among workers and to drive down wages, to further increase subcontracting, uninsured and precarious work, and the role of pundits like Özdağ is to draw attention away from this fact and spread stories about a plot to “arabize” Turkey. The class nature of the issue being ignored, the discussion necessarily turns towards chauvinism. This is a universal

phenomenon, but the framing of the issue is somewhat particular in Turkey, stemming from the evolution of the AKP itself. When the AKP was first elected, it had a more “tolerant”, inclusive Islamist image. This façade was abandoned as time went on to make way for an increasingly chauvinistic agenda without ever abandoning its Islamist roots. Today, the AKP’s ideology can be summed up as Turco-Sunnite essentialism or Neo-Ottomanism: the Turks are at the top of the Muslim world, mastering the inferior Arabs. This creates a very bizarre environment where Erdoğan supporters welcome the refugees as Muslims but also look down on them as Arabs. 

The last point to touch on is the effect migrant labor has on the contradiction between opposing camps of capitalists. It’s abundantly clear that the arrival of foreign workers creates a rift between them and the domestic workers, but it also creates a conflict of interest between small and medium-sized enterprises and monopoly-finance capital. The SMEs were able to grow considerably through migrant labor working in the lower-tier service, textile, and construction sectors, while monopoly-finance capital demands a population that can overcome its dependence on cheap commodity production to take part in the production-consumption cycle. It is worth highlighting however that whatever the disagreements between the two camps may amount to, capital as a whole ultimately benefits from the present setup, as the profit rates make it clear [10]. 

Going Forward 

It is beyond the scope of this article to come up with a detailed program on how to approach the migrant question but some general outlines can still be made. As has been stated, migrant labor does indeed has a depressive effect on wages, but blaming immigrants for this is counter-intuitive. On the contrary, workers should campaign together to obtain the legal prohibition of bosses to employ foreign workers at a wage less than that of domestic workers. Foreign workers should also be persuaded to join the appropriate local unions alongside domestic workers. These ideas, alongside many others, are all present in the program of the Parti Ouvrier of 1880. It is an old but very solid document that can be used as a baseline to create a modern program that can unify domestic and foreign workers.

It of course won’t be easy to realize any of these demands in the EU or in Turkey, but one mustn’t forget that nothing good has ever come easy. Things taken for granted today have always been won with sweat and blood. Even with the war in Ukraine, Europe is still in a relatively peaceful phase of its history, but that in no way gives an excuse for socialists to let their guard down. If foreign and domestic workers are to come together, they’ll have to show the utmost solidarity in the face of the divisions imposed upon them. I’d like to end with a quote from Cabral that I feel should be the guiding principle of everyone who wants to be on the side of labor. 

“Tell no lies, claim no easy victories”

Cem Poyraz Özbay

Bibliography :

[1] Karl Marx, “Capital”, Vol 1, Chapter 25 

[2] Letters: Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt 9 April 1870 (marxists.org) 

[3] For an example of how a very high organic composition of capital coupled with a stagnant population affects profit rates, see Japan 

[4] https://www.al-monitor.com/tr/contents/articles/originals/2019/02/turkey-syria-syrian refugees-burden-or-cheap-labor.html 

[5] World Bank Document 

[6] MetalIsSuriyeSiginmaciTekstil2017.pdf (madde14.org), p. 58 

[7] Turkey’s economy grows 5.6% in 2022, but labor’s income share shrinks – Al Monitor: Independent, trusted coverage of the Middle East 

[8] Şirketlerin maliyetlerinde çalışanın payı düşüyor – Bloomberg HT

[9] To see a balanced response to Özdağ’s claims, see Cem Oyvat on Twitter: “Şu tvitten dolayı yemediğim hakaret kalmadı. “Fonculuğumdan”, “liberalliğime” herşey söylendi. Maalesef bu tepkiler şaşırtmıyor. Twitter’in ortamı böyle. Şu yazdığım Türkiye dışında bir yerde ilgi görüyor olsa veya şu yazdıklarımdan tek kuruş para alsam gam yemeyeceğim. 1/” / Twitter

[10] Fortune 500 Türkiye-2022 Araştırması’na göre, net satış, ihracat ve kârda rekor artış yaşandı – Foreks

Image : © European Union 2016 – European Parliament; Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives CreativeCommons licenses creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). https://www.flickr.com/photos/european_parliament/24327206073