A General Account

Abstract

A recent research monograph on car workers in the USA bore the title Farewell to the Factory (Milkman 1997). Outstanding as that account is, it is entirely appropriate to adopt the very opposite idea as the title for this opening part of the book. For the workers who feature in these pages work in the big corporate sector, not in the USA, but in Turkey. For them, the dream is not to say ‘Farewell’ to the factory. It is to say ‘Hello’. Jobs in the big corporate sector are highly valued precisely because they are some of the few that promise an escape from the much more extensive informal economy. This is rather remarkable when viewed in the context of some western views about both the informal sector and foreign multinationals in countries like Turkey, which in recent years have begun to change.