Habibe Eren

 

ISTANBUL - Women who struggled over insecurity and the right to retirement in the home-based work area, which is mostly women, became unionized after 10 years. However, their problems are not over. Gülsüm Nazlıoğlu, a chairperson of Home-Based Employees Union (Ev-Eksen), stated that they will continue to fight for the right to secure employment and retirement.

 

Home-based work, in Turkey as well as in the world, is the low wage, poor condition, uncertain; It appears as a form of work that sometimes works day and night without interruption, and sometimes no job can be found for months, without any social rights. While the conditions created by the pandemic affected all segments of society, it also deeply affected home-based work, 90 percent of which was women.

 

Ev-Eksen was established on November 10, 2009, but all attempts at the Ministry of Family and Social Services to provide the registration number required for member registration were inconclusive. This struggle of Ev-Eksen, who started the legal struggle when the request for a registration number was rejected by the Ministry on October 14, 2010, resulted in a gain about 10 years later.

With its decision last year, the Council of State paved the way for the registration number to be given to the Ev-Eksen and for the union to become a member following the procedure.

 

Gülsüm Nazlıoğlu, chairperson of Ev-Eksen, spoke about their invisible efforts and demands on the way to May 1.

 

Stating that home-based work emerges as three types of work in employment, Gülsüm said: “The first is the order method. It takes place in the form of orders taken from the small workshops where we live, from the neighbors, from the grocery stores. The employer who brings the order determines the job. The second is piecemeal work from factories. These are a way of working with all the working arms from dry cleaning to the engine part; We call it to outsource. Thirdly, let's say today you work 20 hours a day, making a job in three days, but you see that work may not come for three months. To complete that gap and make it regular, knitting fiber, baby vest, weaving, etc. We try to sell this in places we see or when we find the customer in the market. This is the way of working that we call for her account."

 

'We want social and employment security'

 

Emphasizing that they could not establish a union in any line of work, Gülsüm said: “Let's say today I am making pasta, tomorrow I make fruit leather, and the next day I sew. I can even do these three lines of work on the same day. During this period, eight-hour employees started working 12 hours. You are sitting at your house at night, even when you are asleep they can call you and ask for a job. We need to find a solution together. We want social security and employment security.”