This study examines the forms of state domination over mine labour and the struggles of coalminers at the Zonguldak coalfield during World War II. It is focused on the everyday experiences of compulsory workers as reflected in petitions by those workers and the surveillance materials of the single-party regime at the time. Its aim is to reveal how, under an authoritarian regime, compulsory workers created a political agency. The compulsory labour system was one of the most coercive devices with which the state controlled mine labour between 1940 and 1947, but the compulsory workers negotiated with the political elite for their living and working conditions, and did so within a political sphere which had been devised by the ruling elite as a governmental strategy for managing and shaping the population. By subverting the political discourse of the ruling elite, the miners contributed not just to the development of workers’ rights, but also helped reveal the merits of a democratic society.

Published in 1969, Hobsbawm and Rudé’s Captain Swing remains the sole national account of the so-called “Swing riots” that diffused throughout most of rural southern, central, and eastern England in the autumn and winter of 1830. Whilst much revisionist work has been published since, Hobsbawm and Rudé’s contention that Swing’s brutal judicial repression effectively ended the protests has remained essentially unchallenged. Through an archival re-examination of the resort to protest between the 1830 trials and December 1833, this paper contends that the received understanding that Swing was crushed is too simplistic. In some locales, Swing maintained its momentum, in others it revived. Swing also morphed into different forms, both real and phantasmagorical. But the intensity of protests did decline. By the autumn of 1833, protests were less frequent, now representing a fractured, isolated spatiality instead of a coherent protest campaign.

This article explores the lives of Sümerbank and Etibank workers inside and outside their workplaces during World War II. First, it examines their social origins and the process of recruiting those workers. Secondly, it draws attention to the unhealthy conditions in which they worked, the sundry forms of violence they were subjected to, and the insufficient wages they received. It goes on to analyze social services – nutrition, accommodation, and healthcare facilities – provided by those two enterprises. Drawing on official reports, petitions, and workers’ personal accounts, it highlights the inadequacies of those facilities, and the hierarchical and exclusionary practices inherent in them. Following this framework, it responds to the studies which portray workers in state-run enterprises as privileged government officials and those enterprises as centers of social education. Finally, it focuses on workers’ reactions to their social conditions in the form of high turnover rates. The discussions of politicians, government officials, and journalists revolving around high turnover rates suggest that this reactive form of labor activism played an important role in the formulation and enactment of social policies concerning labor.

The years between the late 1940s and late 1950s constituted a critical period in the historical formation of the working class in Turkey. During that period, Turkey experienced a number of structural transformations. It also saw the elaboration of a new discourse on the working class by labor representatives, organizations, and by workers themselves. That discourse provided the workers and their organizations with the channels necessary to articulate their demands when other forms of expression were considered ineffective and dangerous. Using the language of equality, justice, and human rights, workers appealed for improvement in their status both at the workplace and within society at large. This new political culture and language was built on the critical assessment of the corporatist construction of labor relations and the rejection of the idea that employers and workers were members of the same (national) family. Based on worker and union newspapers, the primary objective of this essay is to discuss the basic components and characteristic features of this new discourse and its place in working-class politics in early republican Turkey.