The impact of COVID-19 on societies worldwide has been unprecedented and the future is still extremely unclear for any short- or medium-term planning. The implications for labor and employment relations are also far-reaching, as unemployment skyrockets across the world.  Besides the immediate impact of large-scale unemployment, scholars around the world have raised concerns about various other aspects of the challenge the COVID-19 has imposed on the world of work. A shortlist of impacts below already shows the severity of the situation:

• The crisis has suddenly, but profoundly, called for recategorization of essential/non-essential work and workers, and in relation to that, sectors;
• The crisis has accelerated, if not ignited, the role of automation and internet-based technologies and this has not only exacerbated precarity for the lower end of the labor market but also altered the interaction between work and time (scheduling) and space (distant work) for workers in higher echelons of the labor market;
• The crisis has unevenly impacted demographic groups by gender, race, and age;
• The crisis is deepening an already troubling North-South divide for two main reasons: i) advanced capitalist countries worry about the composition of their own labor market and are suggesting onshoring jobs and/or recasting the labor market at home for strategic reasons; ii) the massive cost (humane, financial, political and social) of this crisis will strip the countries of the Global South off of their ability to implement healthy labor market policies and deterioration of informal labor market conditions are expected;
• The crisis has exposed the fragile role of states regulating labor markets under neoliberal regimes of different manifestations. The nation-state has reappeared as an undeniable scalar focus on regulating work life and, depending on the success of social reactions, a bearer of welfare in the hopefully soon post-COVID-19 era. However, the crisis also raises challenges for organized labor, a key component of and advocate for such large-scale welfare demands.

The economic downturn in Turkey has also been multi-faceted as demand collapsed, supply chains have been disrupted and credit channels negatively impacted. The Turkish labor market has also suffered significantly and is well-documented in many outlets. I will, however, focus on two issues in this post, which I see particularly troubling for Turkey. These are:  i) youth un/employment, ii) public policy.

Turkey’s youth unemployment rate has been among Europe’s highest for almost a decade now. Prior to the crisis in January 2020, according to Turkstat as of January 2020, the official youth unemployment rate (15-24) was 22.9% compared to 12.6% general unemployment rate. Other sources such as unions cite the youth unemployment rate for the same period as high as 29.3%. The rate is higher for women in urban areas with 37%.

Even this high rate of youth unemployment is relatively misleading as around 10% of Turkey’s population is enrolled in colleges and universities. According to Higher Education Council, as of 2019, 7,740,502 students are enrolled in higher education institutions which roughly corresponds to 10% of the total population, a surprisingly high rate not just among Turkey’s peers but also with respect to the wealthier countries of the world such as the U.S. Since university students are not statistically considered active participants of the workforce, the role they play in this overall number is vague to say the least. Despite this statistical phenomenon, we observe college students working regularly in temporary and/or full-time jobs especially in the retail sector (garment, food, and/or other retail sectors). Not surprisingly, these are the sectors impacted the most from a shelter in place policies across the country. Often taking place in the informal sector, these jobs and their holders shift positions fast without making as big of an impact on statistical calculations.

Another problem regarding these massive layoffs is the question mark surrounding these industries’ ability to bounce back once the crisis is over. As a worldwide concern, the service sector, and its retail component (excluding relatively well-performing supermarkets and food delivery) are expected to be the last to bounce back after the crisis. A recent McKinsey study suggests that in the medium term the retail industry will also suffer from discount wars and this will undoubtedly reflect upon the already dismal labor conditions. Turkey’s poorly protected labor market is certainly a candidate for worsening conditions for young workers.

This brings us to our second and closely related subject: policymaking. So far, the Turkish government has opted for releasing programs offering short term relief for employers in the form of cheap credit, tax relief in various forms, and the ability to furlough workers in limited conditions. These efforts are later supplemented by successive credit packages mostly financed by and administered through public banks. By providing a variety of consumer credit programs (specific to vehicle purchases, the housing sector, and short-term loans) the main goal is to revitalize the economy through rekindling the weakened demand.

The trust in an economic rebound seems like the central tenet of these policies. The keyword used extensively is normalization. In this regard, Turkey does not diverge from the rest of the world as policymakers across the world have so far failed to respond to the crisis with substantial long-term planning. The only outlier so far may be the EU’s emphasis and ambitious plan to transform its economy to a more sustainable and green one instead of pursuing “normalization” that suggests a return to business-as-usual. Whether this ambitious plan will be implemented or not is still open to discussion. However, such massive undertakings with access to vast financial resources in the international arena expose the shortcomings of Turkey and countries alike in generating such large scale and transformative policies. The vulnerabilities of the economy prior to the COVID-19 crisis make such policy-making a formidable task if not an impossible one. Surely, the implications for labor will be profound as the return to normal will be far from sufficient to address the challenges of the post-COVID-19 environment.

The COVID-19 crisis is an unprecedented one in terms of its reach and pervasiveness, and it exposed the vulnerabilities of the global social, political, and economic system. That said, its impact on countries has been uneven and this unevenness depended heavily on the position countries were in immediately prior to the crisis. In Turkey, the key issue of youth un/employment emerged as one of the long-lasting ones since it was a major challenge before the crisis. Policy-making emerged as another key issue as the ability to generate long-term planning escaped Turkey and countries alike for a while. Regardless of when we will get past the pandemic, the post-COVID-19 world will be an extremely difficult one.

The commentary, “Putting the world-historical perspectives at the center of the social sciences in the post-pandemic world” by Biray Kolluoğlu and Deniz Yükseker in the New Perspectives for Turkey is available to download for free until August 15, 2020.

Click here to explore New Perspectives on Turkey on Cambridge Core.