Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s to 1980s by Jennifer A. Miller

Author:Jennifer A. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:44:09.990000+00:00

Foreign Labour Activism in Germany

Since the early nineteenth century, foreign workers in Germany have used labour activism, legal and illegal, to negotiate definitions of belonging; of local, national, and class identity; and of solidarity. Historian John Kulczycki has argued that ethnic Polish miners in nineteenth-century Germany, though aware of cultural and linguistic differences, worked together with native German co-workers towards common working-class goals, with the main barrier to class solidarity being German workers’ prejudice against them.6 What connects the nineteenth-century movements with more contemporary protests is not only the role of migrants but also the civic participation inherent in labour activism. For nineteenth-century foreign miners, according to David F. Crew, “occupation … provided the miner with an ‘integrated’ role in German society … [that] combined economic, social, and legal functions,” and it is this “occupational community” more than material deprivation that explains why workers strike.7 In the case of post-war guest workers, occupational community cannot be assumed as a goal since many workers maintained a desire to eventually return “home.” However, through labour activism, both supposedly temporary workers and their reluctant hosts often achieved occupational community, whether they meant to or not.

By the 1970s, foreign workers were well-integrated into the West German economy: by the early 1970s, the West German construction, steel, mining, and automobile industries had become largely dependent upon foreign labour.8 In 1973, 35.7 per cent of all guest workers were employed in the iron and metals industry, 24.1 per cent in processing trades, and16.6 per cent in construction.9 In 1973, 11.9 per cent of all workers in West Germany were foreign; put differently, every ninth worker was foreign and, in manufacturing specifically, it was every sixth worker.10 Yet despite the vital role they played, labour unions and smaller elected workers’ councils often isolated foreign workers while employers exploited them.11 German labour unions were initially critical of the guest worker program, fearing the program would depress wages and working conditions.12 However, unions strategically ended their resistance to the program in order to be involved in the planning process – for example, in securing the same wages across the board – and to recruit foreign workers into their ranks.13 By the end of the 1960s about 20 per cent of foreign workers were organized – a significant number considering that only 30 per cent of West German workers were organized.14

Guest workers participated in and initiated both legal and illegal labour activism from the beginning of the guest worker program.15 On 30 April 1962, in the city of Essen, three hundred Turkish workers went on strike over underpaid Kindergeld, or child benefit payments. During the strike, workers sang the Turkish national anthem, and the police responded by shooting rubber bullets and deporting ten of the striking Turkish workers.16 In the aftermath of the strike, which prompted much negative press in Turkey for the guest worker program, the Federal Labour Ministry complained that West German officials in Istanbul were falsely promising workers child benefit payments for children left behind in Turkey.

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