The Turkish government has urged people to stay at home and wait out the coronavirus pandemic, but its policies contradict its own slogans and have made self-isolation a luxury that millions of low-wage earners cannot afford, journalist Şebnem Arsu wrote for the Independent.
While government officials have told citizens to stay at home except for essential business and isolate themselves as much as possible, Tayyip Erdogan has made it a priority to keep the economic wheels turning.
This means that comprehensive lockdowns have not been called around the country for longer than the 48-hour curfew in large cities last weekend, and government support for workers to stay at home is limited.
As a result, millions of workers in low-paid jobs have had to continue working despite the grave risks of the pandemic, Arsu said.
“We keep hearing officials call for people to stay at home, maintain social distance – none of which, obviously, applies to us,” she quoted a construction worker, Yunus Özgür, as saying. “Instead we are told to continue production. We have no other choice, anyway. Otherwise, we’d starve.”
Since most of the 2 million construction workers in Turkey are not members of unions and work on short-term contracts, their protection from employers who often work hand-in-glove with the government is scant, said Arsu.
The close relationship between construction companies and the government has meant that coronavirus precautions have been ignored on many building sites, and in some cases, business continued as usual even after workers showing coronavirus symptoms were laid off, the journalist quoted construction sector sources as saying.
“Even after the pandemic arrived in Turkey, we had lunch in a tiny cafeteria where the employees of another firm ate. The tables were never cleaned. A hundred of us used 10 toilets, and I was never lucky enough to use it clean first thing in the morning,” a worker at the construction firm Koray İmşaat told Arsu.
