| and refrain purely from choice. During my stay I had direct evidence of about 75 men being away from the village at one time or another to earn money. since it was not possible to be certain that I recorded every coming and going, the total was probably higher. There are also others who normally go, but who did not go last year. Seven men out of the total I recorded were away for a year or more without permanently emigrating, by far the majority were away for three or four months, and a few went to Kayseri only for a few weeks or even days to help with the harvest, the harvest being earlier on the Kayseri plain than in the village. Within this group are four rough divisions - building trade operatives, plain unskilled labour, factory workers, and a miscellaneous group of people who take special jobs. Men with a special skill are called “usta” (plural “ustalar”) which is used as a term of respect in address and carries social prestige. At present the village ustalar consist of 28 skiled plasterers, 8 stone masons, 4 carpenters, a plumber, a painter, and a glazier who no longer goes to town. For a long time there was been a tradition of building trade craftmanship in the Kayseri area, and the villages nearer Kayseri, which suffer from serious land shortage, have a high proportion of these craftsmen, in some cases up to nearly 100%. In Sakaltutan and its neighbours, the custom is only fifteen to twenty years old. At present it is growing rapidly, 7 of the 28 plasterers mentioned having learnt the trade this year, and 19 being young men of 25 or less. Whereas the standard pay for an unskilled worker is 3 T.L. a day without food, these craftsmen may earn up to 10 T.L. a day (£1.5.Od.) They are paid piece-rates, and the amount earned varies with a man’s skill. Since, when in work, the men work a seven day week, a man can earn 200 to 300 T.L. a month, as much as many middle class salaries. The plumber and the carpenter even claim to make 12 T.L. a day. While in town a man spends about 30 T.L. on food, and 10 T.L. a month on a bed in a dormitory, making a total of expenses of about 40 T.L. a month. At first sight it would seem that such earning power is out of all proportion to the village economy. In practice, however, the advantages are not so great. It is comparatively rare for a man to find work easily, and these men often have considerable periods of time |
| unemployed, when, as they readily admit, they spend a lot of the money which they have earned. I was unable to find out how much is actually sent home, but the figure of 100 T.L. a month was often given in answer to questions. Whereas to my knowledge one or two young men spent all they earned on themselves, others, especially the heads of households, who might bring home. The plumber told me that he had 2,000 T.L. saved up, a contrast with the indebtedness of most of the agricultural families. The town going ustalar can be recognised as a rule by smart western-type suits and shoes. They carry fountain pens and wrist watches, though often their women and children are threadbare and shoeless like the rest of the village women and children. A few ustalar go regularly and for long periods to the towns, and by this means presumably acquire a higher level of skill and regular connections in town, as a result of which they can find work more easily. |
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| These ustalar have to suffer regular and long absences from the village, from family and land, as the price of their comparative affluence. Ibrahim, the plumber, (SI 3), for example, has grown tired of his continual wanderings, and speaks now of staying in the village and attempting some new enterprise there. Apart from the young men, some of whom enjoy the opportunities for amusement in the towns, these men all said that, if only they had the land, they would far rather remain in the village as farmers than go away to warn even the high pay of a skilled man. Equally, the peasant owners do not envy the migrant craftsmen. “what is the use of money? Money is spent, wealth is fields and animals”, said Ali Osman, (BK 1), the schoolmaster. The attitude to wealth in cash has undoubtedly been strengthened by experience of inflation during the present generation. The old men clearly remember the value of money in the days when money in the village was rare. One old man told me of the time when a day’s wage was only 4 piastres, a fiftieth of it present value, and , as recently as 1936 one could buy a yearling for 1 T.L., which now would cost at least 15 T.L. the village thus realises to a limited extent, the danger of this dependence on the town for its income. Early this last summer, 1950, political complaints were to be heard of the difficulty of finding work, the more so following the failure of the 1949 harvest. What in fact is happening is an increase of population beyond the carrying capacity of the village lands, which is dependent of livelihood on seasonal work in the building trade. The rapid extension of this system of villages here recently it was unknown reflects the building boom in the big |
| towns, where flats, houses, offices, ministries, hospitals and schools are going up as fast as possible. The need for this building is more or less inexhaustible, but the continuation of the present rate of such building depends on the ability of Turkey to be able to afford a heavy investment in this direction, an ability itself dependent on national and international political factors. The more dependent the villages become on the building trade, the |
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| greater the risk of disaster. Even without any cut in building as a whole, there is a possibility that the supply of plasterers, for example, may soon seriously exceed demand, since there seems to be no control on apprenticeship. During my stay, according to my records, 19 villagers went to the towns to serve as unskilled labour, as against 38 craftsmen. The unskilled class consists of three types. Apart from the seven new plasterers, whom I have included a s ustalar, four other young men went away who will probably learn a trade later. Another four or five are men who lack the intelligence to learn a trade, and the rest are men who normally find their living in the village, whether from their own land or by one the occupations mentioned in the previous section, and who go away only when in desperate straits, or to obtain money for some specific purpose. A labourer earns only three liras a day, so that even if he is in continual employment in the town, he is unlikely to save more than 50T.L. a month to take back to the village with him. Unskilled work of this sort may be on roads, on building, or on anything that turns up. Quite often unskilled men accompany neighbours or kinsmen who are skilled. Men with no special craft often turn to other occupations if the opportunity offers. Portering, for example, is a recognised profession of long standing and has had an old organised guild in the large towns. Several villagers do odd portering in Kayseri from time to time, and Haci Ahmet (FB 3), who moved to Kayseri for a period, had established himself sufficiently to be able to buy his own horse and cart. Ahmet (VK 1), had been a cook in Iskanderun, for 2.5 years, at 150 T.L. a month, a son of CS 4 had been to sea for three years, and Bilal (VT 1) had held a job in a n English company in Iskanderun as night watchman for two years. This summer three men of Sakaltutan spent the summer in Ankara selling vegetables in the market. Apparently, they buy from peasant producers who bring their stuff to Ankara from the surrounding villages, and sell in the markets near upper class quarter, Yenisehir (“New Town”), where prices are high. |
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| They claim to be able to make anything from three to fifty liras a day. One of |
| the three was a skilled plasterer, and found this more profitable than plastering. All these occupations, skilled and unskilled, are more or less casual, they can be dropped without notice and absenteeism taken for granted. Employment in the Kayseri cloth factory consequently forms a separate type. At the moment only six men, of Sakaltutan all of hem young, work there. Earnings vary with seniority and type of work. Large deductions are made for tax, but net wages seem to range from sixty to 150 liras per month. Workers get free board and lodge for themselves, free insurance, free medical service, overalls, in which some of them seem to live permanently, and a free cinema. A family allowance is paid ranging from six to ten liras a month per child according to seniority. Most men come out to the village on Saturdays and Sundays to see their wives and families. A steady income of this sort is sufficient for a small family, especially as, in every case but one, there is at least a modicum of land worked by relatives in the village. One man of SL village, a floor sweeper in the factory, told me he earned only fifty liras a month net, and said this was not enough to buy his family food, hence he had given up the job. He said he had only five donum, and did not know or seem very worried about what he would do next. Sakaltutan occupies a midway position between the villages to the east of her which , mainly owing to shift of Christian population, have still enough land with which to provide for that growing population, and those in the nahiyeler near Kayseri, where land has long been insufficient for the population, and there is a well established tradition of migrant craftsmen. In each of three villages east of Sakaltutan which I visited I was told that they have very few or no migrant craftsmen, whereas in all villages near Kayseri, but not actually on the Kayseri plain, the proportion of these men was high. In one specific case an educated informant told me that almost 100% of his village were migrant ustalar. It is easy to confirm this by observation, for in any of these villages during the summer months few men |
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| are to be seen except for the aged and the sick. In these villages, the custom is well established and the men go away regularly for nine months each year. Craft is not, as in Sakaltutan , a way of supplementing agriculture, but the normal means of livelihood. Both the more agricultural villages the east, where the land is more plentiful and somewhat more fertile, and the villages which systematically send out ustalar are more prosperous than Sakaltutan. |
| On the other hand, there are no such obvious differences between Sakaltutan and its close neighbours. Villages do vary in that some tend to favour a particular type of outside work. In each village some individuals are engaged in exceptional occupations of their own discovery. Thus in Kb village, according to fairly reliable informants, there are forty-eight masons, forty-six plasterers, thirty migrant unskilled labourers and one carpenter, one painter and one iron worker. Also, there is one undergraduate reading mathematics at Istanbul University and a young lad who has been apprenticed as a fitter, also in Istanbul. In Al village, there are said to be about a hundred plasterers whose migration seems more regular than those of Sakaltutan, but there are still plenty of farmers, and craft is supplementary and new, not traditional. In Ac village, of only sixty houses, there are forty men working at the Kayseri factory, one employee of the State Railways, and an assistant in a chemists shop in Kayseri. Yc village on the other hand, which lies 1.5 hours south of Sakaltutan, more inaccessible and higher, has, I was told, much migrant labour but all of it unskilled. Although to establish systematically correlations between migrant labour and other factors would require much careful statistical effort, it seems likely that he obvious correlation between land shortage and migrant labour holds in the main. In the Sakaltutan area, land shortage is only in this generation becoming acute, and many villagers can still live off the land and the migration of labour is new and not highly organised. In the villages beyond Sakaltutan where land is plentiful migrant ustalar are very rare, and very new. In support of this, |
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| the one village in the Sakaltutan area where there are no migrant ustalar is Kz village which , about seventy years ago acquired the lands of a neighbouring village Elmali, higher up towards Mount Erciyas, when this village moved to land the other side of Kayseri , and which, therefore, has plenty of land. Land shortage is not, of course, the only operative factor in the growth of migrant skilled labour in the village. The normal entry into a skilled trade is through kinship or neighbourhood contacts with people already in the trade. Thus, Yc village, although as poor as Sakaltutan, if not poorer, has no ustalar because no one in that e village has taken the initiative of learning a craft from a stranger or matrilateral kinsman from outside, so that there is no one to teach or introduce other members of the village. Equally, in Ac village, although forty men work in the Kayseri factory, there are no migrant ustalar. Thus a necessary condition of the spread in a village of skills of this kind is personal contact, and this is a purely contingent factor. Again, the near a village is to town, the more the demand for town comforts and luxuries which can only be bought for cash, hence the more the village grows used to a money instead of a |