Political Economy of Labour Law: The Case of Turkey
Ali Murat Özdemir

This award-winning original research, taken at the Middle East Technical University, aims to evaluate the Turkish Labour Law on the basis of a new approach to legal studies that follow the internal tendency of legal science to resolve its own problem, which is that of convincingly defining the point of contact between norm and fact (form and content), materially connecting the juridical organisation of power with the social structuring of power, while avoiding both formalist and positivist deviations. Against this background, the study aims to assess the correlation between the recent changes in the international division of labour and the structural forms, on the axis of which the Turkish legal system functions. This endeavour includes an attempt to view law in its location as a component to a general and persistent process of social regulation that secures general patterns of social domination. This study argues that the role of the collective labour law over the stabilisation of wage relations is increasingly deteriorated by the changing nature of the state and of work, including the new institutionality and the increasing influence of business over labour politics. After the ‘discovery’ of the importance of the universal principle of the freedom of contract in labour law, the regulatory powers of individual labour law have extended to the realm of capital-labour relations having an impact over the social division of labour and have acquired a relative dominance.