ABSTRACT

The Dawn of Paşabahçe Şişe-Cam: “National Factory Regime” The first glass bottle factory of Turkey was established in 1935 by Iş Bank within the scope of the first move of industrialization in line with the First Industrial Plan. The founder of Paşabahçe Şişe-Cam Glass Bottle Factory, Iş Bank -despite being a private capital investment bank- acquired a “national” semi-public identity because of its organic bonds with the founding elite of the Republic. Accordingly, Şişe-Cam Corporation constitutes an archetype for analyzing the formation of class conflicts and the working class in Turkey from a variety of aspects. Through the 1940s, direct decisiveness of the state in labor process intensified. The regulation of labor gained a special importance for the capital accumulation process in this period. These developments also determine the basic characteristics of the factory regime in Şişe-Cam, which was prevailing at the time. Şişe-Cam seems to have shared the same status with the state banks which were the founders of other factories inaugurated within the scope of industrialization such as Sümerbank and Etibank . However, the distinction between the state and the private sector is most genuinely revealed in working relations, labor process and in the matter of distribution of wealth. The social history of Paşabahçe factory cannot be read as the history of the settlement of conflicting classes for a national objective and/or for the improvement of a corporation. On the contrary, this brief history is about the implied or explicit class resistance experiences of workers, against the management strategies implemented by the employer and the state, based either on oppression or on consent. The aim of this article is to give depth to Turkey’s labor history writing on the axis of manufacturing plants history, to draw a realistic outline of the formation of the working class, and for to rewrite the history of “a generated nation” according to the experiences of the laborers. For an understanding of the class conflict in this national factory of the Early Republican period, the first 15 years of Paşabahçe Şişe-Cam will be narrated and analyzed within the framework provided above