ABSTRACT
This study examines the work experiences of professional middle-class employees in humanitarian aid NGOs, drawing on data from a field study conducted in Türkiye. It advances two interrelated lines of analysis. First, it analyzes the strategies developed by humanitarian aid employees to cope with various dimensions of precarization—such as job insecurity, wage pressure, and intense and exhausting labour processes—as well as the limits of these strategies. Second, it explores how dimensions specific to humanitarian aid employment, including social motivation, job satisfaction, and emotional rewards, interact with and shape experiences of precarization. Overall, the study shows that humanitarian aid employees, on the one hand, normalise and adapt to the precariousness embedded in their working conditions; on the other hand, as this same process erodes the social and emotional significance they attach to their work, it fosters increasing alienation from the sector.
