Unpaid family workers, in their simplest definition, refer to men, women or children who work in a family business but do not earn income in return for this work. However, while unpaid family work is a temporary or marginal situation for men, it can be an unchangeable fate for women. The fact that women face unpaid family labor all over the world, especially in agriculture, is a clear indication that unpaid family labor is a gendered category. On the other hand, while employment is a situation related to paid work, unpaid family workers do not receive a wage for the labor they spend in the family business, although they are considered employed, but they can benefit in kind or cash from the household income. Therefore, unpaid family labor is a category that is not only gendered but also contradictory.

The aim of this study is to reveal the conceptual and quantitative change of unpaid family labor, which is a gendered and contradictory category that has been neglected in the labor literature, over the historical process, and to seek an answer to the question of why unpaid family labor is still relatively high through the example of Turkey. For this purpose, the study first examines the conceptual content of “unpaid family labor” and its place in the employment hierarchy within the framework of international and national labor and employment standards. Then, the historical course of unpaid family labor in Turkey was revealed statistically using population censuses and TUIK data. In addition, the socio- economic structure of the country, especially the transformation in agricultural structures and the dominant patriarchal patterns, which form the basis for quantitative changes in the unpaid family labor category, have also been tried to be included in the analysis.

According to census data, in the 1950s, more than half of the employed population in Turkey was unpaid family workers. During this period, a large part of the population relied on agriculture for their livelihood, and petty commodity production based on family labor constituted the basic structure of agriculture.

When the course of unpaid family labor in the General Population Census and Household Labor Force Surveys is examined, it is seen that as the share of agriculture in employment decreases, the rate of unpaid family workers in total employment also decreases. While the status of unpaid family workers for men decreased rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, the decrease in unpaid family workers for women occurred more late in the late 1960s and 1970s. This difference is mainly due to the fact that during the rural-to-urban migration process, which accelerated in the 1950s, men migrated primarily and women continued agricultural production. As the opportunities for secure employment for women in non-agricultural sectors such as Public Economic Enterprises expand with the economic development and industrialization process, it is observed that there is a certain increase in the proportion of women in paid and wage labor. However, for the Turkish economy, economic development does not always mean the creation of new employment in parallel with the population growth rate, and in an environment of scarce employment, men continue to benefit primarily from paid jobs.