What is İşsizler?

İşsizler.org is a social enterprise that records the problems and experiences of unemployed people; examines unemployment policy and practice at public institutions such as İŞKUR, and hiring at private firms; and develops proposals for the failures it finds. Its aim is to bring unemployed people together, to investigate and document those problems, and to be part of the solution.

Why we exist

Unemployment in Turkey has reached a critical scale. According to TURKSTAT (TÜİK), broadly defined unemployment (the labour underutilization rate) has been running at 27-32 percent; among young people, the share neither in education nor in employment (NEET) reaches 31-33 percent. Job search itself has become a domain of insecurity and uncertainty.

Yet when unemployment is treated as a private trouble, the systemic causes that produce and sustain it drop out of view. That leaves unemployed people with a sense of helplessness, isolation and despair. Institutions that are supposed to make unemployment policy, including İŞKUR, have not been equal to its effects or its structural causes. Actors in the unemployment market, such as LinkedIn, Kariyer.net and their peers, further disadvantage those looking for work. When unemployment does make the news, it is usually as a statistic; systematic inquiry recedes into the background.

Despite unemployment on this scale, and despite the insecurity of looking for work, there is no coherent mechanism that investigates unemployment in depth, carries the voices of unemployed people, and brings them together. They remain unknown to one another and unorganised; their experiences vanish in the social-media feed. İşsizler.org was founded to fill that gap.

What İşsizler.org does

We believe the answer lies in making the macroeconomic and systemic causes of unemployment visible; telling its human effects as lived stories, not as figures; changing public policy; and coming together with unemployed people. We pursue the first three at the desk (Masada) and the last in the field (Sahada).

What we do at the desk (Masada)

• We investigate unemployment. We document lived experience, examine public employment policy, assess how career platforms actually work, and analyse the effect of macroeconomic conditions on unemployment.
• We develop policy proposals. From our findings we prepare concrete, workable recommendations for unemployment policy.
• We publish. We take research and proposals to the public, to academia and to decision-makers as reports, publications and podcasts.

What we do in the field (Sahada)

• We bring unemployed people together. Periodic meetings give them a safe place to share experience; we listen.
• We listen, and we make the invisible visible. One-to-one conversations surface unemployment that would otherwise stay unseen.
• We think together. We do research with unemployed people, and we set our agenda from what the field tells us.

The unemployment we work toward

We work toward an unemployment that is understood as a systemic question, not a private failing; in which unemployed people are not reduced to a rate, and their experience and rights are visible; in which looking for work does not produce insecurity and isolation; and in which they are not the passive objects of policy about them, but the people who shape it.