Unemployment in Turkey has reached critical levels. Broad-based unemployment stands between 27–32 percent, while the proportion of youth neither in education nor employment reaches 31–33 percent. Yet when unemployment enters public debate, it is discussed only through statistics.
But behind every one of those numbers lies a job search process: applications sent with no response, interviews that lead nowhere, a wait that stretches and blurs. And this process is often endured alone. When unemployment is treated as an individual problem, the systemic causes that create and sustain it disappear from view; what remains is a sense of helplessness, isolation, and despair.
Despite unemployment at this scale, there is no unified mechanism to research it deeply, amplify the voices of the jobless, and bring them together. The jobless are unaware of each other and unorganized; their experiences vanish in the flow of social media.
Işsizler.org was established precisely to fill this gap.
We will research unemployment: documenting the experiences of the jobless, examining the employment policies of public institutions, evaluating the effectiveness of career platforms. Drawing on our findings, we will develop concrete policy proposals and share them through reports, publications, and podcasts.
But that is only the office side of the work. In the field, we will bring the jobless together through periodic meetings, listen to their concerns through one-on-one conversations, and conduct our research alongside them.
Because we work toward a future in which unemployment is understood not as an individual problem but as a systemic one; in which the jobless are not reduced to statistics; in which the job search process does not breed insecurity and loneliness; and in which the jobless are not passive objects of policies about them, but active agents shaping those policies.
What will we do in the first year?
We will regularly monitor and report on the practices of public institutions that shape unemployment policy.
We will make unemployment experience visible through first-hand stories.
We will create content not about the jobless, but with them.
Through regular meetings, both in-person and online, we will break the isolation that the jobless experience.
We will compile scattered and hard-to-access unemployment data and make it publicly available.
We have explained the why and how of each of these at length on our What is Işsizler? page.
If you are jobless, you are not alone. You are here to share your experience, join our meetings, or simply see what we do and why.