Ceren Karlıdağ, Merve Has/JINHA

MANİSA - In the village of Çökelek, where 15 agricultural workers (13 of them women) died after being packed into a truck onto the way to the fields yesterday, unsafe and cheap labor comes at the price of women's lives.

In this village, nearly all the women share the same source of income: grape leaves. In the wake of the deaths, women here are saying that they will struggle against that which they are told to accept as "fate." In just the first five months of 2015, at least 646 workers have died in Turkey in so-called "workplace accidents" because of insufficient safety precautions. 227 of those died in traffic accidents.

Çökelek is a village of 120 houses located in the Manisa province of Turkey, in the district of Salihli. After the burial of the field workers yesterday, what remained behind was the rage and pain of women who lost sisters, mothers and neighbors. Those women's lives were not very different from theirs. It could have been them in the crowded truck that was struck by another agricultural vehicle (a milk tanker) yesterday.

Unsafe working conditions widespread

Here, workers are not compensated on a daily basis as some have reported, but based on performance; women are paid by the kilo for the grape leaves they pick. For the women who set out early in the morning for the fields during the hot summer days, the most they can hope to earn in a day is 40 lira ($15). In the wake of the death of the workers, many women here have said that so long as women's labor goes unrecognized and unvalued, it will remain women's share in life to die in the backs of crowded trucks.

One of the main hopes expressed in the village has been to see structures and institutions based on women's solidarity that can help them. As the women in Çökelek held one another and shared their pain in the tents set up for mourners in the village, the Manisa provincial branch of the Ministry of Family and Social Policies sent its psychologists to the village. The women's movement has long demanded that a Ministry of Women, one that actively addresses women's issues, replace the "Ministry of Family and Social Policies". When we asked these psychologists whether the lack of safety and visibility for women's work had something to do with the fact that Turkey lacks a ministry to deal with women's issues, the psychologists refused to answer. They said public employees had no authority to answer such questions.

Meanwhile, as women in the village heard that there have been actions by women in Izmir and Istanbul calling for justice in the massacre, smiles came to their faces. They said that it was urgent that women have solidarity with one another.

'We're gathering our women from the asphalt'

Hatice Aktürk lost her younger sister Zekiye Çetin yesterday. Zekiye had gathered grape leaves for the last 30 years. "Who can we get our rights from? Who can I ask about what they did to my sister?" were the first words Hatice said. "First off, the state is not present. That milk company could have hired two drivers, so that one could sleep and rest, and this wouldn't have happened." Hatice noted that no one is ever punished for accidents. "If there were a heavy punishment for them and they had to take precautions, it wouldn't happen this much. If Turkey keeps going like this, many more children will be left orphaned," said Hatice.

She referred to the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's 1000-room palace in Ankara. "Let them live. They're quite comfortable. Let's lose 15 people while they live in their palaces and pavilions. Let us die; let our children be orphaned."

"We women are very strong," she said. "We work, but we can't know the value of our work. We don't have that power. If we did, there would be no poor people left in Turkey. The women of Anatolia are hardworking, but their labor has no value." Hatice grew uneasy and we stopped the tape, but her anger continued.

"We're gathering our women from the asphalt. Özgecan was killed; there was no justice. Cansu Kaya was killed; there was no justice," she said, referring to two of the nearly 150 femicides in Turkey so far in 2015. "Let women be leaders and be in solidarity with one another." She said that the family's only consolation was that Zekiye's daughter, who her mother sent away for school by working in the fields, did not go to the fields that day.

'Women will be sent to the fields in the same cars again'

Fikriye Polat lost her mother, Fadime Orhan, in the collision yesterday. Her mother had brought her to the fields as a baby while she worked.

"I went [to the fields] too, for years, in the top box of the motorcycle. Everyone is trying to send their kids to school," said Fikriye. She recalled that the drivers of the crowded cars would often race with each other, laughing. What made her the angriest is that women will be going back to the fields again under the same conditions. "They'll continue the same work. They'll keep going. It'll be the same women, transported in the same cars."

Fikriye said that her mother and everyone else in the fields had no insurance. The face that women's work was invisible meant they were constantly subject to criticism. The women's husbands constantly confronted them with the question: "What work did you do; what did you do for the house?"

"At least if they had worked in a factory they would be retired by now. But they came home and worked in the house, then went out and worked in the valleys," she said.

'Every one of the women was struggling'

Emine Bakır is angry that the massacre of the women and friends she spent her life with is being reported as an "accident."

"Are we really so interested in setting out at 4 a.m. to gather leaves?" she said. All the women, she said, were working so their children could get educations in Turkey's expensive school system. "This is the dark face of Turkey. When you say you're a student, they rent you a 300-lira house for 500 lira. All the women who died were struggling; all of them were just trying to send their children to school and stay afloat."

(fk/cm)