Racialized Labor Intermediation: Managing the “Threat” of Kurdish Workers on Turkish Farms

ABSTRACT Farm labor intermediaries in Turkey have been at the heart of maintaining a precarious and low‐wage migrant labor force for capitalist agriculture since the 19th century. This labor force has been predominantly comprised of Kurds, a people racialized as “savage,” “racially impure,” and “traitors of the Turkish nation” since the beginning of the 20th century. The war between Kurdish guerillas and the Turkish state in the 1990s introduced the portrayal of Kurds as “potential terrorists” into the discourses that racialize them. This change significantly impacted the role, prevalence, and definition of the institution of the labor intermediary. Drawing on 20 months of fieldwork with Kurdish farmworkers and labor intermediaries, this article examines how intermediaries, typically responsible for enforcing labor control and discipline as agents of exploitation, are paradoxically compelled to protect workers who face threats of racial hostility and state violence in order to facilitate their exploitation. This paradoxical task of social and political protection, which enables economic exploitation, suggests a need to examine institutions of labor management not only with reference to their function in capitalist labor processes but also in light of context‐specific historical and political dynamics of racialization and political violence.