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Money As Justice: Work-Related Deaths, Victim Workers’ Families, and Injustice in Turkey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2022

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Yalçın Özkan*
Affiliation:
Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology, Reed College, Portland, Oregon Email: yozkan@reed.edu
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Abstract

In the event of a work-related death, Turkish law directs the victim’s family to see the death as accidental and understand monetary compensation as a primary vehicle for justice. Based on interview data from a group of victims’ survivors, I examine how the bereaved make sense of accepting money for their losses. Despite the compliance of these families with monetized justice, the interviews suggest that they also have resentments against it. I show that pressing economic needs, a sense of disenfranchisement, and the limited nature of legal counsel lead the survivors to suppress their frustrations. In turn, many come to narrow their expectations of justice to getting what they think of as a fair sum of money. This situated framework, I argue, works to trivialize concerns about workplace safety. Insofar as the families see monetary compensation through a frame of justice, structural factors behind their losses remain unaddressed. Viviana Zelizer has long treated money as being grounded in meanings and moralities. In the tradition of legal consciousness literature, this article extends Zelizer’s fundamental approach by providing a framework to address how the moral underpinning of money can emerge from and reinforce power imbalances and systemic bias in the legal system.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , February 2023 , pp. 262 - 291
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

The author wishes to thank Robert Zussman, Millie Thayer, Kathryne Young, Christopher Dole, Tracy Lord, Ziya Umut Turem, Don Tomaskovic-Devey, Luz Maria Sanchez Duque, the Law & Social Inquiry’s anonymous reviewers and editor Christopher Schmidt for insightful feedback, commentary, and support. Earlier versions of this article were presented at conferences of the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program at Northwestern University, the American Sociological Association, and İlişkisel Sosyal Bilimler Kongresi. The author acknowledges the helpful commentary of those audiences. The research received support from the Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship and the Sociology Department at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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