Turkish Labour And The Turkish Political Challenge

The recent election in Turkey has opened the political structure for a real competition by other parties with the ruling AKP and may have opened a path for the Turkish labour movement to recover from its current weakness and to assert itself once again in the national debate. In recent years Turkish labour has been weakened by the rise of unorganised workers and the casualisation of employment. The number of Turkish workers subject to precarious work has risen dramatically and the interference of the AKP Government in banning strikes and demonstrations has made an effective labour response more difficult.

The history of the development of Turkish labour demonstrates the difficulties of trying to organise an effective labour participation in the economy under military rule. For a long period of its post-Ottoman history, Turkey has been ruled by a strong military force which, when it wasn’t governing itself, exerted a powerful influence on any civilian governments which were formed.

After the Second World War, Turkish politics was dominated by a single political party, the Republican People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) of national hero Ataturk. Ataturk allowed two other parties to form but soon banned them because of their pro-Islamist tendencies. In 1946, the head of the CHP, Ismet In?nü, introduced democratic elections to Turkey. Due to widespread dissatisfaction with the CHP in the four years after its victory the party lost the second multi-party general elections in 1950, and Celal Bayar replaced In?nü as President. Bayar was the head of the Democratic Party (Demokrat Parti, DP) but the real power within the DP was Adnan Menderes, the Prime Minister. The DP was a moderate right-wing party but whose policy options were constrained by the Kemalist policies of secularism, nationalism and statism and the 1924 Constitution.

The main differences between the CHP and the DP was in its economic policies; the DP pushed for a privatisation of Turkish industries and was less secular than the CHP. During the ten-year Prime Ministership of Menderes and the DP, Turkish domestic and foreign politics underwent great changes; industrialisation and urbanization accelerated. The Turkish economy grew at an unprecedented rate of 9% per annum. Turkey joined NATO and was the recipient of a great deal of economic support from the Marshall Plan. The economy was modernised; agriculture was mechanized; and there was domestic and foreign investment in transport, energy, education, health care, insurance and banking.

Along with this modernisation of the economy, Menderes restored many of the religious practices removed by Ataturk and the CHP. He reopened and built mosques across Turkey and used religion as a political weapon against his enemies. He expanded Turkey’s ties to Muslim states in the Middle East and conducted a purge of Greeks living in Turkey (the 1955 Istanbul Pogrom). Most importantly, the DP announced that the parliament had the right to restore the Caliphate. He established a Commission of Inquiries (Tahkikat Komisyonu), formed from only DP Members of Parliament, which allowed this Commission to take on judicial powers and to issue verdicts, judgements and punishments – a direct violation of the separation of powers built into the Constitution

As a result, on 27 May 1960, thirty-seven "young officers" made a coup against Menderes and the DP. Despite international protests, Menderes was hanged on 17 September 1961 on the island of Imrali for violating the Constitution and for massacring the Greeks. On 17 September 1990 he was posthumously pardoned.

The military ruled Turkey but was anxious to turn the government back to civilians; civilians they could control. The man who fit that role was Suleyman Gundogdu Demirel (who just died in June 2015). Like several other Turkish leaders of his generation, Mr. Demirel was trained as an engineer. He was awarded an Eisenhower Fellowship, a program that brought emerging leaders to the United States for several months of traveling, seminars and classes. He spent years representing the American engineering and machine-tool firm Morrison Knudsen. In 1965 he was elected prime minister with the support of the army; at 40, he was the country’s youngest. Turkey in the 1960s was ravaged by political gang fighting and killings. The military stepped in again.

After civilian rule was re-established in the late 1970s, Mr. Demirel served three times as head of the governments. It was during this period that Turkey fell into an economic crisis. Inept handling of foreign debts, compounded by the effects of increasing global oil prices, led to triple-digit inflation, a sharp rise in unemployment and a crash in industrial production. It took a decade for Turkey to make the structural changes — under the leadership of Prime Minister Turgut Ozal, a former Demirel protégé — that laid the basis for its current prosperity.[i] There were subsequently several more periods of Demirel’s leadership, when the military allowed, and he was President for two terms but was kicked out when he tried to change term limits for a third term.

His last years in office were marked by the emergence of Kurdish nationalism, which developed into civil war. He endorsed the military’s scorched-earth tactics, which included torture of detainees, the assassination of suspected militants and an absolute rejection of Kurdish demands.

During the 1960s violence and instability plagued Turkey. An economic recession sparked a wave of social unrest marked by street demonstrations, labour strikes and political assassinations. Left-wing workers' and students' movements were formed, countered on the right by Islamist and militant nationalist groups. The left carried out bombing attacks, robberies and kidnappings; from the end of 1968, and increasingly during 1969 and 1970, left-wing violence was matched and surpassed by far-right violence, notably from the Grey Wolves.

On the political front, Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel's centre-right Justice Party government, re-elected in 1969, also experienced trouble. Various factions within his party defected to form splinter groups of their own, gradually reducing his parliamentary majority and bringing the legislative process to a halt. By January 1971, Turkey appeared to be in a state of chaos. The universities had ceased to function. Students emulating Latin American urban guerrillas robbed banks and kidnapped US servicemen, also attacking American targets. The homes of university professors critical of the government were bombed by neo-fascist militants. Factories were on strike and more workdays were lost between 1 January and 12 March 1971 than during any prior year. The Islamist movement had become more aggressive and its party, the National Order Party, openly rejected Atatürk and Kemalism, infuriating the armed forces. Demirel's government, weakened by defections, seemed paralyzed, powerless to try to curb the campus and street violence and unable to pass any serious legislation.

The 1971 military coup was a little different. It was known as the "coup by memorandum", which the military delivered to the government in lieu of sending out tanks, as it had done previously. In a series of military-controlled civil governments the fight against right and left extremism was attempted but with little success. The military put Professor Nihat Erim in power but ruled the country through their control of the National Assembly (the Parliament).[ii]

In October 1973, Bulent Ecevit, who had won control of the Republican People's Party from ?n?nü, won an upset victory, but the factional fights in Turkey didn’t abate. The economy deteriorated, the Grey Wolves escalated and intensified political terrorism as the 1970s progressed, and left-wing groups, too, carried out acts aimed at causing chaos and demoralization. In 1975 Demirel replaced Ecevit but nothing changed. Finally, in 1980, the military made another coup.

On 2 September 1980 the army intervened again when the Chief of the General Staff General Kenan Evren took over direct control of Turkey. For the next three years the Turkish Armed Forces ruled the country through the National Security Council, before democracy was restored. This National Security Council (Milli Güvenlik Kurulu, MGK), headed by Evren declared a coup d'état on the national television channel. The MGK then extended martial law throughout the country, abolished the Parliament and the government, suspended the Constitution and banned all political parties and trade unions. They invoked the Kemalist tradition of state secularism and in the unity of the nation, which had already justified the precedent coups, and presented themselves as opposed to communism, fascism, separatism and religious sectarianism.[iii]

A reform of the economy was undertaken by Turgut ?zal, who succeeded with a neo-liberal policy guided by the IMF. The foreign exchange rate was allowed to float freely. Foreign investment was encouraged. The national establishments were encouraged to involve joint enterprises with foreign establishments. There was an improvement in the Turkish economy.

However, the political repression remained strong. The coup rounded up members of both the left and right for trial with military tribunals. Within a very short time, there were 250,000 to 650,000 people detained. Among the detainees, 230,000 were tried, 14,000 were stripped of citizenship, and 50 were executed. In addition, hundreds of thousands of people were tortured, and thousands are still missing. A total of 1,683,000 people were blacklisted. Among the prosecuted were Ecevit, Demirel, Türke?, and Erbakan, who were incarcerated and temporarily suspended from politics.

This coup by Evren placed Turkey under martial law. There were several efforts to return the country to civilian rule after 1983 but the excesses which abounded after every liberalisation led to the imposition of states of emergency over many regions of Turkey. It wasn’t until the economic shocks which affected Turkish growth in the new millennium that this unrest led to the victory of the Justice and Development party (AKP) of Istanbul’s Mayor Recip Tayit Erdogan in the 2002 election. Erdogan promised reform but actually pressed forward with the Islamisation of Turkey.

The AKP oversaw an explosive increase in the budget allocated to the Religious Affairs Directorate and in the number of personnel, which has increased from 70,000 in 2002 to over 120,000 in 2014. For example, from 2010 to 2014 about 40,000 people were recruited as Quran teachers, imams, preachers and muezzins. In 2003 there were 3,000 Quran courses, but at the beginning of the school year in 2014 there were 24,757. There are now 85,000 mosques compared to 75,000 in 2003, and there are plans to build mosques at more than 80 universities; by law prayer rooms (“mescit”) are required in shopping malls, cinemas, theatres and other public places. Religious high schools (imam-hatip schools) play a major role in the AKP's plans to transform Turkish society. In 2002 they had 65,000 students, but now there are about 1 million. Originally planned to train imams, their numbers far outstrip this need and instead they are intended to provide the cadres for “the new Turkey.” From 2010 to 2014, there has been a 73 percent increase in the number of imam-hatip schools, and in the same period almost 1,500 general high schools have been closed and around 40,000 students have been placed in religious high schools against their will.[iv]

In April 2007, the Turkish military reiterated that they were “the absolute defenders of secularism.” The AKP retaliated with a series of show trials designed to crush military and secular opposition. Around 40,000 police officers and 4,000 judges and prosecutors have been reassigned and 4,000 preparatory schools (“dershane”), many of which were managed by the Gülen movement and prepared students for university and civil service exams, have been closed. When the military resisted Erdogan he arrested the military leadership. On 22 February 2010 more than 40 officers were arrested and formally charged with attempting to overthrow the government with respect to the “Sledgehammer” plot. The accused included four admirals, a general and two colonels, some of them retired, including former commanders of the Turkish navy and air force (three days later, the former commanders of the navy and air force were released).

This rigid control of the Turkish political scene continued unabated until the 2013 mass demonstrations and sit-ins triggered by protests against the rebuilding plans for the Taksim Gezi Park. This soon expanded to a protest about the whole AKP domination of the political scene. Spurred on by social media 3.5 million of Turkey's 80 million people are estimated to have taken an active part in almost 5,000 demonstrations across Turkey connected with the original Gezi Park protest. 11 people were killed and more than 8,000 were injured, many critically.[v]

The protests and the demonstrations of the Taksim Park opposition marked the beginning of Erdogan’s unchallenged control of the political process in Turkey. In the 2015 election the AKP lost its outright majority in the Parliament and is still seeking a partner party to join the AKP in governance of the country. This erosion of the AKP dominance was based on the realisation that the repressive social and industrial policies of the Turkish Government had left the country in a deteriorating state.

On the eve of the election, the government's Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK) found that 22.4 percent of Turkish households fell below the official poverty line of $1,626 a month for a family of four. While national income has, indeed, risen over the past decade, much of it has gone to the wealthy and well connected. When the AKP came to power in 2002, the top 1 percent accounted for 39 percent of the nation's wealth. Today that figure is 54 percent. In the meantime, credit card debt has increased 25 fold, from 222 million liras in 2002 to 5.8 billion liras today. In 2001, Turkey was in a serious economic crisis, with the unemployment rate at 10.8 percent. Today 11.3 percent are out of work, and that figure is much higher among young people and women. TUIK estimates that over 3 million Turks are jobless, but at least another 2.5 million have given up looking for jobs. The total size of the Turkish workforce is 28 million. Women have been particularly hard hit. Over 227,000 women have been laid off in 2015. [vi] The political parties, even in opposition, are relatively powerless to confront the AKP because the mobilising arm of the working people, the trade unions, have been frozen out of power by the AKP.

Turkish workers have seen their unions virtually dismantled under the AKP government, and many have lost their collective bargaining rights. According to the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, unionized workers have fallen from 57.5 percent of the workforce in 2003 to 9.68 percent in 2015. And, of those unionized workers, only 4.5 percent have collective bargaining agreements. Add to this police repression, the widespread use of the subcontracting system, and a threshold of 3 percent to organize a new union, and there are few barriers to stop employers from squeezing their workforce.

Trade unions have had a history of repression in Turkey. There are four national trade union centres in Turkey. The oldest and largest is the Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions (TüRK-??)

• The Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions (TüRK-??, founded 1952, 1.75m members)
• Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions of Turkey (D?SK, founded 1967, 327,000 members)
• Confederation of Turkish Real Trade Unions (HAK-??, founded 1976, 340,000 members)
• Confederation of Public Workers' Unions (KESK, founded 1995, 300,000 members)

Turk-Is was founded in 1952 as part of the Menderes liberalisation of the Turkish economy and was closely allied to the centrist political parties throughout its history. It was the only union confederation to survive the 1980 Evren military coup. TüRK-?? claims a membership of 1.75 million, and is affiliated with the International Trade Union Confederation, and the European Trade Union Confederation. It is also a member of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD.

DISK was founded by Kemal Türkler, Riza Kuas, ?brahim Güzelce, Kemal Nebio?lu and Mehmet Alpdündar representing Türkiye Maden-??, Lastik-??, Basin-??, Türkiye Gida-?? and Türk Maden-??; unions which were until that time affiliated to Türk-??, except Gida-?? which was independent. D?SK was born at a time when relatively broader rights and freedoms had been recognized by the Constitution of 1961. The trade union acts of 1964 accepted the right of the workers to collective bargaining and strike, and revolutionary and socialist movements gained momentum in the political arena. In fact, with the exception of Mehmet Alpdündar, the founders of D?SK were also among the founders of the socialist Workers Party of Turkey (T?P) in 1961.

Disk began to attract other Turk-Is unions to its side. In 1970 the Turkish politicians of the Justice Party (AP) and the Republican People's Party (CHP) submitted to the parliament a draft law that would endanger the existence of any other confederation than Türk-??. On June 15 and 16, 1970 the workers employed at enterprises organized by D?SK stopped work and started to march. This action ended with the declaration of martial law in Istanbul in the evening of June 16. D?SK leaders and a large number of workers were arrested and tried at military courts.
D?SK leaders were again arrested after the military intervention on 12 March 1971. On 22 July 1980 the founder of D?SK and chairman of Türkiye Maden-??, Kemal Türkler was killed in front of his house in Merter, Istanbul. The public prosecutor indicted several right-wing militants but they always escaped trial and sentencing. With the Evren coup DISK was banned.

The 1980 military intervention severely restricted trade union activities. Following the 1980 coup, the military government prohibited collective bargaining (this lasted until May 1984). After September 12, 1980, the National Security Council suspended the activities of D?SK and its affiliated unions. Their assets were confiscated and put under trustee administration. Fifty-two D?SK leaders were arrested and put on trial with the demand of death penalty on the grounds that they had attempted to demolish the constitutional regime. By the time the military court delivered its verdict in 1986, the DISK trial had 1,477 defendants. The DISK trial was one of many mass trials that progressed ponderously through the military courts, presided over by high-ranking officers of the Turkish armed forces.
The trial at Istanbul Military Court 2 ended on 24 December 1986. The court sentenced 264 trade unionists and experts to sentences between five years, six months and 15 years, eight months' imprisonment. The military court decided in 1981 to close D?SK and ban its members. This ruling was appealed and in 1991 the Military Court of Cassation overruled this decision and acquitted the union leaders. Thus D?SK was able to resume its activities after an interval of 12 year. It was reconstituted in 1992. D?SK is affiliated with the International Trade Union Confederation, and the European Trade Union Confederation.

The Confederation of Turkish Real Trade Unions (HAK-??) was founded October 22, 1976. Hak-Is was founded by the Islamic MSP party of Erbakan. The union defended a sort of corporatism based on the union of employers and employees. While retaining its strong Islamic ties Hak-Is has loosened its ties with the religious political parties of Turkey and evolved towards a secular, pro-capitalism, pro-privatization union. HAK-?? is affiliated with the International Trade Union Confederation, and the European Trade Union Confederation.

The fourth confederation is the Confederation of Public Workers' Unions. (Kamu Emek?ileri Sendikalar? Konfederasyonu – KESK), founded in 1995.It represents mainly public sector workers and has played an activist role in trying to restore the rights of trade unions in collective bargaining. KESK is affiliated with the International Trade Union Confederation, and the European Trade Union Confederation.

The fundamental problem for Turkish unions is the stranglehold of legislation which prohibits the freedoms of unions in the workplace. Key to those freedoms are the impediments of the levels of representation rules. Some 1,040,000 workers are registered in unions. But only about 580,000 of them are entitled to collective labour contracts. The others are denied this right because their unions remain below [legal membership] thresholds. So, many workers with trade union memberships lack the benefit of collective contracts.

Prior to 1980, Turkey’s workers were an important civic power in the country. Trade unions were forces to be reckoned with, organizing highly effective rallies, strikes and resistance movements. Following the 1980 military coup, legal amendments were introduced to curb trade unions, including certain benchmarks for the right to negotiate collective contracts. Three thresholds are currently in place. The unions face the “work sector” threshold; that is a trade union has to recruit at least 1% of all the workers in one of eighteen designated sectors before it has the right of representation. Then comes the “workplace” threshold, which requires unions to recruit at least 51% of the workers in any given workplace. Finally, there is the “chain business” threshold, which bars trade unions from collective bargaining unless they recruit at least 40% of workers in nationwide chains such as supermarkets.

Another major impediment for the labour movement comes from the subcontracting system, which has been heavily promoted in recent years. Even state institutions are increasingly outsourcing to subcontractors, who pay lower wages to non-unionized workers. The practice has expanded so much that even parliament, supposed to lead efforts to protect labour rights, has outsourced many of its own needs, such as cleaning and catering. About 600,000 workers are employed today in the subcontracting system.[vii]

In many ways this narrowing of the horizons of the trades unions has had a powerful effect on Turkish industry. The absence of a trade union presence in the workplaces has led to a disregard by the employer of maintaining a healthy and safe workplace. A good example is the Soma Mine Disaster of 2014.
On May 13, 2014 an explosion occurred in a coal mine in Soma, a small town in western Turkey. The ensuing fire trapped hundreds of miners underground, eventually causing the death of 301 of them, while injuring 162 others. Almost every rule of mine safety was ignored by the management of the mine. While the miners were pressured to maximize production and while overseers structurally neglected health and safety standards the head of Soma Holding boasted in a 2012 interview that his company had brought down the costs of coal from $130 to $24 per ton. The reduction in production costs was paralleled by a similar reduction in safe working conditions. According to survivors’ accounts included in a HumanRightsWatch report “state authorities charged with oversight and inspection were fully aware of the situation but ignored it.” The Soma management was brought to trial in 2015 but the government safety inspectors were excluded from the trial.

While in office the AKP has restricted worker’s rights to organize and strike, intensified neoliberal employment policies, encouraged the practice of subcontracting and part-time work agreements and allowed for the structural violation of worker rights.

Workers in Turkey were once again reminded of their precarious position when at the end of January, 2015 15,000 metal workers planned to go on strike. After failing to reach an agreement with the employer’s union about better wages and the length of collective bargaining periods the workers announced that in 22 factories in ten different cities across the country they would lay down their tools and walk off the job.

However, the next day the strike was “suspended” when the government issued a Cabinet Decree deeming it a “threat to national security”. The suspension of the strike is in fact a strike ban in action. In order to prevent the workers from walking off the job, the government brought back a controversial law – approved in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup – which was designed to curtail the powers of the influential labour unions at the time.

According to the Turkish Law on Trade Unions and Collective Labour Agreements, coded 6356, “A lawful strike that has been called or commenced may be suspended by the Council of Ministers for 60 days with a decree if it is prejudicial to public health or national security”. As the Turkish Cabinet’s Decree was published on 30 January in the Official Gazette, the 60-day period was over as of 31 March. This was only the first hurdle.

The legal and legitimate strike launched by IndustriALL affiliate Birlesik Metal-Is then had to go to the High Arbitration Board for a compulsory process because the Turkish legislation does not allow for the union to conduct its strike after the postponement period. The Government is deliberately delaying the Board so no decision or resolution is possible.[viii]

Another obstacle Turkish workers face is the widespread existence of so-called “yellow unions” – unions under the direct influence of employers. These yellow unions often undermine the bargaining power of independent unions by signing weak collective agreements that fall short of meeting worker demands and undermine the more stringent demands of the independent unions. The agreement between the metal worker unions Turk Metal and Celik-I? and the employers’ union MESS – while Birle?ik Metal-I? failed to reach an agreement and called for a strike – is a case in point which illustrates how yellow unions agree to terms that independent unions do not support.

Turkish labour sees no hope of any improvement under the AKP dominance of the political system However, the inability of the AKP to retain its majority in the last election and its seeming inability to find a willing partner for a coalition government means it is vulnerable to a demand for a new election. In that case the possibilities of the labour movement putting its support behind AKP’s rivals, the HDP.

The left-wing HDP-formerly largely a Kurdish-based party-shattered the 10 percent ceiling to serve in the Parliament, taking 13.1 percent of the vote and electing 79 representatives. The HDP's breakthrough came about because the Party allied itself with other left and progressive parties in 2012-much as Syriza did in Greece-and campaigned on an openly left program. Led by the dynamic Selahattin Demirtas, its candidates included many women, as well as gays and lesbians. There is a natural affinity of the HDP with the Turkish labour movement and a high likelihood of the coalescence of the two in future electoral initiatives. Perhaps Turkey can benefit from the work of Syriza in Greece and move to a broader coalition of the centre-left to sweep the AKP Islamists from power.

[i] Steven Kinzer,”Suleyman Demirel, Seven Times Turkey’s Prime Minister, Dies at 90”, NY Times 16/6/15

[ii] “Turkish Regime Is Ousted By the Military Leaders", The New York Times, 13 March 1971

[iii] Gil, Ata. "La Turquie à marche forcée," Le Monde diplomatique, February 1981

[iv] Robert Ellis, “The Rise of the Turkish Reich”, Zaman, 2/2/15

[v] Patrick Coburn, “Turkey’s Protests and Erdogan’s Brutal Crackdown” Independent 7/6/13

[vi] Conn Hallinan, “Turkey’s AKP Doomed By Poverty, Inequality And Its War on Trade Unions”, Foreign Policy in Focus 10/6/15

[vii] Mehmet Cetingulec, “Turkish Trade Unions in Death Throes” Hurriyet May 5, 2014

[viii] IndustriAll, “Metal Strike Still In Place” 5 April 2015