Editor’s Note:

In the last two years, a group of organisations and collectives from countries around the world came together to produce the International Strike Reports for 2022 and 2023, offering strike data analysis and interviews with workers and unions. As the preface in the 2022 report explains,

“Due to the considerable limitations in official data sources, scholars and activists from numerous countries have created alternative datasets to capture strike levels and labour unrest more comprehensively. Considering the prevalence of strikes in many countries across the globe, it is imperative that activists, policymakers, and scholars have access to reliable data on
labour unrest.”

The reports are valuable resources for gaining an understanding of the global landscape of worker’s strike activities. We spoke with Alpkan Birelma, who is a member of the Labour Studies Collective that collected the data and the author of the section on Türkiye in the report. He shared his analysis on working-class militancy, strike wave and movement revitalisation, and the peril of automocratisation.

Asian Labour Review (“ALR”): Can you tell us about yourself, and also the Labour Studies Collective, which you are part of?

Alpkan Birelma (“Alpkan”): I am a sociologist and work at Ozyegin University in Istanbul. I have been an active participant in the labour movement in Türkiye since the 2000s. The Labour Studies Collective is a collective that we established in 2014. We are a small group of people with similar backgrounds who are involved in both universities and the labour movement. We have been publishing working-class protest reports since 2015. We are also organising talks on the labour movement and providing face-to-face education to people interested in the labour movement.

ALR: For readers who may not be familiar with the labour movement landscape in Türkiye, can you sketch out a few things to give us a sense of what it looks like?

Alpkan: The labour movement in Türkiye is not very strong. It was not always like that. Back in the 1960s and 70s, we had a militant, politicised labour movement. However, we had a military coup in 1980, a very repressive and bloody one. The primary goal of that coup was to end working-class militancy. The working-class movement was very much affiliated with the socialist movement at that time. The coup was quite successful. We had some big strike waves after 1980, but it has never been the same because they shut down the socialist workers’ union confederation, namely DİSK, for more than a decade. The socialist movement lost its momentum due to repression. Neoliberalism and the very repressive union laws also contributed to the weakening of the movement.

In 2015, we had an impressive and unexpected strike wave. That was one reason why we started this project. Since the beginning of the 2010s, there has been a limited revitalisation of worker militancy, but we were also experiencing a quite harsh autocratisation. It’s a lively scene.

ALR: What led to this latest revitalisation of worker militancy in Türkiye?

Alpkan: It is very difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons. The strike wave in 2015 was led by automobile workers. We have many car factories that primarily produce for the European market. Türkiye is a relatively industrialised country, and has a pretty stable industrial base, and those workers use their structural power.

I think the more important factor was a political/cultural one: We had a pretty massive urban rebellion in 2013 as part of this post-2008 crisis and global protests. The bigger protest wave in Türkiye at that time had some impact on workers. There were also short-term political factors. The powerful Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been running Türkiye since 2002, was facing challenges, and Erdoğan was not as powerful as he was before or after. There was an elite division, and Erdoğan’s coalition was shaky at that point.

ALR: I want to ask you about the political dynamics. Türkiye is still a democracy, however problematic, which means that you can legally establish a union, and you still have the freedom of expression and assembly. But at the same time, the legal regulations on strikes are extremely restrictive. Only a small percentage of the strikes are legal; the rest are all wildcat strikes.

Alpkan: The ratio of legal vis-à-vis non-legal strikes changes depending on the year. The legal strikes are sporadic in the period we have been exploring, at around 10 per cent or so, so strike activity is 90 per cent non-legal. Why? Since 2015, we have been experiencing a very strenuous autocratisation. I should once again underline the fact that there is also a rise in worker militancy. However, because of the further autocratisation, workers cannot strike legally. But still they are striking, non-legally, which is riskier and more difficult to do.

Some people are even arguing that we have been turning from a competitive authoritarian country into a fully authoritarian one. On the other hand, the authoritarianism towards labour has been built into the DNA of Türkiye with the coup back in 1980. I think we should acknowledge that the labour scene is not democratised at all since the coup. The union law, which was established by the coup, hasn’t really changed, so the mindset of the military coup leaders on trade unions and legal restrictions hasn’t changed significantly.

It is very difficult to unionise in Türkiye from scratch, especially in the private sector. For workers at a factory that does not have a union, it is extremely difficult to organise and get recognition and authorisation to sign collective bargaining agreements due to union laws. And, the government can practically always ban strikes by claiming that the strike is allegedly against national security.

We already have a very low union density: it is around 10 per cent. However, practically speaking, almost 80 per cent of the existing union movement is controlled or manipulated by the government or the employers. We have a small cluster of independent unions. It is always more difficult to transform a workplace which is held by a yellow union into an independent union, even more difficult than organising a new workplace from scratch.

ALR: Does the rise of independent unions hold new hopes?

Alpkan: In the last five years or so, we have seen new unions emerging which are independent from the existing confederations, and they are making some impact. The one textile union, namely Birtek-Sen, which was based in the southeast of Türkiye, had a significant impact in that region. We just had a local strike wave in southeast Türkiye at the beginning of this year, which was led by that union. It is quite impressive as a three-year-old union with very moderate resources. It is a sign of the revitalised worker militancy.

ALR: I’m quite curious about the outcomes of the strikes and how you evaluate the outcomes.

Alpkan: This is something we discussed with our colleagues from more than 10 countries in our collaborative project that produced the international strike report. What is success? It’s not easy to categorise the outcomes. It is also a big discussion in the broader social movement studies. However, we have some data on that, and we can find out whether there are any gains because of the strike. Since 2015, the strikes have not been in vain. A significant portion of them result in some kind of gains for the workers. Those outcomes are, of course, moderate. Because of the general strength of the labour movement in Türkiye, worker strikes mostly aim at wage increases. They mostly demand very moderate wage increases. We don’t have many offensive, more advanced, or political strikes. So maybe this is why the ratio of favourable outcomes is kind of high, as what people are demanding is very moderate at the time.

ALR: What are the centres of strike activities in terms of industries or sectors? 

Alpkan: Manufacturing is by far the biggest sector prone to strikes. To be more precise, metal is the most strike-prone; by metal, in the Türkiye context, we mean the automobile factories and white goods industries. This is because we have the biggest militant union in Türkiye in that sector, which may be less expected for the international audience. The union includes municipality workers, such as collectors of trash, park maintenance workers, and clerks in municipality buildings. Municipality employment is legally defined as a single sector in Türkiye, and it has always been one of the most militant sectors. We see lots of strikes there.

The textile industry is relatively militant in Türkiye, construction is less, but still one of the sectors where we see a lot of strikes. However, textile and construction strikes are mostly very defensive, led by workers to demand their unpaid wages. Public health care workers, doctors and nurses are also very active, because doctors have a strong national organisation that is both powerful and very left-wing. They organise national strikes, which only last for one or a few days, but lots of people participate in them. The frequency is low, but participation is very high.

ALR: How do you collect the data on strikes? What are the strengths and limitations of the data that you use?

Alpkan: Our dataset is almost complete. We miss some strikes, but I think there are very few strikes that we miss. We have a four-step process. In the first step, we are using three news websites. One is a national daily, the other two are left-wing news websites. We scan their sections on labour issues manually. Secondly, we use a professional media service, and we use the word “worker” within their research engine, which checks all newspapers in Türkiye, including local newspapers. We check all the news that includes the term “worker” in its title, and we check the titles of these articles. If a title indicates a protest, we read the report and process it. Then in the third step, we focus on the missing information. Sometimes we have information about a strike in some distant city. However, there is little information, such as its duration. So we do a targeted Google and social media search to find the missing information about that particular strike or protest. In the fourth step, when we are still not able to get some information about a strike that we know happened, we try to get in touch with the union if there is one. We collect data on all types of worker protests, not only strikes, but also marches, rallies, picket lines of workers dismissed for unionisation, as well as smaller workplace protests which do not disrupt production. We have a vast database.

ALR: Having been part of this international group that produces the international strike reports, what have you learned from these discussions and from the final reports that you find interesting or surprising?

Alpkan: We produced two international strike reports so far, one for the strikes in 2022 and the other in 2023. The most interesting thing I learned from the 2023 report was the situation in Uruguay. I fell in love with that country’s labour movement. I wasn’t aware of it, probably because it’s a relatively small country. I had a very hard time believing and processing the number of strike participants in Uruguay. The numbers are incredible. For this interview, I have been talking about how Turkish workers have become relatively more militant lately. But what we have is super moderate if you compare it with the level of mobilisation and militancy in Uruguay.

Our colleagues there interviewed the President of the biggest workers’ union confederation. They have one single union confederation, and it is left-wing and very powerful. Towards the end of the interview, the union President was asked about the main challenge for the labour movement in their country, and he said it is whether they can shape the development strategy of our country. They are so powerful that they are shaping the development strategy of their country. This is the challenge they face. I felt like they get as powerful as one can get within neoliberalism, so their challenge now is whether they will be able to change it or not. We are very far away from that power and mobilisation. But we are hopeful that they represent our future.

I think Uruguay is a very important case that gives us lots of insights – insights about what we can achieve, and how to achieve it in our neoliberal world where our power resources are so much eroded. I felt like Uruguay’s labour movement is the most powerful in our contemporary context. In that sense, it gives you a perspective and vision about what we can achieve, how far we can go even within the neoliberal context, when we have a stronger and more political labour movement. It is especially relevant for us since it’s not a core country.