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| Gaye Yilmaz |
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| Tolga Tören |
Workers and their unions in Turkey have been systematically attacked by their rulers over many years. But these attacks have sharpened recently, especially following the attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2016, after which large numbers of public servants were sacked and imprisoned. The president has used the subsequent state of emergency to intervene in workplaces where strikes are threatened; this has become a marketing strategy to woo business. We will discuss the repression of Turkish workers and ask why this president and his policies seem so popular.
From bad to worse
In the last 15 years, the AKP (Justice and Development Party) has passed numerous regulations against workers and their trade unions. Even more savage has been the President’s response to events harming working people. For instance, in May 2014, an explosion at a coal mine caused an underground fire, which burned for two days. It was Turkey's worst ever industrial accident: 301 miners died, some burnt alive, and others suffocated. Families of victims and also thousands of workers from other sectors were shocked when Mr. Erdoğan, on the evening after the disaster, said ‘These types of incidents are ordinary things’ (The Guardian, 2014).
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| Edward Cottle |
A strike is a ‘social phenomenon of enormous complexity which, in its totality, is never susceptible to complete description, let alone complete explanation’ (Gouldner, 1954:65). The complexity of the meaning and implications of strikes often comes to the fore when offensive strikes – strikes where workers demand more than what they have in terms of wages and working conditions – force the attention of the state, capitalists and civil society. They lead to a varied interpretation not only of how events unfolded but also the impact they have made.
Strikes are a key manifestation of the class struggle over the distribution of national income and reform of the labour relations system. Offensive strikes can generate an extraordinary amount of pressure on the social system which often leads to structural changes such as the reconfiguring of the industrial relations system, the economy or the political system. Such events are referred to here as a turning point ( Legassick, 2012; Alexander, 2013; Webster, 2016).
Strikes in post-apartheid South Africa
In the immediate post-apartheid period, the trend was for strikes to increase in frequency, with the highest number of strikes in South African history – 1 324 strikes – taking place in 1998. From 2000 and 2009, however, strikes averaged 71 per annum, which was even lower than the 1960s, and these strikes were largely defensive in character.
