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In the post-2002 period of single party rule by AKP, trade union rights were seen to suffer
a considerable meltdown. The results of this development are striking in both qualitative (legislation, practices, social-political impact) and quantitative (unionization, collective bargaining coverage) terms. Currently the trade union density in Turkey is...
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... We reach the following results once we include all salaried workers earning salary, wage or allowance, in line with the method proposed by ILO: The number of workers covered by collective bargaining schemes, which stood at 1.6 million in 1988, has been falling ever since to reach 750-800 thousand in 2010. In parallel, the trade union density was seen to drop from the order of 22% to 6% in the same period (Table 1). In the 2000s, unionization rate has thus fallen from 10% to below 6%. ...Similar publications
In this study an individual-level data set is used to study the impact of the official minimum wage on a host of labour market outcomes in Cyprus, where the legislative coverage is limited to only a few occupations. In the remaining occupations bipartite collective bargaining is not subject to an institutional minimum. The evidence indicates that m...
Citations
... The workers' union too had not much power and even less interest in raising safety concerns related to the mining site (Ercan and Oğuz 2015). At any rate, when the overall picture is considered, the power of labour unions had already been curtailed across most of the country following the shift to neoliberalism, which was initially implemented during the three years under a military regime following the 1980 coup d'état (Adaman, Buğra, and İnsel 2009;Çelik 2013). The final parameter that led to the tragedy was the position of mining engineers who were responsible for safety in the galleries. ...
... 29. For more comprehensive discussions, see Bozkurt -Güngen 2018;Çelik 2013. 30. ...
... 84 One telling example of this process was the appointment of Zahit Akman, who served for many years as the top-manager of the pro-Islamist Kanal 7, to the position of the chairman at the Radio and Television Supreme Council (Radyo ve Televizyon Üst Kurulu) (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)). The Journalists working for the state media were forced to leave the "Kemalist" Turkish Journalists' Union (Türkiye Gazeteciler Sendikası) and become members of more conservative HAK-İŞ Trade Union Confederation (HAK-İŞ Konfederasyonu) 85 . ...
The history of Turkey provides multiple examples of intricate combination of secularization (in the Turkish tradition – laicism) and desecularizaion (understood as a revival of Islam and its expansion into social life) while its contemporary dynamics provides a background for a non-conventional view on the correlation between the state and religion in the Muslim societies. The desecularization of Turkey has been a continuous process since the late 1940s, making it increasingly convenient for Islamists to become more visible in the political and the socioeconomic spheres. This paper analyzes the inclusion and accommodation of the “Turkish Islamism” into the sociopolitical life of Turkey focusing on such important phenomena as the constantly expanding religious sphere, the emergence of economic liberal conservatism, the rising resurgence of Islamism in education and media sphere together with the “jemaatization” of the Turkish society. The manifold manifestations of descularization in social, political and economic life, its profound impact on the Turkish party system, banking sector, education and mass media indicates the dialectic nature of secularization and desecularization nexus and reveals the flexibility of the border between religious and political spheres.
... 84 One telling example of this process was the appointment of Zahit Akman, who served for many years as the top-manager of the pro-Islamist Kanal 7, to the position of the chairman at the Radio and Television Supreme Council (Radyo ve Televizyon Üst Kurulu) (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009). The Journalists working for the state media were forced to leave the "Kemalist" Turkish Journalists' Union (Türkiye Gazeteciler Sendikası) and become members of more conservative HAK-İŞ Trade Union Confederation (HAK-İŞ Konfederasyonu) 85 . ...
... Observers of Turkey's current industrial relations will mostly agree that the AKP's pursuit of an authoritarian neoliberal political economy in the industrial relations sphere, while having empowered the state and business vis-à-vis organised labour (Çelik, 2015a;Özveri, 2012;Uçkan, 2013), at the same time created a highly fragmented labour movement in relation to workplace and wider socio-economic issues (Çelik, 2013b;Dinler, 2012;Erdinç, 2014). However, this should not come to mean that the Turkish labour movement became fragmented under AKP rule, for in fact, this has always been a main feature of the labour movement in modern Turkey. ...
Authoritarian neoliberal governance of industrial relations is on the rise around the world, displaying remarkable similarities across countries with similar democratic political structures. However, despite a certain degree of resemblance, countries have been following divergent paths rendering each case unique in terms of its experience. This article explains the specific path through which authoritarian neoliberalism was materialised in the governance of Turkey's industrial relations under AKP rule. It is purported that AKP's pursuit of authoritarian neoliberalism in its governance of industrial relations shares certain similarities with the emerging market economies, which have a less democratic political system. However, it is contended that the governance of Turkey's industrial relations under AKP leadership embodies spatially and temporally distinct characteristics integrating long‐established authoritarian institutional structures and practices with neoliberal ideology, powerful political alliances, Islamic values, repressive practices and mounting resistance, thus rendering it a unique form of authoritarian neoliberalism.
... Observers of Turkey's current industrial relations will mostly agree that the AKP's pursuit of an authoritarian neoliberal political economy in the industrial relations sphere, while having empowered the state and business vis-à-vis organised labour (Çelik, 2015a;Özveri, 2012;Uçkan, 2013), at the same time created a highly fragmented labour movement in relation to workplace and wider socio-economic issues (Çelik, 2013b;Dinler, 2012;Erdinç, 2014). However, this should not come to mean that the Turkish labour movement became fragmented under AKP rule, for in fact, this has always been a main feature of the labour movement in modern Turkey. ...
Authoritarian neoliberal governance of industrial relations is on the rise around the world, displaying remarkable similarities across countries with similar democratic political structures. However, despite a certain degree of resemblance, countries have been following divergent paths rendering each case unique in terms of its experience. This article explains the specific path through which authoritarian neoliberalism was materialised in the governance of Turkey's industrial relations under AKP rule. It is purported that AKP's pursuit of authoritarian neoliberalism in its governance of industrial relations shares certain similarities with the emerging market economies, which have a less democratic political system. However, it is contended that the governance of Turkey's industrial relations under AKP leadership embodies spatially and temporally distinct characteristics integrating long-established authoritarian institutional structures and practices with neoliberal ideology, powerful political alliances, Islamic values, repressive practices and mounting resistance, thus rendering it a unique form of authoritarian neoliberalism.
... The workers' union too had not much power and even less interest in raising safety concerns related to the mining site (Ercan and Oğuz 2015). At any rate, when the overall picture is considered, the power of labour unions had already been curtailed across most of the country following the shift to neoliberalism, which was initially implemented during the three years under a military regime following the 1980 coup d'état (Adaman, Buğra, and İnsel 2009;Çelik 2013). The final parameter that led to the tragedy was the position of mining engineers who were responsible for safety in the galleries. ...
While state-society relations in Turkey have historically been top-down and coups d’état periodically interrupted democratic politics, the recent authoritarian turn under Erdoğan is remarkable. Two dynamics are especially salient. First, Erdoğan and his AKP have been particularly effective in deepening the neoliberalisation of economy and society. Their policies have created a new form of neoliberal developmentalism, where solutions to all social ills have come to be seen as possible through rapid economic growth. Second, they have intensified the transformation of the countryside, where new forms of dispossession and deagrarianisation open the way to an unprecedented extractivist drive. Together, neoliberal developmentalism and extractivism have resulted in growing social dissent. The eruption of anger after the Soma coal mining disaster that killed 301 miners is one such case. The paper shows how Erdoğan and the AKP use populist tactics (ranging from an uptick in nationalist discourse to the provision of ‘coal aid’ in winter) to assuage their critics. Where these prove inadequate, an increasingly violent crackdown on social dissent is being deployed in the name of peace and order as the country remains in a state of emergency since the attempted coup of July 2016.
... 8 Hence, neoliberal restructuring, combined with this kind of Islamic Protestantism, paved the way for the ascendance to power of a political party that had the characteristics of what its president until recently, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had described as a conservative party along the lines of the European Christian Democratic parties. At the economic level the victory of AKP did not change much.Flexibility of production and a new strain in the relationships between capitalists and the working class(Çelik, 2013;Ercan and Oğuz, 2014) were some of the changes that the Erdoğan administration pushed for. Furthermore, a new wave of privatizations and state withdrawal from public services came to be added to the previous similar policies of the 1980s and the 1990s(Ercan and Oğuz, 2014).7 ...
Drawing on ethnographic material from Istanbul prior and during the Gezi uprising of 2013, the present article examines the mass demonstrations that broke out in more than 90 cities in Turkey and lasted for about a month as an event in the sense of the short duration of history (évènement) informed by historical processes of medium length duration (conjoncture) marked by authoritarianism and protest; an event bearing the inevitability of rupture that long-term authoritarianism carries to the present and also the future; a product of a culture of protest traced back to the 1980s and the neoliberal restructuring of the Turkish economy. Furthermore, the paper discusses the rise of the electoral influence of the Democratic People's Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi-HDP) as a symptom of the same historical conjuncture.
... The astonishing increase in the membership of Memur-Sen and Hak-İş during the intensified period of de-unionization is mostly related to co-optation and intimidation strategies that oblige workers and civil servants to quit their previous trade unions or recruit nonassociated workers as members of preferred trade unions (Çelik 2013;Erdinç 2014). The size of these organizations has turned them into major interlocutors between labourers/ civil servants and the government at the collective bargaining stage. ...
This article seeks to explain the endurance of populist parties in power by focusing on the case of Turkey and the Justice and Development Party (AKP). The existing scholarly research on the AKP’s populism either focuses on the discourse and mediagenic performance of Erdoğan constructing an antagonism between ‘the people’ and ‘elites’ or equates populism with patronage politics. This study argues that in order to understand the AKP’s long-term appeal, populism should be theoretically decoupled from narrow approaches related to economic governance and treated as an essentially anti-pluralist set of ideas in a problematic relationship to democracy. Empirically, this article examines the government-dependent trade unions and women’s organizations in Turkey to understand how ruling populists shape extra-legislative fields. The findings show that the AKP expands the reach of populist antagonism between the people versus the elites through these organizations. Dependent organizations serve to reassert the AKP’s continuing relevance as the only genuine representative of ‘the people’, while transforming the labour and women’s struggle in line with the government’s agenda. They also keep newly arising social demands in check under democratic disguise while denying pluralism to civil society and entrenching undemocratic governance.
... The only real kind of negotiating that exists in Turkey takes place within unionised factories (Fougner and Kurtoğlu 2011;Çelik 2013). Collective bargaining can take place only in relation to individual establishments or all establishments belonging to the same employer. ...
Starting from the 2000s Foxconn invested in Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary,
Russia and Turkey, implementing a territorial diversification strategy
aimed at getting nearer to its end markets. This chapter investigates the
development of Foxconn in Turkey where the multinational owns a plant
with about 400 workers. A few kilometres from the city of Çorlu and close
to highways, ports and international airports, the plant enables Foxconn
to implement an efficient global supply chain. We illustrate this process
by examining the company’s localisation within a special economic zone,
underlining the economic advantages derived from such a tax regime,
bringing labour costs down to the Chinese level and obtaining proximity
to European, North African and Middle East customers, thus lowering
logistic costs. We also analyse the roles of labour flexibility and trade
unions. In order to impose far-reaching flexibility on its workers Foxconn
put in place a range of strategies, including an hours bank system, multitask operators and the recruitment of apprentices thanks a special
programme funded by the state. We show how these have been crucial
for Foxconn’s just-in-time production contrasting its labour turnover
problem. Finally, we highlight how the company has been able to
implement a flexible working pattern, weaken the trade unions and
undercut workers’ opposition, thanks to favourable labour laws approved
by successive governments in the past thirty years.
