Workers’ festival overshadowed by the state of emergency

Şehriban Kıraç
 
This year Turkey will celebrate the Mayday Workers and Wage-Earners’ Festival overshadowed by the state of emergency.
The AKP has presided over years of loss for the working class. Particularly under the state of emergency introduced in the aftermath of the coup attempt, the usurpation of workers’ rights and the arduousness of working life have reached colossal proportions. With insecure employment becoming widespread, there has been a 400% increase in job sub-contraction. Working life has more or less been turned into a hell of sub-contraction. The government, having also set its sights on severance pay, will supply funds to capital with money that comes out of workers’ pockets under the guise of individual retirement insurance.
With the wheels of the economy coming to a standstill and foreign capital shelving plans to invest in Turkey, the army of the unemployed grows day by day. According to the latest figures, the army of the unemployed now numbers 7.1 million people. Women are being excluded from working life. Only one in every three women of working age in Turkey is part of the world of work. The only country in Europe in which women’s employment is below 40% is Turkey. Turkey, bringing up the rear in Europe in terms of women’s employment, only leaves behind countries such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan and Mauritania. The total number of workers to have lost their lives under the AKP’s time in office is approaching 19,000. The AKP’s fifteen years in power have been years of loss for the working class. Here are some of these losses:
Hell of sub-contraction
1 Hundreds of public bodies have been sold. The public and private sector has passed into the hands of foreigners. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs. Insecure and flexible working has become widespread in the AKP years. In March 2013, the scope of Labour Law job security was changed from ten employees to thirty employees. There has been a 400% increase in job sub-contraction. Working life has been turned into a hell of sub-contraction. In May the hired worker law that makes even sub-contract working look desirable passed through parliament. The sub-contraction system has moved into all employer bodies. The number of sub-contractors’ staff has exceeded 4 million.
2 In 2008, despite all the objections by trade unions and workers, the retirement age was increased to 65 under the new Social Insurance and General Health Insurance Law. The number of insured days needed to retire was increased. With the introduction of mandatory individual retirement insurance in August 2016, the aim is to provide funds to capital with the money that comes out of our pockets and the way has been paved for the long-term privatisation of social security.
Worker’s money to the bosses
3 Employees have only been able to recover a small portion of the money that has accrued in the unemployment fund created with money that is deducted from their wages. With only 14 billion lira having been paid to employees from the fund since 2002, the amount that was paid to employers in one stroke under the decree with the force of law of 9 February was 13 billion lira. Money deducted from wages supposed to be available at times of unemployment was gifted to bosses touted as being an ‘incentive’.
Strikes banned
4 Job centres have been turned into slave trading centres. Never mind having been turned into centres that simply license the setting up of Private Employment Offices, workers have begun to be hired out by job centres themselves. This has been called the ‘Work Programme for the Public Good’. The number of workers to be hired out each year has reached 200,000.
5 Eleven major strikes have been banned in fifteen years. At the start of this year, a strike launched by 2,200 workers on 20 January in a dispute over the United Metalworkers’ Union’s collective labour agreement with the Electromechanical and Metal Employers' Association was banned by the cabinet on ‘national security’ grounds. Following the state of emergency, the scope of strike bans has been expanded under decrees with the force of law. Banking and urban transport, over which the Constitutional Court has previously annulled strike ban decisions, have been included within strike bans.
Snatching severance pay
The first thing to be targeted by the AKP after ‘yes’ prevailed in the referendum has been workers’ severance pay. The transfer of severance pay into the fund will make it easier to dismiss workers and will increase flexibility. If the fund is set up, the connection between severance pay and the employee’s final wage will be broken and the amount of severance pay they get will decrease.
According to trade unions, severance pay is the employer’s individual debt and so they are opposed to funds and premium deductions being channelled into the fund to be set up out of public resources and unemployment insurance. If the fund is set up, it is considered to be more or less certain that severance pay will fall from 30 days to 10-15 days.
According to workers, severance pay should remain a direct obligation of the employer. Discussion about transfer to the fund should be dropped.
Should stay at 30 days
Severance pay should remain at 30 days and the conditions governing entitlement to severance pay should be relaxed. For example, on resigning following a certain number of years of service severance pay should also be made. If the employer goes bankrupt, the severance pay due should be included alongside amounts owed to the state and mortgage creditor banks and raised to first rank. All amounts due to employees, including severance pay, should be guaranteed.
ILO convention C173 that envisages the guaranteeing of all amounts due to employees, including severance pay if the employer becomes insolvent should be ratified. With severance pay put in place in Turkey in 1971, severance pay is applied compulsorily in 152 countries in the world, and semi-compulsorily in 18 countries.
Only 1.5 million workers are in unions
According to the notice that the Ministry of Labour and Social Security published in the Official Gazette on 29 January 2017 about unionisation statistics, the total number of workers was 12.7 million while the number of unionised workers was 1,547,000. The official unionisation rate was announced to be 12.18%. Hence, the number of unionised workers, which stood at 1.2 million in January 2013, has increased by around 545,000 in four years.
Even though the number of unionised workers appears to be 1,546,000, the number of workers covered by collective agreements is in the region of one million. More than half a million workers who are union members are not covered by collective agreements. One-third of unionised workers do not have collective agreements. This is attributable to unionisation thresholds and hormonic growth in unionisation.
Lower among women
According to July 2016 data of the Turkish Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions Research Institute, with 1.2 million out of 9.1 million male workers being in unions, the unionisation rate among male workers is 13%. On the other hand, with 254,000 of 3.3 million female workers being in unions, the unionisation rate for women stands at 7.6%.