Focus: Wildcat strikes in auto sector of Turkey

Abstract

6 | International Union Rights | 23/3 FOCUS | TURKEY Wildcat strikes in auto sector of Turkey In last 10 years Turkey’s auto industry grow exponentially just in 2015 Turkey exported 843, 000 cars just to EU which makes to Turkey the biggest car exporter to EU, this number is even more than sum of Japan and South Korea’s car exports to EU. Country hosts production plants for almost all the multinational auto producers including Ford, FIAT, Toyota, Renault, Hyundai, Mercedes, MAN, Honda etc. Between 2009-2014, employment in auto assembly in Turkey grew 350 percent. Europe remains the largest market, despite declining demand due to the crisis. FIAT, which has been closing units in Italy, has just announced that they will export 175,000 FIAT Doblo cars from Turkey to the US between now and 2021. The Turkish Government has a policy to attract foreign investment by keeping labour cheap by imposing major restrictions on right to organise. For some time now, Erdoğan, Turkey’s President (and former Prime Minister), has been promoting the dream of turning Turkey into the ‘China of Europe’. In April 2015, when Economy Minister Zafer Çağlayan met with foreign investors in London he declared with pride that ‘labour costs in Turkey are even lower than in China’. The minimum wage in Turkey is around 400 Euros per month; many workers earn only the minimum, even the skilled ones, and Turkey has the highest death rate from workplace accidents in Europe, and ranks third in the world. 1700 workers died in workplace accidents in 2015 alone. The vast majority of the Turkish workforce is unorganised; only around 5 percent of workers are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. This is the lowest unionisation rate among the OECD countries. And the majority of the unionised workers are members of unions hat were not chosen by the workers but got ‘assigned’ to them. The current system creates discontent among the workers. From time to time, this discontent turns into spontaneous uprisings which are mostly supressed by police violence and dismissals. The protests at Renault During the collective bargaining negotiations of 2012 1500 Renault workers on one shift stopped production and did not leave the factory. In order to prevent these workers from meeting up with other workers on the next shift, Renault management cancelled that shift. The next day, they dismissed 35 workers in order to put a stop to these workplace actions. After the signature of collective bargaining agreement which covers the three year term (20142017 ) which covers majority of the workers in auto industry in Turkey, there was a general discontent among the workers. The main opposition to the agreement was because of its duration, until that time, all the collective bargaining agreements signed in the metal industry were covering two years. Turkey has high inflation rates and a rather unstable macroeconomic situation. For a majority of the workers, three years is too long a time to predict economic developments. In every previous collective bargaining agreement, it was possible to get some adjustment beside the rate of inflation. A three-year agreement would mean that for every two agreements, workers would lose one agreement, meaning a loss of some extra adjustment in their salaries. The second biggest discontent was among the low-waged, younger workers who represent around 60-70 percent of the workforce in these companies. In some cases, a worker who started after 2005 might be paid around half the wage of a worker who started before the 2000s. This situation creates huge tension among the younger workers. Their wages are so low they cannot see a future for themselves. Since they cannot live on these wages it does not matter too much if they lose their jobs. They have nothing to fear and nothing to lose. This makes them the most militant section of the class. For this new generation of workers an agreement without any plans to narrow this wage gap, is unacceptable. At the end of April 2015, workers of Renault factory in Bursa started to demonstrate at the beginning and end of each shift. Soon after, these demonstrations spread to other automobile factories and their suppliers in...