Memur Sen: a loyal partner in the emergence of state corporatism in contemporary Turkey

Trade union rights have always been at the very bottom of the rights and freedoms agenda in Turkey – not just for the last years but during the entire history of the republic. In the post-2002 period of single party rule by the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP, English: Justice and Development Party), trade union rights were seen to suffer a considerable meltdown. Currently trade union density in Turkey is much lower than in the decade following the military coup of September 12th, 1980. Due to higher thresholds for entering into collective bargaining system, a very low number of workers benefit from collective agreements or are able to engage in collective action, including strikes. Union members are insufficiently protected from dismissal on the grounds of their trade union activities. Moreover the right to strike has been abolished de facto. Trade union legislation undermines trade union rights Turkey’s industrial relations legislation as a whole has not encouraged trade unionism – indeed, to some degree it has been hostile to the unions. There were no remarkable changes in trade union legislation during the AKP rule and the legislation of the coup d’état of 1980 went untouched. In 2010, some amendments were made to the provisions of the Constitution related to trade union rights. However, these changes, contrary to some claims, are not capable of creating meaningful expansion of trade union rights. The changes cannot satisfy the criticisms of the European Court of Human Rights, along with the ILO’s and the EU’s demands. Turkey’s new Law on Trade Unions and Collective Agreements (No. 6356) was enacted in December 2012. Even though the new law introduces some limited improvements especially as far as the founding of unions, as concerns the internal functioning of unions and union membership (within the context of freedom of association), it maintains, and in some areas even increases limitations, especially those concerning the rights to collective agreements and to strike. The Act did amend the double threshold system – 10 percent all of workers in a particular industry and more than 50 percent at in individual firms/workplace must join a union for it to be recognised – that had inhibited unionisation for 30 years. At first, the industry threshold was reduced to 3 percent for independent unions and 1 percent for unions affiliated with confederations under the umbrella of the Economic and Social Council (ESC). In 2015 the Constitutional Court decreed that all unions shall be subject to the 1 percent industry threshold. The law continues to maintain the workplace threshold of more than 50 percent where a company is composed of a single workplace, while lowering the threshold to 40 percent for enterprises composed of multiple workplaces, for example, banks. These high workplace and enterprise thresholds hamper union organisation, the effective representation of workers and the exercise of their right to bargain collectively. There are several unions and confederations for civil servants in Turkey but these have been left out of the analysis here for several reasons. They are regulated differently from the workers’ unions and differ markedly from them in terms of rights. It is still forbidden for some public officials to be unionised, and no civil servants have rights to genuinely free collective bargaining. They must submit to compulsory arbitration and are forbidden to strike. Moreover, while workers (in both the private and the public sector) work under individual employment contract, civil servants are subject to administrative law. Civil servants’ unions in Turkey work as associations rather than trade unions. The structure of trade unionism in Turkey Industry based unionism or the principle of ‘industrial unionism’ has been adopted in Turkey. Workplace and profession-based unions, along with regional unions and federations were not allowed. Instead, Turkey adopted a uniform, centralised industrial unionism by force of law. The new trade union law No. 6356 also limits the formation of unions to industry level and prohibits the formation of workplace, enterprise or occupation-based unions. Nor does it allow union federations, city- or region-based unions, or unions representing retired people, farmers or the unemployed. The trade unions in Turkey are organised mainly under three confederations or umbrella organisations. The leading one is the...

Automation and unemployment: Does collective bargaining moderate their association?

The weakening of collective bargaining systems has been one of the top priorities within the so-called “new economic governance” at EU level over the past decade. Based on the Stability and Growth Pact and its tightening in the course of the Euro zone crisis, decentralisation and fragmentation of collective bargaining geared to promote labour cost-based competitiveness has become common standard in the “country-specific recommendations” within the “European Semester”. This approach has been pushed forward most vigorously in Southern Europe. Quite surprisingly, however, the outcomes of these attacks differ substantially across countries. The paper describes the different dynamics of collective bargaining systems in Spain, Italy and Greece over recent years and gives some tentative explanations for these differences, pointing primarily at contrasting trade union approaches. Further, the paper addresses the potentials of the state at national and EU levels to act as a stabilizer, rather than a driver of weakening collective bargaining systems. Given the stark contrasts in industrial relations practices across EU countries, it suggests practical steps to be taken towards a turnaround in EU policy approaches to collective bargaining within the framework of the “European Semester”, following the logic of an enabling state aimed at fostering social equity.

Implementation of collective bargaining system in China is not only an issue of straightening out the labor relationship, but an economic issue of economics and even a social issue. In China, a lot of difficulties still exist in implementation of collective bargaining system, including obstacles in terms of system and obstruction in terms of institution. The three labor rights are the basis and guarantee of collective bargaining system and collective bargaining separating from the three labor rights may cause the system to be a mere formality. An analysis of the reasons for vacancy in the collective bargaining system can be reconstructed from the following three aspects, namely, prescribing the right to strike of laborers, reforming the current wage system and funds system of the trade unions, positively carrying out industrial collective bargaining and promoting establishment of multi-level collective bargaining to help resolve predicament in collective bargaining faced up in China.

In recent years, individual and company bargaining have increasingly supplanted sector and country collective bargaining leading to increasingly heterogeneous and perforated, that is, hybrid, national collective bargaining systems. Little is known about the relative effects of these different systems. In this paper, the authors derive and test a comprehensive categorization of collective bargaining systems and argue that different systems are associated with different production functions and therefore have different effects on labour productivity. The hypotheses are tested using representative workplace‐level data for all member states of the European Union. It is found that the performance of coordinated sector collective bargaining systems is higher than for all other forms of collective and individual bargaining. Policy implications of the results are discussed as these results challenge attempts to reform collective bargaining in Europe.

After experiencing its half-century golden period between 1950-2000, the system of trade unionism and collective bargaining, which arose with the concern of turning the class political struggle, which entered the agenda of humanity into a peaceful situation, faced a crisis of existence and function. A change in the understanding of Labor Relations and Business Management, a change in the perspective of working and production with modern human resource management techniques, has led to the need to reproduce the system of trade unionism and collective bargaining. Globalization, international competition and small businesses succumbing to mass production have led to trade union monopolism and cumbersome organizations. Trade union organizations have fallen behind the human resource vision they represent and have begun to fade in the trap of wage unionism. This led to a trend of changes in the way trade unionism was conducted, but the components of new trade unionism did not fall into place. The traditional collective bargaining system, which can find a living space thanks to the introduction of wage costs against the price-quality-sales performance in production, has had to express itself again as this cycle begins to be questioned. The main concerns about trade unionism have changed as follows: It has become vital that unionism is peace-oriented rather than fight-oriented, compromise-oriented rather than debate-oriented, solution-oriented rather than Problem-Oriented, Development and life-oriented rather than wage-oriented, strategy and employment-oriented rather than bargaining-oriented. Therefore, especially in trade unionism, it is clear that there is a need for “trade unionism and community bargaining system reform”, which begins with the qualifications and election times of trade union managers and extends to managing flexible working models and from there to the correct perception and correct interpretation of international company relations and paves the way for entrepreneurship. Keywords: Trade Unionism, Collective Bargaining, Labor, Industrial Relations, Productivity, Innovation, Human Resources

10 | International Union Rights | 23/3 FOCUS | TURKEY Legal Barriers to Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining Turkey’s current legal protection of trade union rights remains a long way from compliance with international norms. Labourers are divided into ‘workers’ and ‘public officers’. The Law on Trade Unions and Collective Bargaining (Law 6356) regulates the trade union rights and freedoms of workers. The Law on Trade Unions and Collective Bargaining of Public Officers (Law 4688) regulates the trade union rights and freedoms of the public officers but provides public officers very limited rights of association, collective bargaining and strike. Besides, the parties to the collective bargaining under Law 4688 do not have to reach an agreement and the final decision is given by the Government. If the parties disagree, the public officers have no right to strike. This legal rule - enacted in 2012 - provides no rights to association, collective bargaining or strike for public officers to protect their interests. Therefore, the following analysis of these rights will focus on the Law on Trade Unions and Collective Bargaining (Law 6356). Freedom of Association: only sector-based unions can be formed The right to form a trade union and freedom of association are assured in Article 51 of the Turkish Constitution. However, Law 6356 was enacted with a limited scope in contrast with international norms. Article 3 says that a ‘trade union is formed to operate in a certain sector’. This regulation contradicts Article 2 of Convention 87 of the ILO Convention 87 which accepts the ‘liberty’ principle on the matter of the freedom of association. Additionally, the ILO Committee on Freedom of Association (CFA) assessed Article 2 of Convention 87 and stated that workers can form a trade union with reference to the sector, profession or regional and other criteria. Moreover, Law 6356 Article 2 does not allow trade unions to organise themselves under umbrella organisations like federations or others, other than confederations. This is also in contradiction with the liberty principle in Article 7 of Convention 87. Collective Bargaining Rights The most important discrepancy in Law 6356 is that while it only permits the formation of trade unions in the sectors, the collective bargaining system is organised on the basis of the workplace or business. Apart from the workplace and business in the collective bargaining, it was not defined on the scale of country, industry and sector (Articles 33-4). This certainly violates ILO norms (Convention 98, Article 4). One of the most important obstacles in Turkey for trade union association and collective bargaining is the legal restrictions and thresholds to have authority for collective bargaining. There are two major problems in Turkey in the system of authorisation. The first obstacle is having the majority in the country and then in the workplace and business, as the law requires. The prerequisite for collective bargaining rights is union membership of 1 percent of workers in respective sector in the country. After the trade union achieves this condition, if more than half of the workers working in the same workplace become members of this trade union, collective bargaining can be signed for the workers in this workplace. If the company has more than one workplace or branches, the union must also organise 40 percent of all the workers in all these workplaces. If a trade union cannot ensure these conditions, it has no authority for collective bargaining. For instance, according to the data from July 2016, there are almost 3,079,761 workers work in Sector 10 (Education and Commerce Offices). A trade union in this sector has to have at least 30,790 members working in this sector for a collective bargaining in any workplace. Otherwise, even if all 20,000 workers from a single workplace of 20,000 workers are in membership this trade union still has no legal power for collective bargaining. The second is that collective bargaining power is given by the Ministry of Labour and Social Security – a political institution. The processes determining if a trade union meets those thresholds are controversial. These are implemented by the Ministry. If an employer or another trade union in the same sector objects to the processes to be performed by...

Vulnerable identities: Pious women columnists' narratives on Islamic feminism and feminist self-identification in contemporary Turkey

Collective Bargaining Systems in Germany and Kazakhstan This study provides a comparative overview of labour regulation in Germany and Kazakhstan with a focus on collective bargaining systems and emphasizing key differences and similarities considering the historical, economic and social background of the two countries.Much has been written about the German industrial relations system in English. However, Kazakhstan’s collective labour relations are basically still unknown to international scholars. There are few sources that describe the Labour Law of Kazakhstan in English, and most of them are dedicated to specific areas of labour relations.Evidently, the most important way to achieve a better understanding of any national legal system is a comparative legal analysis along with historical perspective, comparing to the well-known legal system with long-term traditions and presenting a classical model of labour regulation.This contribution also sheds light on the recent reforms in labour regulation in both countries that significantly affect the contours of modern Collective Labour Law.It concludes that the German collective bargaining system is decentralized with a predominant sectoral level and bilateral structure of social partnership, while Kazakhstan has a centralized collective bargaining system with a predominant national level and tripartite structure of social partnership.

In autumn 2020, the European Commission published a proposal for a "Directive on adequate minimum wages in the European Union". For the first time in the history of the EU, draft legislation is on the table which explicitly aims not only to significantly increase the level and scope of minimum wages in Europe, but also to strengthen collective bargaining systems. The proposal thus represents a fundamental paradigm shift in European labour policy. Not so long ago, the Commission essentially viewed adequate minimum wages and strong collective bargaining systems as institutional barriers for the functioning of free markets and thereby as having a negative impact on the development of growth and employment. Indeed, in the wake of the last major economic crisis in 2008/2009, the EU exerted considerable influence in many countries towards freezing or even decreasing minimum wages and weakening collective bargaining systems. Now the European Commission’s approach is the exact opposite: by upgrading minimum wages and extending collective bargaining, the main aim is to strengthen the bargaining position of workers. The adoption of the Directive would mark a significant step towards a more “Social Europe”. However, the debate on the Directive is shaped by various political and legal fault lines so that its adoption is still anything but certain.

The authors examine Spain and France, where the state intervened to reform collective bargaining systems through legal regulation. French and Spanish policymakers used the same rhetoric to justify the reforms: the alleged rigidity of their labour markets and collective bargaining systems. Nevertheless, several differences are noticed, especially regarding the strategies of social partners. The idea of decentralisation as a unidirectional and comprehensive process is challenged when examining both countries. In France, the concept of articulation over that of determination is preferred when referring to the collective bargaining decentralisation process. In Spain, the effect of the reforms has been the creation of a new pattern of fragmentation in industrial relations rather than a clearly decentralised collective bargaining system.

INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 2 Volume 23 Issue 2 2016 IUR ❐ EDITORIAL Editorial: Trade union rights after the UK’s vote to leave the EU T his edition of IUR looks at the implications of what was, for many, an unexpected development with potentially far-reaching consequences : in June, UK voters voted to leave the European Union, by a margin of 52 to 48 percent in an average turnout of 72.2 percent. Owen Tudor of the British TUC (which campaigned for a Remain vote), but expresses concern : ‘the European Union has played a central role in protecting working people from exploitation , combating discrimination and promoting good employment practices’, while ‘UK governments strongly resisted equal treatment rights for agency workers, working time limits, and rights for workers to receive [workplace information and consultation]. During the referendum, only four trade unions officially called for a vote to leave the EU, while most other unions (including the country’s largest unions) called for a remain vote. Yet, as Alex Gordon points out, ‘analysis of the voting patterns revealed in the referendum result demonstrates a majority of working class voters, particularly in Britain’s former industrial heartlands; the north of England, Midlands and South Wales, voted (and in significantly large numbers) to leave the EU’ Trying to gauge international perspectives on ‘Brexit’, IUR uncovered clear concern at the deteriorating attitude towards Polish workers in the UK being expressed by the Polish trade union centre OPZZ, which has observed that ‘the campaign was won by xenophobia and populism, and as a result of exit from the EU, the situation for the majority of British people will worsen’. Esther Lynch of the ETUC observes that ‘the EU as a whole now faces a very difficult challenge … the anger and disillusionment of working people with the EU is not confined to the UK’, and adds that ‘social rights, in particular […] trade union rights, are not being accorded equal weight and emphasis compared with the protection and promotion of employers’ economic freedoms’. To address this urgent situation , Esther argues that ‘collective bargaining systems have to be restored as a fundamental right and because a pay rise for workers in Europe is central to a fair recovery from the crisis. The adoption of a social progress protocol is urgently required to restore the proper balance between economic freedoms and fundamental social rights in particular trade union rights’. Into this dynamic context, IUR welcomes the timely launch of the Manifesto for Labour Law: towards a comprehensive revision of workers’ rights, produced by the UK’s Institute for Employment Rights (IER). Observing that ‘the UK has ‘a framework of law born out of 19th century conditions, which has bypassed many advances of the 20th century, which ignores today’s economic and workplace realities, and which is not fit for purpose in 21st century Britain’, IER calls for the ‘restoration’ of the principles of collective bargaining ‘to provide a means of workplace democracy , to bring some measure of balance to the otherwise disproportionate power of employers, to redress wage inequality, to prevent the exploitation of migrants, to raise wages, increase demand and reinvigorate the economy, and to fulfil the UK’s binding legal obligations’. As Jon Jeffries reminds us, however, April this year saw the passing into law of the much-criticised Trade Union Act 2016. While parts of the original Bill were stopped (in part due to trade union negotiations linked to the then impending EU referendum) Jon Jeffries examines how the role of the Certification Officer was re-written. Looking at the trade union scene elsewhere; we report on unpopular changes to French labour law and the response of unions and youth movements; on Turkey we assess the trade union rights situation before and in the immediate aftermath of the failed coup attempt; we hear from David Bacon of the appalling treatment meted out to striking teachers in Mexico; report on the shocking sentence handed down to a South Korean trade union leader; and we publish a report back from the Global Labour Institute’s trade union summer school. Daniel Blackburn, Editor Next issue of IUR Articles between 850 and 1,900 words should be sent by email (mail...

How Collective Bargaining Shapes Poverty: New Evidence for Developed Countries

Across Europe there is increasing direct political intervention into collective bargaining INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 17 Volume 20 Issue 4 2013 TORSTEN MÜLLER is Senior Researcher and MAGDALENA BERNACIAK is Researcher with the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) in Brussels the country-specific recommendations issued in the framework of the European Semester; since these recommendations were formulated for the first time in 2011 they have been applied to 12 EU Member States. The second being the bilateral agreements concluded by national governments either with the International Monetary Fund (‘IMF’) and the European Union (‘EU’) or with the European Commission, the European Central Bank (‘ECB’) and the IMF (collectively known as the Troika). In these ‘Memoranda of Understand-ing’, or ‘Stand-by Arrangements’, national governments commit themselves to carry out the required reforms in return for direct financial support. The third instrument involves the purchase of state bonds by the ECB in exchange for policy reforms. The formal distinctions among these three intervention instruments notwithstanding, the general policy intention remains the same, namely , the implementation of substantial labour market reforms. These, as a rule, include the demand for moderate wage developments and the decentralisation of the collective bargaining system. Decentralisation and dismantling of multiemployer collective bargaining Even though the current crisis has reinforced the decentralisation of wage-setting and collective bargaining institutions throughout Europe, this process was most pronounced in the countries subject to direct political intervention by the Troika and the IMF/EU. Figure 1 provides an overview of the procedural changes to the collective bargaining systems undertaken in these so-called ‘programme countries’ in return for financial support. Two of them, Romania and Ireland, saw a complete breakdown of national-level collective bargaining structures that had been in place before the crisis. In the case of Ireland, the employers withdrew from the social partnership agreement at the end of 2009, which after 22 years of crosssectoral wage coordination brought the return to company-level bargaining. In Romania, national cross-sectoral collective bargaining was abolished in 2011 by the Social Dialogue Act, implemented unilaterally by the government. Since at the same time the Act re-organised branch-level bargaining structures and introduced stricter criteria for the representativeness of social partner organisations as a precondition for negotiations, the bargaining process virtually came to a standstill. In effect, the collective bargaining coverage rate has gone down from 90 percent to an estimated 20 percent. In Greece, Portugal and Spain, sectoral bargaining structures have formally remained intact, but they have been hollowed out by legal T he neoliberal reform policies pursued by European and national policy-makers to come to terms with the crisis have far-reaching implications on collective bargaining throughout Europe – both in terms of bargaining outcomes and procedures. In a nutshell, their impact manifests itself in three ways: first, in the continuing pressure for moderate wage developments ; second, in the growing decentralisation of collective bargaining processes; and third, in the increasing direct political intervention into collective bargaining in order to ensure the effective implementation of the policies of wage moderation and decentralisation. Before we look at each of these processes in more detail, it is worthwhile to examine the role of wages within the reform policies. The policies of wage restraint and decentralisation of collective bargaining are part of the broader strategy of the IMF and the political elites in the EU to solve what they view as being first and foremost a debt and cost competitiveness crisis. As a consequence , their crisis management is heavily based on austerity policies which aim to reduce public expenditure and to consolidate state budgets, and on the pursuit of so-called ‘structural reforms’ designed to improve national competitiveness. In both approaches, wages play a crucial role as an adjustment variable. In the case of austerity policy , cuts and freezes of public sector wages, alongside the abolition or reduction of fringe benefits for public sector employees, have been part and parcel of governments’ efforts to reduce public spending. The neoliberal structural reforms in the field of collective bargaining are based on the assumption that macroeconomic imbalances between surplus and deficit countries are attributable primarily to differing developments of wages and unit wage costs...

The 1985 annual meeting of the American Historical Association was held from December 27-30 in New York City. This report is on nine sessions deal ing with themes of interest to the readers of this journal. For a catalogue of the meeting, which had additional panels with a labor history component, write to the American Historical Association, 400 A Street SE, Washington, DC, 20003. The most unusual features of the annual meeting were the two joint meetings between historians and members of the Industrial Relations Research Association. As David Brody indicated, these two disciplines have rarely con versed, because industrial relations has based itself on a systems approach that emphasizes stability over change. This attempt to stimulate a new dialogue aroused considerable interest. The first of the two sessions took an unusual tack: Melvyn Dubofsky (SUNY, Binghamton) compared industrial relations in the 1920s with the 1980s, while Irving Bernstein (UCLA) compared the 1930s with the 1960s. Dubofsky found many similarities in the two periods, particularly in the fact that employers crushed unions on the one hand, and preached cooperation on the other. Bernstein showed how the welfare state measures of the New Deal era were broadened during the Great Society, albeit on a more fragile political foundation. Unfortunately, the comparative approach did not clarify why the collective bargaining system that emerged with the New Deal has begun to break down. The second session, a roundtable on theories of industrial relations and labor history, was also disappointing. David Brody suggested that labor his tory's search for a synthesis, and industrial relations' current attempt to explain recent changes in the collective bargaining system, may make for a convergence. Brody suggested that Piore and Sabel's recent book, The Second Industrial Divide, might provide a starting point for exploring common ground. Robert Ozanne (Wisconsin) did not seem sympathetic to the session's