Unionization and Autocratization: Class Organization Strategies Under the Authoritarian Transformation in Turkey

Abstract

Turkey’s neoliberal authoritarian regime poses increasing challenges against unionization processes. While the decline of workers’ rights under this regime created a renewed impetus to unionize, barriers to unionization equally increased and diversified. Taking three recent unionization experiences as case studies, this paper explores the dynamics between class organization and authoritarian statecraft. It proposes that barriers against unionization are not consequences of authoritarian consolidation but part and parcel of its making in the Turkish context. However, they have the contradictory effect of weakening such consolidation at the everyday level by engendering a working-class politicization and desire toward democratization within unionization struggles. This paradoxical relation also reveals how unionization efforts inevitably incorporate political demands in addition to economic ones under the Turkish authoritarian circumstances and become a space of struggle against the authoritarian logic at large, whether that be the anti-democratic practices of the regime or the top-down bureaucratic attitudes of unions.