ÖzU International Relations faculty Alpkan Birelma prepared report on the Trade Unions in Turkey for the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation.
Some points from the report include:
Turkey’s inflation soars to 61 percent as of March 2022. As a reaction, in the first two months of 2022, the country witnessed an unauthorized strike wave. Thousands of mostly non-union workers staged a total of 108 strikes.Union laws in Turkey are far from aligned with ILO conventions. The right to strike was further restricted recently. Since 2016, according to the ITUC, Turkey has been among the ten worst countries for workers. Union density rose from 8% in 2013 to 13% in 2021. This was mainly because of the unionization of workers employed by subcontractors working for public institutions. In the private sector, the density stagnates around 6%.