EXTENDED SUMMARY

The Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions (Türk-İş) did not participate in the proceedings of the Minimum Wage Setting Commission (AÜTK) in December 2025 period, and the minimum wage for 2026 was determined solely by representatives of the state and employers. What makes this stance analytically significant is not the boycott itself, but the fact that the confederation had made its participation conditional upon a reform of the minimum wage setting system, and had announced this condition a full year in advance, on 25 December 2024. Türk-İş has represented workers in the minimum wage regime without interruption since 1969. This article asks how distinctive this position is within the history of the confederation’s minimum wage policy, how it emerged, and what its outcome was.

The article approaches the minimum wage as a field of trade union struggle. Where collective bargaining coverage is low, the minimum wage becomes the principal institutional mechanism shaping the general wage structure. Hence, the importance of the minimum wage for trade unions. Furthermore, Turkey has a minimum wage setting system that provides representation of organized labor in the commission that sets the minimum wage level.

Low bargaining coverage and the growing importance of the minimum wage have produced, in Turkey, what Çelik terms a “minimum wage trap”: rather than serving as a lever that raises wages generally, wages are compressed downward toward the minimum wage level — a dynamic observable even in unionized workplaces, where seniority-based wage scales have been eroded. Comparable patterns are reported internationally: minimum wage systems gain importance as collective bargaining declines, governments extend their control over wage-setting institutions, and minimum wage increases fail to spill over into the wider labor market where bargaining is weak. Within this framework, the minimum wage question involves not only the wage level but also the transformation of the institutional structure through which it is set. The article therefore examines Türk-İş’s institutional reform effort through the lens of trade union power resources, drawing in particular on Grimshaw and Johnson’s argument that the effect of institutional power depends on its interaction with organizational, ideational, and societal power resources.

The study draws on the commission decisions taken between 1969 and 2025, published statements of vote and dissenting opinions, and Türk-İş’s publications, press statements, and video recordings of those statements. The study adopts a historical design rather than a causal comparative approach; it traces the confederation’s shifting positions and the formation of its reform agenda within an institutional structure that has remained largely unchanged.

The article first establishes the continuity of the system: the commission has been composed of five representatives each from labor, employers, and the state since its inception, its decisions are binding rather than advisory, and its structure renders the state’s position decisive whenever labor and employers fail to agree. Against this stable background, Türk-İş’s repertoire is reconstructed. Of the 52 decisions taken since 1974, the confederation opposed 31, and in 13 of these it either did not attend the final session or left before the vote. Opposition, walkouts, and non-participation are therefore not new. Nor is the demand for reform: in the 1980s and 1990s Türk-İş submitted concrete legislative proposals, which later gave way to more general calls for a “fair commission.” Even the complete boycott of a setting process has a precedent, in December 2009 — though that boycott was not tied to any reform demand. The distinctiveness of the 2024–2025 stance thus lies not in its components, which are all familiar, but in their combination: participation was made conditional upon institutional reform.

The article then traces the emergence of this stance from the December 2015 decision onward, through three sub-periods marked by shifts in the confederation’s voting behavior, its criticisms of the commission’s composition, and its relations with the other confederations. The 2015 decision, announced beforehand as an electoral pledge, made the political nature of minimum wage determination unusually explicit; 2016 marked the beginning of a distributional shock against labor. Between 2019 and 2021 Türk-İş returned to non-participation, acted jointly with the other confederations for the first time, and revived its reform demand. Between 2021 and 2023 the commission was de facto reduced to an advisory body as the President effectively assumed the power to determine the minimum wage, and the confederation raised no objection.

The boycott itself did not achieve the reform objective the confederation had publicly announced. Over the intervening year, no concrete legislative proposal was formulated; the confederation’s energies were absorbed by the public sector collective agreement, concluded only in August 2025. When the demand resurfaced in late 2025, its focus shifted from the commission’s composition to the criteria used in wage setting. Reform was demanded, but its content was left to the government. The move was made under unfavorable conditions, without a public campaign, and without the organizational mobilization the confederation had demonstrated in 2024. Institutional power was relinquished without being substituted by organizational or ideational resources — a finding that underscores Grimshaw and Johnson’s contention that institutional power alone is insufficient.