ABSTRACT

For the last ten years, Turkey has been passing through a process during which neoliberal policies have been ruling, unemployment and precariousness have been rising with trade union rights being violated and activists being arrested due to the violent oppression against social protest actors and social movements. The mobilizations of workers under sub-contractors or workers being fired because of their union affiliations make the quest of trade unions to produce new strategies more vital. During the AKP government, many legal changes have been realized including the labour code, the collective bargaining code and the trade unions’ code and subcontracting and de-unionization have been expanded. In this context, throughout our research, we are going to analyse the reconstruction of the trade union field under the AKP government and the impact of this reconstruction process on the resources and the organization and mobilization strategies of trade unions. By an analysis of the relations between the AKP and different trade union confederations such as Hak-İş, Memur-Sen and DİSK, KESK, we examined how the government is privileging a trade unionism based on consensus and marginalizing a trade unionism based on conflict. In our first chapter, in order to make clear our theoretical framework, we explained shortly the “field theory” of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and then analysed the reconstruction of the trade unionism field by the legal system and by the political discourse. In the second chapter, we studied the trade unionism of Hak-İş, the stand of DİSK and the strategies of Türk-İş. Thus, we aimed to understand the construction of the relations between trade union field-political field and the State on national, local and individual levels during the AKP government period. Our paper is based on the fieldwork during which we have conducted ninety interviews and made observations in Hak-İş, DİSK and Türk-İş in Istanbul and Ankara and the press analysis that we have realized during 2012 and 2013