Extended Summary

Since the second half of the 1990s, the number of legal strikes has declined severely in Turkey because of authoritarian neoliberalism. In the 2010s authoritarianism has deepened, and the government has almost banned all the legal strikes. Did working class protests become exceptional and insignificant in this context? Or did they continue in different, more hidden forms? Using protest event analysis (PEA), this research seeks to answer these questions by examining working class protests against employers and state in the second half of the 2010s. As Koopmans and Rucht (2002) succinctly noted, PEA provides a solid ground in a topic that is often marked by more or less informed speculation. The protest tendencies of workers in Turkey is indeed such a subject of speculation, and this article aims to shed light on these tendencies.

Turkey may not be a country with exceptional working-class militancy. However, in assessing working-class militancy of Turkey comparatively one should consider the following: Not only in the 2010s but also in the 1990s, Turkey was one of the countries in the world with greatest number of violations of collective labour rights as shown by Teitelbaum (2010). The 2010s witnessed greater restrictions, so that the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has declared that Turkey is among the ten worst countries in the world since 2016. Despite these facts, workers in Turkey staged significant number of protests in the second half of the 2010s.

To present and analyse the data, we mainly focused on the number of protest cases in this article. The number of protesters can be also the main unit of presentation and analysis. All such preferences related to the unit of analysis have their limitations. To partially overcome the limitation in our case, we also briefly present some distributions according to the number of protestors.

The research found 5 thousand 725 working-class protests for the years between 2015-19 as reported by the press. In other words, workers staged three protests per day on the average during these years. If we combine protests staged consecutively for the same reason (for example, protests organised consecutively by the workers of the same workplace for the same reason) as one working-class protest case, we reach 3 thousand 95 such cases. 70% of these cases are workplace-based protests, which refers to protests by workers of a workplace against their employer demanding something related to that workplace. Most of the rest are protests aiming at the government, demanding something more general for the working class. The latter is called general protests. This article mainly focuses on workplace-based protests.

The number of protest cases was the highest in 2015, when the political atmosphere was relatively more democratic, especially until the general election in June. Authoritarianization has gained momentum with the rerun of election scheduled in November. The number of protests has decreased in 2016, when Turkey experienced a failed coup attempt and ensuing state of emergency. In the following years, the number of protest cases could not reach its level in 2015. This trajectory is in line with the literature, which notes that more democratic regimes experience a greater number of protests compared to more authoritarian ones. On the other hand, while authoritarianization has deepened in the following years, the protest frequency did not decline but followed a steady course.

In these five years, 59% of the workplace-based protests were defensive in the sense that workers organised them to defend themselves against employers’ violations and aggressions such as in the cases of dismissals, wage arrears or mobbing. The rest was offensive on workers’ part, such as the protests aiming at unionisation or increasing the wages. In terms of industries, metal manufacturing ranks number one among the workplace-based protests. One fifth of workplace-based protest cases and one fourth of the protestors were from this industry.

The most obvious, quantifiable impact of authoritarianization on the working-class protests was the increase in police intervention. While the ratio of police intervention against workplace-based protest cases was 9% in 2015, it increased to 16% in 2016 and 21% in 2017. The ratio was 19% and 17% in the following two years, namely 2018 and 2019. In the same period, the government postponed the strikes of nearly 170 thousand workers, and one should note that postponing means prohibiting in the Turkish case. The article reveals that even in such a difficult and authoritarian context, the working class in Turkey has put in a strong protest performance.