Extended Summary

The power and effectiveness of the working-class movement and the responses produced by capital to this determine the nature of the class struggle within the historical process. Historically and universally, the working class has mostly encountered capital’s counter-organization in this area through the economic struggles they have waged via trade unions. In this context, while unions are self-organizations developed by the working class within the contradictory cultural fabrics of their universal and own experiences, yellow unions, on the other hand, emerge as universal structures known to be used by capital to destroy the self-organization of the working class from within. However, in certain situations and periods, yellow unions lose their functionality for capital, and new structures are created by capital and states against unions.

In countries such as Turkey, where the political authority/state is the main actor rather than a third party in labor relations and shifts the class power balance in favor of capital, counter-organizations developed against the working class are also significant. This is because the structures positioned and developed against the working class and trade unions establish more complex relationships with the political power and employers than in other countries. Historically, attempts to understand counter-organizations through the definition of yellow unions often lead to a lack of understanding or incomplete understanding of the characteristics and effects of new types of structures under given conditions. In this context, this study will examine the structures that were developed by the political power in Turkey in the 2000s against the self-organization of the working class, i.e., the unions, and which are referred to as “Non-Union Unions” in the international literature and defined as ghost unions in this study. In this sense, this study is a product of the effort to understand and define the unions that emerged and grew in the 2000s, generally characterized as “yellow” in the literature and in practice.

The 2000s were years of significant change in the field of labor relations in Turkey. The rise to power of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the weakening of the labor movement, and the confinement of the traditional trade union movement to a very narrow sphere were the main reasons for the changes in labor relations and the growth of non-union unions. The AKP, which stands out from previous governments with its policies and practices in the field of labor relations and occupies a rather unique position, also has a relationship with unions that lies outside the traditional politics-trade union relationship. For this reason, after presenting the state of union rights during the AKP era, this study discusses the characteristics and effects of non-union unions. The study adopts a method based on the analysis of news reports in the press and content shared on the official websites of trade unions, and is prepared in a descriptive style.

The study attempts to highlight the characteristics that distinguish non-union unions from genuine and yellow unions, evaluating the conditions that give rise to them through their relationship with political power. Non-union unions, which not only restrict the use of union rights for workers but also continue to exist as structures that undermine the very essence of union rights as a whole, are organizations that grew under specific historical periods and conditions. However, the most important issue to emphasize and pay attention to in terms of the union movement is not the historical duration of non-union unions’ organizational life. It is the duration of the overall impact that the methods and practices of non-union unions and the damage they cause to the essence of union rights will have on the union movement. In a system of labor relations where non-union unions do not exist organizationally but the methods and practices of the non-union union structure continue, workers may face not a short-term but a long-term, fundamental change to their detriment. In this context, the struggle against non-union unions should not be waged against the methods they adopt and implement, but rather against the methods and practices accumulated by the working-class movement throughout its historical process.