It’s not very often that Turkey’s top three labor unions join forces due to their different ideological stances. The Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions (Türk-İş) is a mainstream labor organization with the most members, while the Hak-Is Trade Union (Hak-İş) represents the conservative part of the Turkish working class and the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DİSK) represents the leftist part.
Hak-İş, for example, due to its political proximity to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), has not been very much willing to join the two other labor organizations’ criticisms against the government on issues concerning labor rights.
But draft legislation before the Turkish Parliament that seeks to amend various laws concerning employment, unemployment insurance, severance pay, flexible working and other workers’ rights has united all these three labor organizations with shared concerns that it undermines the job security and labor standards in Turkey.
They have two major criticisms of the bill. First, they complain that the government did not seek to listen to the labor organizations, which represent millions of workers while drafting the bill. Their second criticism is about the content of the proposed bill as they conveyed their objections through a joint declaration.
