FIM

The Council of Global Unions and the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) have writ­ten a let­ter to President Abdullah Gül about the new “Trade Unions and Collective Labour Relations Bill” which passed the Parliament last week and is now await­ing his approval. 

The glob­al trade union move­ment com­mu­ni­cat­ed its con­cerns regard­ing this bill sev­er­al times to the Turkish gov­ern­ment. Furthermore, the International Labour Organization (ILO) draft­ed a very detailed mem­o­ran­dum which point­ed out numer­ous arti­cles in the draft law that vio­late the fun­da­men­tal work­ers’ rights enshrined in basic ILO stan­dards includ­ing Convention 87 on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize, and Convention 98 on the Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining. 

The European Commission has also been very crit­i­cal about the changes intro­duced by this bill. The EU Commission has just released the Turkey 2012 Progress Report in which the Commission presents its assess­ment of what each can­di­date has achieved over the last year. This report clear­ly states that the cur­rent Turkish labour law is not meet­ing EU and ILO stan­dards. It more specif­i­cal­ly men­tions the high thresh­olds for enter­ing into col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing as well as the restric­tions on the right to strike. 

Turkish labour law is not meet­ing EU and ILO standards

The draft was crit­i­cized many times by the Global Union Federations (GUFs) and trade unions in Turkey because it main­tains restric­tive sec­toral, work­place and enter­prise thresh­olds; keeps restric­tions on the right to strike; man­dates offi­cial inter­ven­tion in the col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing process and sets bureau­crat­ic bar­ri­ers relat­ed to union mem­ber­ship and col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing process.

It is a com­mon prac­tice in Turkey to dis­miss work­ers who are organ­is­ing trade unions. Global Unions, ETUC and their sec­toral struc­tures are informed about union dis­crim­i­na­tion cas­es in Turkey almost on a dai­ly basis. There are 6.5 mil­lion work­ers who work in com­pa­nies employ­ing less than 30 employ­ees, which rep­re­sent 70 per­cent of the work­places in Turkey. Should this law be enact­ed, 6.5 mil­lion work­ers would have no access to any pro­tec­tion against dis­missal and anti-​union dis­crim­i­na­tion, which would make vir­tu­al­ly impos­si­ble for them to exer­cise their rights to orga­nize and to col­lec­tive bargaining.

See thank-​you let­ter from DISK (Turkish TUC).