1 A Formative Experience: The First Work Stoppage

In October 1938, Ahmet migrated to western Anatolia from a remote and poor northern village after reading about the opening of a new Sümerbank textile factory in Nazilli. Having lived all his life in the mountains, seventeen-year-old Ahmet found his two years in the hot and humid climate in Nazilli a struggle. The reader will remember this factory, and its proximity to a mosquito-infested swamp, from Chapter 3. Like many of his generation, Istanbul would be the young migrant’s next destination. After working for a short time at a private textile factory, he moved to the Bakırköy Factory in 1941, where, before leaving for military service in 1943, he had a formative experience on the shop floor. The incident was not recorded in the factory archives, nor was it reported in any of the newspapers. Only an incomplete account exists of what happened before, during, and after the incident, which makes charting a full story difficult. Such stories by necessity appear only in fragments, and rely on informed speculation to be understood in a meaningful way. I treat the following biographical snapshot exactly in this manner: an incomplete but exemplary case of industrial conflict, where a wage dispute turns into a discussion over the possible meanings and political uses of national belonging and citizenship under wartime conditions.

The narrative of events leading up to the strike incorporates a complex configuration of interests and identities based on class and nation. On one level, the issues represent a clearly defined workplace conflict. Viewed within the larger social milieu of the factory, however, they provide an insight into two interrelated points. First, Ahmet recalls that it was the director who used the word “strike”; the workers just said “we are not working.” He had never heard the word before. It is impossible to know whether the others knew what a strike was and avoided using it because strikes were illegal; or if they were also hearing it for the first time from the director. The ensuing exchange is instructive as an instance of contested legitimacy. The director begins by projecting a powerful definition onto the situation as a disciplinary hearing rather than a negotiation, and criminalises the strike as a political offense requiring punishment under martial law.⁷ He resorts to the common managerial strategy of putting workers on the defensive from the outset, by making the first move.⁸ The second point concerns the director’s next claim, which shifts from the broader level of industrial relations to the specificities of state factories. The machines, he protests, were not supposed to stop because “[t]hose fabrics you weave are for our army.”

This notion of patriotic service was used by industrial policymakers not only as a means of external labour regulation; it also formed an integral part of labour control on the shop floor. It could be expected that referring to the national interest during wartime would enable the director to achieve political authority, the challenging of which would transcend the realm of factory rules and discipline.⁹ However, the director did not simply resort to values that were “rooted in ideologies in the wider society beyond the workplace” to use them as “currency” to maintain the rules and practices of the workplace. As a central component of state ideology, etatism concretised these values in state factories; it rendered them an intrinsic element of labour control on and beyond the shop floor.¹⁰

With this appeal to hegemonic ideology, however, the incident takes on a twist that the director could not anticipate.¹¹ When Ahmet appropriates the very categories referred to by his opponent and uses them as a basis for claims-making, a wage dispute evolves into a discursive struggle over categories of national identity, belonging, and citizenship. Ahmet refuses to backpedal in response to the director’s strategical likening of industrial labour to national service; he also does not adopt a language of benevolence, as was common in workers’ petitions in the early 1940s. Instead, he deploys the very principles derived from the dominant ideology, in forcing the director morally to concede to an increase whilst standing on the legitimacy of the national war effort. The basis of citizenship thus shifted from a rhetoric of “equality in sacrifice” to a notion of equal status with respect to the rights and duties that accompany the status. Ahmet turned the Kemalist regime’s master narrative into a discursive field where identities of nation and citizenship are constantly being contested and redefined.¹²

By using the same discourses that were intended to mobilise state workers as the justification for his resistance to managerial authority, Ahmet echoes what T.H. Marshall defined as one of the pillars of citizenship: “the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in the society.”¹³ For Turkish society, these standards referred to the promises implicit in the Kemalist nationalist rhetoric. But Ahmet did not stop there. At the police station, Ahmet made it clear that he perceived state employment not as a relationship of service but as a relationship of contract. “To be working class,” Charles Tilly argued, “is to interact with capitalist in one’s capacity as the bearer of labour power.”¹⁴ As a member of a working class without organisational power, Ahmet had no choice but to combine his control of that capacity with the rhetoric of national belonging as the basis of his claims-making.

In 1943, Ahmet left the factory for his almost four-year-long military service. Upon his return to Istanbul, a twenty-six-year-old Ahmet who had never heard of the word “sendika” (trade union) before found a dramatically different political environment. Workers were no longer the audience but were instead becoming the actors, with the trade union movement flourishing once again after the heavy blow it had sustained the year before.¹⁵ Among those to seize that opportunity were the Bakırköy workers.

2 The Return of the Repressed

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, two waves of political turmoil had struck Turkey, and labour protests peaked during both of them. A mixture of protests and celebratory demonstrations and stoppages by labour groups followed the first granting of the right of association under the Ottoman “Declaration of Freedom” in 1908.¹⁶ Fuelled by nationalist sentiment against foreign capital, strikes spread throughout the country and continued until 1909, when they were prohibited with the Work Stoppage Act of 1909 (Tatil-i Eşgal Kanunu).¹⁷ Labour unrest died down, only to be revived in the power vacuum created by the defeat of the empire and the beginning of the Independence War. Between 1918 and 1925, the second wave of labour disturbances and various attempts at organisation took place, some of which were organised by socialists.¹⁸ The suppression of the second wave broke the link between the developmentalist state and the trade union movement, which would shape the course of state-labour relations in the following decades. The fate of the inchoate and transnationally fragmented communist movement played a central role in this history. Last but not least, the complicated relationship between Kemalists and communists, which still has reverberations today, also has its seed in this suppression.

During the formative years of the republic, three separate communist movements developed in Turkey. As one of the oldest communist parties in the Middle East and the first to be made a member of the Comintern, the Communist Party of Turkey (Türkiye Komünist Partisi, hereafter the tkp) was founded in 1920 in Baku by Mustafa Subhi. While living in internal exile because of his critical stance on the ruling Committee of Union and Progress, Subhi had fled to Crimea in 1914, and later organised Turkish émigrés and prisoners of war in the Soviet Union to form his own organisation in contact with Moscow. In exchange for Bolshevik support for the Anatolian struggle for independence, Subhi requested permission from Mustafa Kemal to carry on communist activities in Turkey, but did not wait for a positive response. He stepped up his efforts to organise communists in Anatolia from Baku, and returned to Turkey in January 1921, ostensibly to join the struggle for liberation in Anatolia. But shortly after setting foot in the country, he was cast into the Black Sea off Trabzon with a group of tkp leaders.¹⁹ To this day, the degree of Ankara’s complicity in this murder remains unknown.²⁰

A second communist party, the People’s Communist Party of Turkey (Türkiye Halk İştirakiyun Fırkası), grew out of the Green Army, an anti-imperialist force formed by the Ankara government to attract the support of the Soviet Union. Established on 7 December 1920, the party was admitted into the Comintern as a second body representing Turkish communists, in addition to the organisation set up by Subhi. Around the same time as Subhi’s murder, the party’s leadership was arrested and convicted on charges of unauthorised links to foreign powers. Although the government permitted the party, thanks to strong Soviet representation in March 1922, by then it had lost its critical momentum. The final blow came in September that same year, when Moscow welcomed the Kemalist victory over the Greeks and asserted that Turkish workers would eventually have to turn against the Anatolian government. The party was closed down once again, and remained so.²¹

The third movement started in Germany in September 1919 but came to be known as the Istanbul movement. Turkish students in Germany, heavily influenced by German Marxism, had organised the Workers’ Association of Turkey (Türkiye İşçi Derneği) with the young workers who had been sent to Germany for technical training, and formed a companion political body, the Turkish Workers and Peasants Party (Türkiye İşçi ve Çiftçi Fırkası). They added the appellation of “Socialist” to the party name when they transferred to Istanbul later that year. Following the demise of Subhi’s émigré movement, the Istanbul movement became the dominant strand. Şefik Hüsnü Deymer, a medical doctor who had been influenced by the French socialist party, took over its leadership. With the approval of the Comintern, the party initially supported the Kemalist revolution. By 1925, however, both the Comintern and Deymer had become strongly critical of the regime. In 1927, the Kemalist regime initiated a crackdown on the party. After spending one and a half years in prison, Deymer fled the country in 1929. He returned ten years later, and would remain a leading figure in the Turkish communist movement until his death in 1959.²²

A persistent wave of labour protests was the backdrop to this communist activity. In the four years between 1919 and 1922, there were thirty-four strikes in Izmir, Istanbul, and Zonguldak. A wave of workers’ protests took place in 1923: twelve thousand miners went on strike at Zonguldak and Ereğli; beer factory workers in Istanbul went on strike in late summer in protest at dismissals; but the strongest workers’ action was the October strike at the Eastern Railway Company (Şark Şimendiferleri).²³ Between the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923 and the declaration of the Turkish republic in October 1923, there was a significant upsurge in the labour movement, with more than fifty thousand workers going on strike in Istanbul, Izmit, Zonguldak, and other cities. In the Ereğli-Zonguldak coal basin, miners successfully demanded the introduction of an eight-hour working day, one day off a week, the signing of a collective agreement, and the formation of an insurance fund.²⁴ Workers at the Bomonti Brewery in Istanbul also won their strike in August 1923, which was later exploited by the Istanbul Labour Union and the government as a source of propaganda for cooperation between labour and capital. Among other strategies, they also resorted to inciting ethnic animosity among workers to prevent the consolidation of the labour movement. Sadly, it worked. For example, in August 1923, the workers of the Istanbul Streetcar and Tunnel Company demanded the immediate dismissal of all foreigners, including non-Muslim workers. Later the same month, workers at a Belgian-owned textile factory in Izmir went on strike because the director had offended their national feelings. They successfully demanded his dismissal as well as the subordination of the factory management to Turkish laws.²⁵

In November 1923, 250 workers’ representatives, representing almost 45,000 workers, established the General Union of Workers (Umum Amele Birliği). Although the union emphasised that it was an exclusively national and economic organisation, as well as an enemy of communism, the government refused to approve its by-laws and the union dissolved in early 1924.²⁶ Later the same year, several Istanbul unions formed the Society for the Advancement of Turkish Workers (Türk Amele Teali Cemiyeti), a nodal organisation for socialist-leaning trade unions.²⁷ In January 1925, the Turkish Workers and Peasants Socalist Party began publishing its weekly Orak-Çekiç (Hammer and Sickle), which would play an important role in mobilising workers.

As strikes in industrialised regions of the country continued in 1925, the Kurdish tribes of eastern Anatolia revolted. In the spring of 1925, the republic was shaken by a revolt among Kurdish peasants, led by religious and tribal chiefs, that rapidly spread across a vast part of eastern Turkey. The reason given for the revolt was the programme of secularisation. The rebels used symbols of a religious nature and the leader, Shaikh Said, after whom the revolt was named, cited mainly religious arguments in village propaganda. But the Turkish authorities, insisting that the rebels intended to establish an independent Kurdish state, crushed the revolt with much bloodshed. Within weeks, parliament had enacted the 1925 Law for the Maintenance of Order and declared a state of emergency, launching a new phase of authoritarianism.²⁸

The Ankara government had already broadened the Treason Act in 1920 to embrace political as well as military subversion, and on 4 October 1920, an amendment to the Associations Act gave the government the authority to prohibit organisations “opposing public law and state policy.”²⁹ The victory of the Kemalists in Anatolia in September 1922 meant that they now wielded political power, which they used to crack down on communists in March and May 1923—on charges of “inciting to revolt.”³⁰ But, mainly for the sake of maintaining good relations with the Soviet Union, they could not go as far as they wanted. Two years later, the Kurdish revolt provided the government with the opportunity to get rid of its political opponents once and for all.

“Istanbul descended into an atmosphere of terror,” wrote Sabiha Sertel in her memoir, the prominent leftist journalist who had been forced to flee Turkey in the 1950s.³¹ Communist journalists and members of the Society for the Advancement of Turkish Workers were among those sent to the Independence Tribunals, the revolutionary courts established in 1920 invested with the supreme authority to try cases of treason and all such activity against the regime. Sertel describes the shock and confusion experienced by leftist intellectuals and workers before this wholescale attack. “Why are they bringing workers into this? Are they also religious reactionaries?” a typesetter asked her. The government, she responded, was trying to kill not two but three birds with one stone. When the revolt broke out, parliament was in the course of one of its many debates on the labour code, as the reader will remember from Chapter 2. The occasional strikes that targeted not only foreign but also domestic capital upset the government and employers. The revolt was an opportunity for the rulers to suppress not only the Kurds, but also the press and the labour movement. The government closed down the communist journals and prohibited propaganda activities, effectively bringing the legal phase of communism in the country to an end. The veteran leadership were either imprisoned or in self-exile, and the remaining cadres were under close surveillance by the authorities.³²

Workers who had lived through that time told an American academic in the 1950s that the labour movement had enjoyed more freedom and more popular support prior to 1925 than in the 1930s and 1940s precisely because of their identification with the nationalist struggle.³³ Workers had been invited to the Izmir Economic Congress in 1923, for example, where they demanded the freedom to organise unions, the right to strike, and the designation of May 1 as Labour Day.³⁴ Sporadic strikes and other demonstrations had been reported in the late 1920s, and the constitution of 1924 recognised the right of association. From 1925 onward, however, the scope of worker organisations was legally limited to mutual assistance through welfare and related activities.³⁵ With this last nail in the coffin, the Turkish case diverged from both the nineteenth-century European and the twentieth-century postcolonial nation-states. In the former, unions emerged against a background of party politics divided along class lines, and workers’ political allegiances followed this line of conflict. Through their links with labour parties of various denominations, the unions played a significant role in national political life, both in national parliaments and as representatives of a major interest group. In the latter, the labour movement came out as critical of the cause of anti-colonial nationalism, and enjoyed, albeit not for long, a certain degree of legitimacy derived from that role after independence.³⁶ Although a temporary alliance between the labour unions and the nationalist party did exist during the Turkish independence struggle, it dissolved shortly after the establishment of the republic. When the labour movement re-emerged simultaneously with the adoption of the competitive party system, unionists’ party loyalties also quickly became divided, and a union-party alignment did not develop.

Two pieces of legislation further criminalised class-based politics in the 1930s. First, as we have seen, the 1936 Labour Code established legal penalties for strikes and lockouts and sanctioned compulsory arbitration for labour disputes.³⁷ Second, two clauses borrowed from the penal code of fascist Italy were introduced into the Turkish penal code, making it illegal to engage in any activities aiming to “establish the hegemony or domination of a social class over the other social classes, or eliminate a social class, or overthrow any of the fundamental economic or social orders established within the country” and to carry out communist propaganda.³⁸ But strikes and other forms of labour action, such as the 1931 Defterdar strike, the 1934 mineworkers’ hunger march, or the 1938 May Day celebrations, took place even under such repressive circumstances. In fact, more than half of the 145 strikes between 1923 and 1960 occurred before 1938, the year in which the Associations Act prohibited class-based organisations outright.³⁹ By centralising all power in government hands two years later, the National Defence Act effectively eliminated whatever freedom of organisation remained.

Workers began to call for the right to organise before the official end of the war. In July 1945, tobacco workers wrote a letter describing how the war had made their already dire working and living conditions unbearable. “We need an organisation of our own,” they claimed, “we can only communicate our problems and demands to those in power through such an organisation.”⁴⁰ For more than a year, nothing changed. And when change did come, it was all rather unsensational. On 10 June 1946, the most important revision of labour policy happened not through a major legislative initiative, but through a simple amendment of the Associations Act. Under pressure amid the upcoming local elections in July and unable to foresee the frantic union activity that would ensue, the government overturned the ban on class-based organisations; not only labour unions, but also political parties, including socialist and communist parties, became legal.⁴¹ Only eight days after the amendment, however, the government introduced articles 141 and 142 to the penal code, forbidding subversive—in particular communist—propaganda.⁴² The events that followed proved that the right to organise was stillborn, and the extended Turkish political arena would remain off-limits for the radical leftist parties for the coming decades.

Still, the leftists took advantage of the small window of opportunity created by postwar liberalisation. In the early Cold War period, trade unions globally emerged as key sites of communist organisation and quickly evolved into key sites of robust anti-communism.⁴³ In the Turkish context, too, the 1946 trade unionism brought the class politics that had been simmering at the subterranean levels to the surface. As soon as the requirement to obtain permission to set up an organisation was rescinded, some twenty political parties, including communists, sprang up. Seven parties promoting the interests of peasants and workers were established in 1946. Although most did not survive, they changed the face of the political scene irreversibly.⁴⁴ Two of these parties, the Socialist Party of Turkey (Türkiye Sosyalist Partisi, hereafter the tsp) and the Socialist Party of the Workers and Peasants of Turkey (Türkiye Sosyalist Emekçi ve Köylü Partisi, hereafter the tsekp), played an important role in the development of a trade union movement, mainly because the preceding two decades of repression had created a vacuum of leadership and experience among workers, which political activists tried to fill.⁴⁵

The tsp, a pro-Western party with a broad leftist orientation, and the tsekp, a Marxist party following the Soviet line, strongly disagreed on the organisational model of the trade unions.⁴⁶ While the tsp followed the industrial branch-based trade union organisational model, the tsekp advocated for bottom-up organisation and adopted a workplace-based model of trade unionism. The founder of the social democratic and pro-Western tsp, Esat Adil Müstecaplıoğlu, argued in the party publication Gün (Day) that craft or industry-based unions should be organised into national federations.⁴⁷ In the tsekp newspaper Sendika (Trade Union), Deymer referred to trade union organisations in industrialised countries, where the concentration of workers in the workplace was ever increasing, and referred to the acceptance of this organisational model by the World Federation of Trade Unions (hereafter wftu).⁴⁸ In sectors where production is dispersed into smaller workplaces, workers should organise in occupational unions, Deymer argued.⁴⁹ But as soon as a factory has two to three hundred workers, a separate trade union should be established, he wrote in another article. In addition to organising into national federations, he continued, these workplace-based unions should also be organised geographically under the name of Birlik (Alliance), an association of local unions in a city or region.⁵⁰

Notwithstanding their divergences, both parties were united against the Association of Turkish Workers (Türkiye İşçiler Derneği), an overtly nationalist organisation founded on 9 July 1946 to support, as set out in its charter, the Ministry of Labour in better implementing the labour code and to increase productivity.⁵¹ The association envisioned a loose national body organised into local derneks (associations), a word that was strategically chosen over trade union.⁵² Both Sendika and Gün protested the chp-controlled Association of Turkish Workers for seeking to undermine the trade unions.⁵³ A 1948 chp report on labour issues vindicated those claims, in admitting that the party was caught unprepared for the surge in communist activity. The two communist parties, the report noted, had quickly organised workers in different industries and brought them under the Alliance of Trade Unions (Sendikalar Birliği). By delivering lectures on “materialism, capital and labour conflict, and the history of communism” at trade union centres and publishing a number of magazines, “professional communists poisoned workers, and even university students.”⁵⁴ In the eyes of the government officials, trade unions were functioning as “schools of [class] war,” as Engels once called them.⁵⁵ To put a stop to the communist subversion, party members met with state factory directors and worked with them to “protect state workers from communist infiltration.” The derneks, which started first in the state tobacco factories, were a product of this collaboration.⁵⁶

The number of trade unions established in 1946 varies depending on the source. According to the Ministry of Labour, there were around a hundred; in the newspapers this number was multiplied by seven. In his defence of the closure of the unions and the persecution of their leaders in a parliamentary meeting, the internal affairs minister complained that thirty-eight of the numerous “trade unions [that] sprawled out in a short period of time in our various cities” had been founded almost entirely by “registered and fanatical communists.”⁵⁷ A contemporary communist wrote that the tsekp had established twenty-five trade unions under the umbrella of five associations and also founded the Istanbul Workers Club, while the tsp had established six sector-based unions as well as the Federation of Turkish Trade Unions.⁵⁸ The unions were mainly established in industrial centres such as Adana, Ankara, Eskişehir, Istanbul, Izmit, Zonguldak, and Samsun, where the socialist parties and the tkp had been active earlier, but they also appeared in Kayseri, Trabzon, Sivas, and Malatya.⁵⁹ Later, a contemporary prosecutor claimed that socialists had organised as many as ten thousand workers just in Istanbul. In its own publications, the tsp claimed to have registered 4,500 textile workers in a single month.⁶⁰

Among the trade unions organised by the tsekp was the Bakırköy Textile Workers Trade Union (Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası İşçileri Sendikası). The union charter, published in Sendika on 26 October 1946, stated that membership was open to workers of all religious, ethnic, and political identities, but closed to those “who spied for and made propaganda for factory management and engaged in racist or fascist activity.”⁶¹ Of the nine names given by the newspapers as the founders of the factory union, three are worth mentioning for different reasons. The reader has already met the first, and we will read more about him below: Enver Tenşi. The second name is Sabri Özcan, a fitter whose name made it into a 1950 police report on communist union activity, suggesting that even after the total crackdown, some communist workers continued to be politically active.⁶² And the third is a woman: Reyhan Ozan; the only woman working in the iron works department.

Reyhan made it into the pages of Sendika on two other occasions. In September 1946, a female journalist interviewed Reyhan and called her “a tough worker, a welding foreman, a Turkish woman.”⁶³ She had fourteen years of experience by the time of the interview. Before Bakırköy, she had worked at factories in Eskişehir and Ankara. She had been trained by a German foreman, Jeniqe. Two months later, Reyhan was one of two main protagonists in a news story about unionism on the shop floor. The second protagonist was Enver. The reporter joined a conversation between Reyhan and Enver that he had been eavesdropping on. Their union activity, they told the reporter, had stirred up the factory. The foreman had been pressuring them by saying they would soon be fired. They did not know at the time but they had good reasons to be fearful. Hasan Özgüneş, a full-time union officer in the 1950s, was fired from the Sümerbank Adana Cotton Mill because of his involvement in the 1946 union movement. Although he went on to sue the factory and collect a sizeable indemnity, he was never reinstated.⁶⁴ Reyhan and Enver told the reporter that the director of the operations department at Bakırköy had taken matters one step further and threatened them: “This is [a] Sümerbank [factory], in other words, it is state territory. How dare you think you would protect workers’ rights better than the state?” The reporter found the male worker “highly intimated,” but the woman impressed him: “Her voice is still ringing in my ears!” he wrote, “She said to her male colleague: ‘My friend! Neither the chief’s recognition nor the foreman’s satisfaction will save you. Only the trade union can save you!’”⁶⁵ Needless to say, she left a lasting imprint on the male journalist, who called her “the brainbox of the cloth factory.”

Reyhan and Enver did not have to worry about the pressure on the shop floor for much longer because barely two weeks after the above conversation, the government instigated a crackdown on the trade unions. Accused of communist propaganda, the trade unions and workers’ political organisations faced the full brunt of state repression. The two socialist parties, the trade unions, and six newspapers and magazines were closed down indefinitely on 16 December 1946 under the authority of martial law on the allegation that they were violating the penal code by promoting concepts of class struggle.⁶⁶ Their leaders were tried for communism and acquitted, but further arrests followed and continued into the 1950s.⁶⁷ The suppression was a hard blow for the communist movement, and communism quickly gained a bad name among the populace.⁶⁸

Three developments caught the chp off guard in the summer of 1946. First, the Democrat Party won seventy seats in the local elections and continued to intensify their criticism of the chp. Although the dp shared the chp’s rejection of class conflict on the grounds that “there does not exist in our nation the situation which requires class conflict,” it strongly supported both the right of free organisation and the right to strike.⁶⁹ Second, late summer saw increased Soviet pressure to institute joint military control of passage through the Turkish Straits. When the Turkish government refused, tensions escalated into what came to be known as the Turkish Straits crisis, which resulted in Turkey’s turning to the United States for protection through nato membership. Third, against the backdrop of early Cold War tensions, the unexpected success of socialist ideology among the trade unions and some of the intelligentsia was becoming a growing concern for the government. The expectation that the government would be able to direct the development of the movement through the new Ministry of Labour and its own Workers Bureau gave way to a cold awakening to the potential of a communist insurgency, despite two decades of lethargy. As a result, although the labour minister declared his full support for the trade unions and underlined his faith that they would “serve the objectives of the ministry” in September 1946, the government had abandoned its policy of laissez-faire by the end of 1946.⁷⁰

By December 1946, the draft Employer and Employee Unions and Union Alliances Act (İşçi ve İşveren Sendikaları ve Sendika Birlikleri Kanunu) was ready. The head piece in the penultimate issue of Sendika on 7 December fiercely protested, arguing that the draft law was an anti-democratic move targeting independent trade unions.⁷¹ Another critical piece in the final issue argued that, by stating no one could be barred from membership, the draft opened up the trade unions to the risk of infiltration by “fascists.” The draft, Şefik Hüsnü Deymer continued, left out many fundamental trade union rights such as control over production and labour supply through collective agreements, as well as the free election of workers’ representatives.⁷²

Had it not been for the crisis with the Soviet Union and the Cold War, the short-lived 1946 unionism had the potential to change the course of the labour movement, especially with regard to its demands and its international orientation. These unions not only demanded wage increases and old age insurance; they also called for the right to strike and collective bargaining, the right to representation for trade unions, and the amendment of the labour code.⁷³ As we shall see below, serious disagreements on these points emerged in the later trade union movement, and workers had to wait until the 1960s for these rights. Both the tsp and the tsekp closely followed and advocated for joining the international trade union movement. The 1946 brochure of the Alliance of Trade Unions, Bize Göre Görüşler (In Our Opinion), openly set out the goal of the Turkish unions joining the wftu.⁷⁴ Both Sendika and Gün covered news related to this international organisation.⁷⁵ Besides the expected internationalism of the leftist movement, the strong emphasis on wftu membership was also a strategy to provide protection against the state. Rasih Nuri İleri, a tsekp member who was active in the party’s trade union activities, cites a conversation between Şefik Hüsnü Deymer and the leader of those activities, Ferit Kalmuk: “Move quick and establish ten alliances of trade unions and a national federation that has to join the wftu as soon as possible, so that [the chp] cannot easily shut down the Turkish trade unions.”⁷⁶ Little did he know that the escalating Cold War tensions would soon divide the wftu into two camps and that the Turkish trade unions would have to wait a long time even just to join the anti-communist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (hereafter icftu).

The persecutions erased the differences between the socialists and the communists; from then on, the state would approach any left-leaning politics with the suspicion of communism.⁷⁷ In 1966, the leader of the trade union federation Türk-İş (more on this below), Seyfi Demirsoy, boasted about the practices they, the anti-communist trade unionists, had used to red-bait and eliminate the communists in the 1940s. “We took control of the unions by beating up the communists,” he told participants at the general committee meeting, urging them to stay alert to communist infiltration.⁷⁸ In the midst of yet another wave of worker radicalisation, the leader of the national trade union federation was trying to browbeat the unionists into acquiescence through memories of 1946 unionism.

By the end of 1946, it became clear that the trade union movement could not be allowed to grow unchecked. The chp government faced a two-sided problem: It needed to build a trade union movement that would conform to the expectations of free world trade unionism, but without jeopardising industrial development or paving the way for class politics. The strategy of either rejecting the notion of class politics or reframing it as a national struggle against foreign capitalists and their local agents would no longer work. When the rhetoric of the nation as an indivisible community and the ability of the state to promote class harmony did not hold anymore, the affirmation of workers as a social presence became inevitable. Moreover, the ruling group had lost “the leisure to plan and pursue the most rational path” of progress, as a new vocabulary of political discourse had emerged and labour questions were increasingly more involved in political controversies.⁷⁹ The state’s task was to remould the union movement to build closer contact and cooperation with workers and facilitate their integration into the postwar political order. To achieve the former, the government created a new legal framework and associated institutions, and for the latter, it continued to lean on nationalism, but in a form that relied increasingly on communism as a magnified enemy.

3 Weakening the Trade Unions, One Step at a Time

The labour minister resorted once again to the tropes of etatism and industrial work as patriotic service in order to achieve policy legitimation. Together, he claimed, these two key characteristics set Turkey apart from both class-based societies and totalitarian regimes. The parliament enacted the Employer and Employee Unions and Union Alliances Act on 20 February 1947 in the midst of heated debate. The act would remain in effect with minimum amendments for the next sixteen years, and only undergo radical changes after the military takeover of governmental power. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on the three structural determinants of union bargaining power: the fragmented union structure, limited union finances, and leadership problems; the ban on political activity and international affiliations; and the absence of the right to strike and effective collective bargaining. The combination of these three factors would severely hamper the development of the union movement, leaving workers to their own devices on the shop floor.

4 Union Structure: Fragmentation, Finances, and Leadership

Figures show that trade union enrolment kept its momentum the second time around. In 1948, every sixth worker covered by social legislation was a member of a trade union, ten years later, this applied to every third worker. Between March 1949 and August 1952, the number of unions and unionised workers increased from some seventy unions with 75,000 members to some 211 unions with 173,000 members. In percentage terms, this meant that thirty-three per cent of all workers covered by the labour code—or just over twenty-five per cent of all industrial workers—were unionised in 1952, making Turkey the most unionised country in the Near and Middle East after Israel.⁸³ The number of trade unions increased significantly thereafter, with the establishment of multiple unions in a given branch or regional unit, and reached 354 in 1954.⁸⁴ More than one third of these unions catered for workers on the state railways and in the state monopoly administrations and other state enterprises.⁸⁵

Behind the high number of unions, however, lay a problem. The resulting “union inflation,” as the unionists called it, created small and local organisations with few members and little bargaining power.⁸⁶ By permitting an unlimited number of organisations in the same industrial branch and allowing membership of multiple organisations, the law encouraged rival unionism, which fragmented the trade union movement. Voluntary union membership was a strategy to prevent the formation of a union shop. Bianchi called this a “debilitating pluralism” that was hidden behind a “façade of associational freedom.” The government promoted a multitude of weak and manipulable organisations that were highly vulnerable to the retaliation of hostile governments. The associational regulations were so complex, limiting, and unclear that organisations inevitably violated them and had to seek refuge in political tutelage.⁸⁷

The Trade Union Act allowed the formation of unions by workers either in the same or related industries or practising the same craft in different industries, and extended the same right to employers. Local unions became the lowest level and the predominant form of organisation. Two types of local unions emerged. There were plant-based unions in the larger factories, and multi-shop unions formed where smaller workplaces were the rule. Where more than one union existed in a plant, there were no provisions for selecting one as the bargaining agent. The connection between workers’ representatives and unions was also ambivalent because the working relationship between the Trade Union Act and the Labour Code, which defined the mechanism of worker representation on the shop floor, remained unclear.⁸⁸

These local unions could then organise in their branches of activity by establishing federations on a regional or national basis, and they could also come together with local unions in different branches in the same urban or regional area as alliances (birliks).⁸⁹ In March 1948, several Istanbul labour unions representing different industries founded the Alliance of Istanbul Trade Unions (Istanbul İşçi Sendikaları Birliği). Associations in other cities followed; by the end of 1954 there were fourteen such groups across ten cities.⁹⁰ Regional organisation became the most common and influential form of union collaboration, while federations were less frequent. The relative merits of these two forms remained a seriously debated issue throughout the 1950s.

The Act did not define the scope and function of the alliances in precise terms, and in the absence of a confederation, the Istanbul Alliance acted more like a national rather than a regional organisation.⁹¹ Although the alliances did not have a direct role in the wage bargaining machinery, they were important urban political organisations. They attracted the most talented of the local union leaders, providing them with a forum to take the required steps to form nationwide confederations. In 1952, together with other national federations, alliances in large urban centres formed the Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions (Türk-İş), which would remain the country’s main labour organisation until the establishment of a second confederation in 1967.⁹²

Limited union finances were under strict governmental control. For one, the Ministry of Labour limited annual membership dues, restricting union freedom to increase the rate of dues and own property.⁹³ Checkoff was permitted in many of the state and large private plants, but not in smaller workplaces, resulting in periodic financial crises for many unions.⁹⁴ Employers would deduct the union dues from members’ wages and forward them to the Ministry of Labour, which then distributed them to the unions.⁹⁵ Union headquarters were nothing more than “one or two small rooms in the cheaper rent section of the city,” with the exception of some state factories where the management provided adequate space cheaply. But many such unions still preferred to rent smaller spaces on their own outside the factory to emphasise their independence.⁹⁶

Unionism was voluntary and limited in scope to manual workers because the Trade Union Act exclusively applied to those included within the definition of “worker” under the 1936 Labour Code, namely, “a person who performs work that is either exclusively manual or both manual and intellectual.” Purely intellectual workers could form associations under the Associations Act of 1938, but could not form or join trade unions.⁹⁷ Because of the legal restriction excluding white collar workers from union membership, union leaders were members of the working class.⁹⁸ According to a 1954 questionnaire, out of 251 union leaders, 139 were aged thirty-five or younger. Less than one fifth were born in cities with a major concentration of industrial activity. Their education level also tended to be quite low, with 150 union leaders having only attended primary school. They worked full time in their trade, which meant their union activities were limited to after-work hours. Only sixteen received a salary from their union, which, in any event, was a practice that did not begin until in 1950, meaning that they conducted union affairs “at considerable sacrifice of time and money.”⁹⁹ In a 1955 piece, one of these leaders, Bahir Ersoy, defined unionists in the 1940s as a mostly illiterate, inexperienced group of men who were exhausted due to continuous overtime work despite protective legislation.¹⁰⁰ “A rank-and-file leadership in every sense,” concluded American political economist Sumner Rosen, which made it quite difficult for these men to fulfil positions of authority in a society where prestige depended on education, occupation, age, and social origin.¹⁰¹

5 Parties and Politics in the Trade Union Movement

Responding largely to the short-lived but effective 1946 union movement, these two provisions located unions under strict government control. Union meetings could take place only under the close supervision of the Ministry of Labour. A union in Turkey could be suspended for between three and twelve months, or dissolved by the court, for any one of the various infringements of the law, such as engaging in political activity or resorting to strikes. “But what was the scope of political activity?” a prominent trade unionist wrote in 1955, arguing that the intentional ambiguity of the definition gave rise to tightened state control over trade unions.¹⁰² Parliamentary discussions over the Trade Union Act supported this interpretation, during which it was understood that struggles over the working day and wages were political in nature.¹⁰³ Both the chp and the dp governments exploited the legislative ambiguity around the concept to steer the trade union movement away from dissident political action, as well as to mobilise it for their own political purposes. Union demands to repeal the ban on political activity fell on deaf ears until the 1960s, and both the chp and the dp governments refused to permit international union affiliations.¹⁰⁴ In 1967, one of the founders of the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (Devrimci İşçi Sendikaları-disk) criticised the more moderate Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions for holding onto “an idea that exists neither in underdeveloped areas, nor in Europe—that of keeping above party politics.”¹⁰⁵

In his comprehensive book on the development of Turkey’s trade unions, Aziz Çelik argues that apolitical trade unionism resulted from the country’s internal dynamics, and was not simply a result of external influence, in particular from the United States.¹⁰⁶ While there may not have been any direct influence, there were certainly two interrelated global developments that helped the chp to steer the nascent movement in the direction of trade union reformism. First, following the rapid and often violent development of trade unions in colonial contexts in the 1930s, colonial officials and trade unionists collaborated in guiding the emerging trade unions along “responsible lines.” Underscored by a motivation to cut any possible links between the trade unions and the independence movements, this strategy was institutionalised by the end of the Second World War.¹⁰⁷ “Responsible trade unionism” had already been established as a term by the time the chp was insisting on apolitical trade unionism. Second, the formative years of Turkish trade unionism coincided with the splitting of the wftu. In the wake of the breakup of the wftu, primarily over the Marshall Plan, and the eventual formation of the icftu in 1949, Turkey became an even more strategic arena for both organisations. Fearing “a highly possible Soviet breakthrough in the Near East [that] might open three continents to Soviet penetration,” the United States government perceived Turkey as the first line of defence, and allocated large amounts of aid and military funding to the country.¹⁰⁸ The growing American influence in the country also boosted anti-communist sentiment, including the proletarian variant, as we shall see below.

While labour unions were banned from engaging in politics, political propaganda, or publishing political views, they remained vulnerable to party control. The state had created a framework in which, in the face of legal ambiguities and state repression, unions depended on the support of local politicians, and because the government controlled the finances, they depended on the ruling party financially.¹⁰⁹ The chp monitored trade union developments on the ground, especially in mines and state factories. In some cases, advisors from the party handed out exemplary trade union charters to workers, who then became union founders and managers. In the end, many trade unions ended up with suspiciously similar charters.¹¹⁰ The directors of state factories played an active role in this first phase. At the Paşabahçe Glassware Factory, for example, the director summoned twenty head foreman and declared them the founders of the trade union.¹¹¹

Labour journalist and later trade unionist Kemal Sülker reported hesitance among workers to join trade unions because the events of 1946 had bred strong distrust for the government. The chp established a Workers Bureau under auspices of the Istanbul branch of the party, and appointed Rebii Barkın, the deputy of Zonguldak, the mining region, together with Sabahattin Selek, a resigned military officer, as official labour deputies. The bureau played an active role in the establishment of trade unions in 1947. In Istanbul alone, it was behind the founding of sixteen trade unions. Bureau officers published the trade union newspaper Hürbilek (Free Wrist), joined trade union administrative meetings, spoke at general assemblies, and allocated funds to unions, including the Bakırköy Textile Workers Trade Union in September 1947.¹¹²

The government also launched its own network of unions, which it later subsumed under the Alliance of Istanbul Labour Unions (İstanbul İşçi Sendikaları Birliği) in 1948.¹¹³ Discontent over party control of the movement was simmering. In January 1949, for example, the chair of the Istanbul Textile Workers Union (Istanbul Mensucat İşçileri Sendikası), whose predecessor, the Eyüp Textile Workers Union (Eyüp Mensucat İşçileri Sendikası), did not join the chp-founded labour union alliance, summarised the suspicions and hesitations over the Workers Bureau activities. “We had long discussions whether the establishment of trade unions by the bureau could really benefit us, the workers,” he said, and arrived at the conviction that “a trade union that was not founded and managed by the workers themselves could not benefit the workers.” The lack of finances and experience made it difficult to establish independent unions, he continued, but Istanbul textile workers did manage to found their own union in October 1947. The real difficulty, however, began only after that, because, lacking legal knowledge and organisational experience, the union faltered for a long time.¹¹⁴

In February 1950, dissident unionists left the Alliance of Istanbul Labour Unions to establish the dp-supported Alliance of Free Labour Unions (Hür İşçi Sendikaları Birliği). Prior to 1950, political differences had led to a split among regional organisations in Istanbul, but in the 1950s, splinter groups divided along political rivalries were formed in three of the other regional organisations.¹¹⁵ The escalating rivalry between the chp and the dp resulted in divisions among individual unions as well as union organisations into partisan cliques.¹¹⁶ Such was the background of the heated Bakırköy Textile Workers Trade Union meeting that ended with Enver’s dismissal. But his political affiliation resided outside the rivalry between the ruling party and the main opposition.

Enver Tenşi had been born in 1914 in Sliven, southeast Bulgaria, directly after the Balkan Wars had deprived the Ottoman Empire of almost all its remaining territory in Europe.¹¹⁷ The Tenşi family migrated to Edirne, Turkey, where Enver’s father, Mehmet, opened a confectionery shop (see Figure 26). Until 1934, Enver lived in Edirne, studying at the vocational school and helping out in his father’s business. He then left the town for his first factory job at the Alpullu Sugar Factory, some seventy kilometres away from the family home. In 1937, he crossed to the other side of the Marmara Sea to work at the Gemlik Artificial Silk Factory, another state enterprise. He met his wife, an émigré from Romania, around this time. Three years of military service followed the marriage. From 1941 onward, he lived and worked in Bakırköy. He grew so fond of the neighbourhood that after his retirement from the Bakırköy Factory, he founded a neighbourhood protection association. During the twenty-nine years he worked at the factory, Enver received praise from his supervisors for his diligence and discipline. It took him less than a year to get promoted from a weaver-helper to foreman. His two children, born in 1940 and 1952, remember watching him trying to construct or repair looms in the factory workshop after working hours, and complain in a bittersweet way that he did not allow himself or others to sit still even for a moment. An incident from 1952 supports their recollection. Enver became furious when his vice-foreman, Halim, gave permission to a female worker to take a break without consulting him first. Accused of lax discipline, Halim blew his fuse, and swore at and beat Enver until he lost consciousness.¹¹⁸

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Enver Tenşi with his father, 1936

courtesy of the tenşİ family

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Enver’s energetic and vocal personality was not confined to his work. We have seen above that he was one of the nine founders of the Bakırköy Cloth Factory Workers Trade Union in 1946. By that time, he had already joined a political party, and he even ran as a candidate in the July 1946 local elections.¹¹⁹ Interestingly, his choice was not the main opposition party, but a much smaller one. At a party meeting in May 1948, Enver criticised the main opposition: “What did the dp, which has [a similar] programme to the chp, do so far? Nothing!”¹²⁰ His choice seems even stranger if we consider his employment. Enver was a state worker, but the National Development Party (Milli Kalkınma Partisi, hereafter the mkp) he joined was fiercely anti-etatist.¹²¹

The first opposition party in Turkey after the Second World War, the mkp had been established by Nuri Demirağ, a rich Istanbul industrialist, in July 1945 (see Figure 27). The party was also known as the “Lamb Party” because in every city he visited, Demirağ would pay for the ritual slaughtering of a lamb and throw lavish feasts.¹²² Demirağ’s business career offers a glimpse into how the turbulent political economy of the era affected private investors. Born in a small central Anatolian town in 1886 and orphaned at the age of three, Demirağ began his career as a civil servant at the Bank of Agriculture when he was seventeen. After climbing the bureaucratic ladder during the last years of the empire, he resigned from his position in the treasury, allegedly due to being insulted by the non-Muslim minorities in his office when Istanbul came under British invasion. He started out manufacturing cigarette paper, and branded his product “Turkish Victory,” a bold choice of name given the political landscape of the times. After the state monopolised the tobacco industry, Demirağ moved into international trade, and then invested in the expanding railway network. The surname Demirağ, which translates as “Iron Web,” was a reference to his railway business.¹²³ In the 1930s, he developed a passion for the air industry and established an aircraft factory. By the end of the decade, he fell into a series of conflicts with the leader of the chp, İsmet İnönü, and had to give up on his investments in the air industry. In his eyes, his private business had fallen prey to etatism, hence the mkp’s stern opposition to state involvement in the economy.¹²⁴

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Enver Tenşi with Nuri Demirağ, c. 1950

courtesy of the tenşİ family

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The party appealed to workers’ votes in 1946 by distributing a leaflet titled “Worker Rights that the mkp will Gift to the Country,” and found considerable support at the Bakırköy Factory.¹²⁵ In 1947, Enver became the head of the Bakırköy branch of the party, which had 431 members by the following year.¹²⁶ He also wrote for the party’s weekly newspaper, Tez Kalkınma (Fast Development). Whenever he did not give his name, he would sign off as “a worker who lives in Bakırköy and works at the Sümerbank Bakırköy Factory and who is a member of the textile trade union.” In these pieces, Enver mostly described the tensions on the factory shop floor and the problems of trade unionism.¹²⁷

On 2 July 1948, Enver reported on a series of violent events at the factory, including physical fights and broken windows. The latest incident involved a chief, Niyazi, who had been trained in the Soviet Union. According to Enver, Niyazi could come and go as he pleased, and used the resources at the factory workshop for the maintenance of his private car. Although the situation was reported to the management, the workers on the factory payroll continued to attend to Niyazi’s car. When a young head foreman, İhsan, refused to work on his car, Niyazi slapped and swore at the head foreman. İhsan took the matter to the management, who simply disregarded it.¹²⁸

In September 1948, eight days before the tumultuous trade union meeting that opened this chapter, Tez Kalkınma published a letter by Enver. In his harsh critique of the Bakırköy Textile Workers Trade Union, Enver first notes the low rate of unionisation in the neighbourhood. Of the more than two thousand workers at Bakırköy, the union managed to organise only about three hundred. Some of these members, he goes on, were enrolled by the bosses and “the chiefs,” by which Enver means the chp officers, and these members did nothing more than inform the party about union discussions. The union needs “honest, decent, selfless, and independent leaders,” Enver concluded, and it was probably this closing line that offended the union management most.¹²⁹

It appears to be at the famous trade union meeting that the seething tensions between the mkp and the chp finally surfaced. Published by two prominent figures in the chp’s Workers Bureau, Rebii Barkın and Sebahattin Selek, the trade union newspaper Hürbilek described the assembly as an “exciting” meeting attended by the majority of the members.¹³⁰ Tez Kalkınma, on the contrary, claimed that there were only seventy members present, thirty of which had just joined the union that day. To solve the union’s financial crisis, a member suggested that the union dues should be collected by the factory. The letter in Tez Kalkınma was fiercely critical of this suggestion, as well as the discussion over establishing a workers’ bureau in the factory, claiming that the management and the chp were slowly building a “yellow union.”

Next on the meeting agenda was Enver’s accusations. According to Hürbilek, the confrontation at that moment could scarcely have been more divisive. On one side was Enver and his allegations against the union management. Opposing him were the entire union conglomeration and the guest participants from other textile unions. Provoking a “storm” of loud exclamations and discordant noises from the members, Enver’s allegations united the otherwise divided assembly. The verbal contest that ensued was sharp and, at times, almost nasty, and it demonstrated how trade union politics could stoke tensions on the shop floor. For example, Enver had verbally accused two members of the union management of working for the factory management. When confronted, he explained that he suspected them because they had been promoted unusually quickly. The members applauded to show their support for the two accused, and Enver was thrown out of the clubhouse. Defeated and insulted, Enver refused to give up. He penned another piece for Tez Kalkınma the following month. “With its Barkıns and Seleks,” he wrote, referring to the two directors of the chp Workers Bureau, the government “is trying to control the unions” for electoral benefit. But its efforts had backfired, he claimed; the workers knew that their interest in the unions was far from sincere, and they refused to join what he called “the chp’s trade unions.”¹³¹

As we saw in the introduction to this chapter, ganging up on Enver did not succeed in soothing the tensions neither on the shop floor nor in the trade union. We will return to this briefly but we should first follow Enver through the eventful days preceding the 1950 general election, “the happy day on which the national will manifest itself,” to borrow Enver’s words. He announced his candidacy “as a worker citizen” in a public letter addressed to his “self-sacrificing and patriotic fellow workers,” and fiercely criticised the conditions of the industrial working class.¹³² He described their slave-like status at their workplaces, their dreadful health and housing conditions, the lack of educational opportunities for working-class children, and the calamity in which working-class families found themselves. Those who appealed to workers’ votes by bringing their problems up in the runup to the election, he claimed, would forget about them just as soon as they made it to Ankara; “only workers could represent workers.” But how could they do this when the accusation of communism hung above their heads like a sword of Damocles?

With this remark, Enver’s fierce critique reached its limits. He resorted to the by now familiar tropes of the dedicated nationalist and sacrificial citizen, drawing on the prevailing notions of the regime’s master narrative. He had already made nationalist remarks at the beginning of his letter, when he introduced himself as a proud Turkish worker who was carrying out his “sacred military duty,” or when he described Turkish workers as “the most self-sacrificing, patriotic, and benevolent workers in the world.” When he referred to communism, however, he took things to the next level, arguing that “there is not a single communist among Turkish workers and there can never be.” The motivation behind such unfounded allegations directed at workers was to “condemn them to live in fear and suspicion.” A nationalist working-class parliamentary representation was the solution, and the mkp provided exactly that, Enver reassured his readers, before he signed off the letter: “Working and striving from us, blessings from God.”

Enver was an outsider amid the fierce competition between the government and the main opposition that pervaded the entire social arena, including union politics. But he very much subscribed to the main tenets of Kemalism, much like the unionists Rosen met in the 1950s. “Turkey’s union leaders, all of whom are workers,” Rosen wrote, “share the fervent nationalism that Atatürk gave his people, and expend considerable energy demonstrating their rejection of communism and class warfare.” They have wholeheartedly accepted the premises of society and their role in it.¹³³ He met only a few union officers who called themselves “socialists,” and even then, they meant socialism “in the gradualist tradition of the British Labour Party.” He had clearly never met Ahmet.

6 What Are Trade Unions For?

After four long years, Ahmet walked out of the military barracks in Ankara for the last time into the cold, snowy winter. His initial idea was to go to the state iron and steel plant in Karabük, but from his previous experience, he knew finding a job would be difficult during this season. He then headed to Zonguldak to work in the mechanical workshop of a coal mine, where he earned almost thirty per cent more than a miner. It was during this time that he first heard of occupational disease insurance. He had no idea what it meant, and neither did the foreman he approached. He concluded that miners were “a backward bunch” compared with textile workers, and decided to leave. He became the ninetieth member of the Bakırköy Textile Workers Trade Union when he joined in September 1947 (see Figure 28).

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Ahmet (second from the right in the front row) in front of the Bakırköy Textile Workers Trade Union, c. 1949

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It was remarks like this that pushed workers away from the government, according to Ahmet. Around the same time, Ahmet attended a meeting of the Alliance of Istanbul Trade Unions, where he heard Fuat Köprülü, another dp founder, likening a trade union without the right to strike to an army without weapons, and promising to grant it as soon as the party came to power.¹³⁴ In its defence of the strike ban, the chp once again referred to etatism and the unique nature of Turkish industrialisation. The Turkish state had caught up with early industrialisers, policymakers claimed, in terms of welfare provision and social protections without workers’ having to strike.¹³⁵ The Democrats criticised the ban on strikes, blaming the chp for not believing in the workers’ political maturity, and appealed to union support by promising to legalise strikes.¹³⁶ Ahmet was convinced; he joined the main opposition party. It was shortly after this that the trade union meeting discussed at the beginning of this chapter took place, where Ahmet raised the profoundly simple question: What are trade unions for?¹³⁷

We had left İhsan Önaslan, in September 1948, crying with relief after Enver had been thrown out of the union meeting. Seven months later, he has resigned as union chair and we meet him describing what it was like to be a unionist in the 1940s: “There is not a single worker among us who could serve the trade union more than one day in the week, because we all had to work at least six days a week to provide for ourselves and our families.” Over approximately seven months, İhsan continued, executive committee members devoted twenty-eight days to union activities, sacrificing the time they needed for rest and for their families. Above, I quoted both local and foreign observers on the leadership structure in the trade unions and the problems it generated. İhsan was only one of those workers who took on union duties on top of full-time work. He had a hard time living on the wage he earned from his full-time work, and he was searching for work in the private sector, where, he claimed, he would earn more. According to three petitions he filed between 1946 and 1962, İhsan “could barely provide for his family of six and lived in hardship” and thought he “would earn much more outside.” At no point did İhsan, the union chair, appeal to his union for support in dealing with the factory management. One could hardly find more striking evidence of how legislation—more specifically the continuance of compulsory arbitration—hampered the development of trade unions.

Until 1950, the role of the trade unions in the arbitration process was limited to submitting their views and offering suggestions to solve the dispute. Although the Trade Union Act authorised trade unions to negotiate and sign collective bargains on behalf of their members, in practical terms trade unions were bound hand and foot. The act did not stipulate restrictions on an employer refusing to recognise his employees’ union as the representative of his employees or refusing to negotiate with the union concerning the conditions of employment. Labour unions thus lacked the special legislative protection they needed, especially in the absence of the right to strike.¹³⁸

Two factors precluded the unions from representing their members in negotiating collective conditions of employment. The first concerned the institution of a workers’ representative introduced by the 1936 Labour Code. Between 1936 and 1946, when the government had legalised trade unions, only ten cases of wage disputes reached the central arbitration board through the workers’ representatives.¹³⁹ After the enactment of the Trade Union Act, the existing system of representation substantially precluded the trade unions from the vital activity of representing their members in negotiating collective conditions of employment. Furthermore, because the office of workers’ representatives existed independently of the employee organisations, union participation in dispute settlement was kept at a minimum and the role accorded to organised labour in channelling and managing worker protest was very limited. Unions had no role in selecting workers’ representatives to participate in the deliberations, which precluded them from representing their members in negotiating collective conditions of employment. A kind of dual representation emerged at the workplace level, where the unions had to compete with non-union representatives as well as the rival unions created by the employers.¹⁴⁰ The chp also intervened in the election of workers’ representatives.¹⁴¹ From the very beginning, workers protested at these interventions and demanded that their representatives be union members, but both governments turned a deaf ear to their complaints.¹⁴² Second, neither the Associations Act nor the Trade Union Act contained adequate provisions to protect union members from discharge or other discriminatory treatment.¹⁴³ In contrast, the labour code permitted employers to terminate a contract of employment with notice and upon payment of compensation. “A period of discharges follows every union congress,” wrote Bahir Ersoy in 1955.¹⁴⁴

Two developments in 1950 strengthened labour’s hand to some extent. First, labour courts were transformed into tripartite tribunals.¹⁴⁵ The Labour Courts Act granted trade unions a clear function in labour-management relations for the first time, in that they could file lawsuits to these courts.¹⁴⁶ Second, an amendment to the labour code conceded limited authority to trade unions to initiate disputes on the condition that they have as members a majority of the workers employed in the enterprise concerned and that one fifth (a minimum of ten) of the total number of employees in the enterprise had submitted a written request. In the 1950s, a large proportion of the arbitrated disputes were submitted through this means. Still, trade unions did not have the power to establish a pattern of direct relations with employers; workers’ representatives had enough authority to present grievances but not enough to bargain on them; trade union influence over employment conditions remained limited to providing advisory opinions to the courts and arbitration board.¹⁴⁷

Another amendment in 1954 provided for direct representation of workers’ and employers’ organisations on arbitral bodies.¹⁴⁸ By the mid-1950s, collective agreements negotiated by trade unions were still very few in number. In its reply to an International Labour Organization survey in 1956, the government claimed that the awards of the arbitration boards should be “looked upon as a form of collective agreement,” adding that at the same time it was preparing a bill concerning collective agreements.¹⁴⁹ Collective agreements were rare until the recognition of the right to strike in 1963, rendering the individual contract the main instrument regulating the employment relationship. İhsan’s choice to keep his wage grievance separate from his union leadership was but one manifestation of the individualisation of industrial relations.

Why and how did trade unions turn into mutual aid societies? A prominent unionist argued that workers joined unions for material and non-material benefits, and not because they believed in the cause of the labour movement.¹⁵¹ The labour code permitted the transfer of workers’ fines to solidarity funds, which are established by trade unions to be used for social benefit. Given workers’ low wages, this strategy was successful in recruiting union members. Employers also supported unions’ spending their money on social benefits because, first, this saved them fringe benefit expenses, and second, it meant that unions could not save for “the time when workers finally have consciousness.” The reduction of trade union activities to those of a mutual aid society, Ersoy argued, acted like a drug on workers.¹⁵²

An incident that happened couple months before Ahmet’s protest at the union meeting supports Ersoy’s critique. Interestingly, this incident was quite similar to Ahmet’s first experience of worker resistance during the war. On 30 December 1948, seventy-three weavers failed to show up for the night shift, and were later fined a day’s wage. The union, the director proudly reported, managed to get these workers “forgiven” on the condition that they would work on a holiday to make up for the lost working hours. Only nineteen weavers stuck to their promise when the day came. The archive is silent on the reasons behind this incident. But two things are as clear as day. First, shop-floor industrial relations were quite tense, as reported by both Enver and Ahmet. Second, between the first work stoppage during the war and this incident in 1948, trade union involvement had not changed much, because the union’s role was limited to pleading to the management. Third, workers did not follow the union, as seen from the weavers’ reaction to the union’s “solution.”

The meeting concluded with the election of the new union administration, which promoted Ahmet to the position of deputy chair. By this time, Ahmet was also head of the Bakırköy branch of the dp. He went on to become the chief workers’ representative in 1951, and shortly after that he came head-to-head with the head foreman of the weaving department, who reported that Ahmet had threatened him in front of two weavers: “Let these friends be witness; from now, if you carry out unfair practices or wrongdoing here, I will take legal action. Similarly, if you report any worker or cause anyone to be fired, I will take legal action.” Four days later, the chief of the main production units reported the incident to management, and claimed that Ahmet was using his status as union deputy chair to intervene in the management of the weaving department. He left his loom unattended, the chief claimed, and would engage in public fights with the foremen and head foremen, which was having a negative influence on workers and ruining workplace discipline. Five days later, Ahmet received an official warning from the factory director. His behaviour was contrary to both trade union law and the factory rules and regulations; he would be fired if he continued to disrespect his supervisors. And for the first time in a shop-floor conflict at the factory, the trade union intervened.

In November 1951, the union petitioned the factory. Referring to the Trade Union Act and factory regulations, the union refuted the factory management’s claim that Ahmet’s behaviour was unlawful and demanded that the warning be revoked. Because the management had built its case on the rejection of Ahmet’s claim to authority, the union petition began by establishing Ahmet’s status as the deputy chairman and workers’ representative, while defending his right to intervene in worker-management relations on the shop floor on behalf of workers. The correspondence ended with a short note from the factory management jotted on the union petition: “The management does not deem it necessary to reply.” The case was closed. But Ahmet continued to challenge the factory management—even more strongly because his political views were changing after the dp’s first year in power.

Once in government, the dp backpedalled from its campaign promise to legalise strikes, and switched to an anti-strike stance in June 1951.¹⁵³ During discussions on labour issues at a party congress two years later, Ahmet took to the stage to criticise the party’s labour policy and publicly resigned “in front of the ministers,” unaware of the high price he would pay for this protest. By then, dp supporters had gained power on the shop floor, or, rather, those who already had power had become government supporters. Ahmet lost the workers’ representatives elections. But more importantly, he was kicked out of the factory housing cooperative that he had jointly founded.

After the meeting, Ahmet’s political route would take yet another turn. Having heard Ahmet’s critique of the dp, a lawyer, Orhan Arsal, approached Ahmet. Arsal, together with three trade unionist workers, had established a political party in October 1950.¹⁵⁴ Arsal had decided to establish a new party after falling out with the dp, and aptly named the party the Democrat Labour Party (Demokrat İşçi Partisi, hereafter the dİp).¹⁵⁵ The party shared Ahmet’s disappointment in the dp’s labour policy. The Democrat Labour Party vice-chairman called 14 May, the day the dp had come to power, “the day of betrayal of the workers,” and accused the government of forgetting about workers after “stealing [their] votes.”¹⁵⁶ He fiercely criticised party controls on organised labour, and claimed that it had created yellow trade unions in which union aristocracy benefited under political party tutelage, and went so far as to prohibiting party members from joining unions.¹⁵⁷ This critique did not appeal to workers. In 1952 the party had only six hundred members, and it disbanded in August 1955.

Ahmet did not elaborate on his decision to join the Democrat Labour Party. In the end, this was a brief interlude in his political life for he could not find his political match here either. Ahmet left the party because he did not believe that Arsal was sufficiently committed to the cause of labour. This short-lived encounter is revealing of the complex political world surrounding Ahmet during his politicisation, with personal connections playing an important role in this process. It was one such connection that would shape Ahmet’s next political affiliation and form a bridge between 1946 unionism with that of the 1950s.

Without explaining how, when, and where they had met, Ahmet mentioned an enamel worker, Şükrü, who had been active in the 1946 union movement. A “class-conscious worker” in Ahmet’s words, Şükrü “woke us up,” Ahmet said, meaning that he taught Ahmet and others what unions were actually for. He also did something else that would change the course of Ahmet’s life forever: he introduced Ahmet to Hikmet Kıvılcımlı, a communist theoretician who had been one of the leading cadres of the illegal Communist Party of Turkey in the 1920s. When Ahmet met him in 1953 or 1954, he was fresh out of prison, where he had spent almost twenty years of the previous three decades.

Ahmet was now a communist. But what did it really mean to be a communist in the mid-1950s? A month after coming to power, the dp government conducted a raid on the Society of the Friends of Peace, the Turkish branch of the international peace front that had organic ties with the political traditions of the tkp. Because the Society objected to Turkey’s participation in the Korean War, the government jailed its members on charges of spreading communism. In 1951, the dp government modified the criminal code to increase the penalty for “communist activity.” A wave of arrests on charges of membership in the underground communist party followed, and a total of 167 workers, intellectuals, and professionals were brought to trial for spreading communism. One of these defendants, the leader of the communist movement since the 1920s, Şefik Hüsnü Deymer, was given a prison sentence of over five years, and died in internal exile.¹⁵⁸ Kıvılcımlı was able to avoid this wave of arrests because he had only just come out of prison in 1950 after spending the last twelve years incarcerated. The persecution of leftist activists continued along with authoritarian legislation with severe penalties, such as the 1954 Press Law (Neşir Yoluyla Veya Radyo İle İşlenecek Bazı Cürümler Hakkındaki Kanun) and the 1956 Law of Meetings and Demonstrations (Toplantılar ve Gösteri Yürüyüşleri Hakkında Kanun), continued for the rest of the decade. The repression of independent labour organisation remained a constant from the single to the multi-party period.

Despite increasing repression and the ongoing prohibition on strikes, labour protests continued. Strikes took place in Istanbul, Izmir, Ankara, Mersin, and other cities in 1951 and 1952. Port workers also went on strike in Iskenderun and Izmit in 1953 and 1954. In addition to economic demands, workers had political demands such as the abolition of the anti-democratic labour legislation and the expansion of trade union rights. In 1953, a year before the parliamentary elections, the tables had turned when the right to strike made it into the programme of the opposition party, the chp.¹⁵⁹ The dp, on the other hand, stuck to its no-strike policy and expanded state paternalism by increasing fringe benefits for rank-and-file while criminalising union activity.¹⁶⁰ Although Turkey had ratified the ilo’s 1949 Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention in 1951, the government maintained the restrictions on strikes.

Labour anti-communism also remained strong (see Figure 29). In fact, the trade union movement played a role in shaping the distinctive character of postwar domestic anti-communism through the development of their own discourses of communist infiltration and subversion. Trade unions organised anti-communist rallies, and whenever a worker would mention that such rallies were against the ban on unions to engage in political activity, others would attack and insult him, arguing that being an anti-communist had nothing to do with politics; it was a national duty.¹⁶¹ The public hysteria found its strongest expression in a biological discourse built on blood, germs, and contagious diseases. Trade unions used biological metaphors that claimed “the microbe of communism” could not “live in the noble blood in his veins.” Unionists used the word “Turkish” almost always in an ethnic sense, suggesting that the ethnicised body of the Turkish worker was full of antibodies to combat communism.¹⁶²

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“We are the enemy of communism,” Aydın branch of the Textile, Knitting, and Clothing Industry Workers’ Union (Türkiye Tekstil, Örme, Giyim ve Deri Sanayi İşçileri Sendikası, TEKSİF), c. 1955IISH KEMAL SÜLKER PAPERS, BG A63/90

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Tensions intensified on the shop floor, too. In the interviews given in the 1980s, some trade unionists explained how party membership provided protection for workers against accusations of communism.¹⁶³ However, it could also trigger such accusations, since the war against communism was also embroiled in partisan hostility. A dp-supporting worker from the Defterdar Factory sent a complaint to labour journalist Kemal Sülker, reporting the mistreatment he had suffered at the hands of chp-affiliated foremen and engineers. He wore his party badge with pride on the shop floor, he wrote, but the foremen and engineers kept accusing him of communism.¹⁶⁴ To be accused of being a communist in those days, remembered Bahir Ersoy, was akin to being accused of being a national traitor, or even a Soviet spy, and made it extremely difficult for the unionists to communicate with the public.¹⁶⁵

But perhaps most shockingly, the pent-up shop-floor tensions at the Bakırköy Factory culminated in “a mysterious murder” in March 1952.¹⁶⁶ The series of events that led to three gunshots portray a vivid picture of the political pressures on the shop floor. A twenty-eight-year-old engineer, İhsan, had just returned from the United States, where he had been on a six-month training course on a grant from the Marshall Plan (see Figure 30). He shot another young engineer, Fethi, three times while the two men were having an early lunch in the factory canteen. Nobody witnessed the incident, and by the time the waiters had arrived at the crime scene, Fethi was already dead. İhsan had run out to the back of the factory to jump into the Marmara Sea, but a doorman caught him. He then succumbed to silence, refusing to answer questions from either the police or his family.

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İhsan Aydın leaving for the United States with a big send-off from his family and factory personnel, c. 1951

courtesy of ergİn aygöl

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People had different theories about the murder motive. Some thought the two men had a common love interest. Some others said that it was because Ferit earned more than İhsan even though İhsan was more qualified as an engineer. Months later, İhsan spoke for the first time in court. Before he had left for the United States, life at the factory had become almost unbearable for him, he said, complaining of two groups at the factory: the communists and the slanderers. Despite his clean past and good intentions, the slanderers had been provoking him. He had been blamed for several cases of arson and sabotage. Then they tried to turn workers against him. Finally, “they painted hammer and sickle and wrote ‘Long live communism!’ on the walls near my office, and blamed it on me,” he claimed. The period he referred to was the time of the communist arrests. On the witness stand, the factory director, Şefkati Türkekul, confirmed that the factory management had indeed been trying to weed out the communists in the factory to no avail. A group of employees, including Fethi, had wanted to smear his name because they were jealous, İhsan concluded, and he could not stand it anymore.

Such was the world on and outside the shop floor when Ahmet decided to join Kıvılcımlı in establishing a new communist party. On 22 October 1954, Ahmet was one of the founders, and the first chair, of the Homeland Party (Vatan Partisi). After twenty days, he left his seat to Kıvılcımlı at the first party general assembly. Textile workers made up the majority of the party membership, Ahmet noted. The party was not very well organised, but it was active in Taşlıtarla and Zeytinburnu in Istanbul, as well as Izmit and Izmit. In the 1957 general elections, Ahmet announced his candidacy. By then, he was no longer working at the Bakırköy Factory; a new phase of his life had started, one characterised by police surveillance and state violence.

7 The Arrest

On 4 January 1955, while he was on leave to take care of his family after the death of a family member, Ahmet was arrested “on the basis of false allegations,” in his words. He had just returned to Istanbul after a visit to his hometown, and was looking for a fountain pen a fellow villager had ordered when an undercover police officer approached and asked Ahmet to follow him to the police station. The police officer questioned him about a speech he had given at a trade union meeting. He referred to Ahmet’s mentioning the worker struggles in Europe and the United States for the eight-hour working day, and that the socialist labour parties backed these struggles. Communist parties were in European parliaments, Ahmet had continued, arguing that it was time for the same to happen in Turkey. And there he was at the police station being interrogated for communist propaganda.

The factory management annulled Ahmet’s contract immediately after his arrest. In June 1955, after his acquittal, he petitioned the factory, demanding to return to his job. The response was negative: the factory did not need weavers. With this, Ahmet’s personnel file enters into twelve years of silence, during which time he is unable to secure stable employment. The last document in his file dates back to 1967, when Ahmet made one last attempt to be recruited. He mentions numerous unsuccessful applications he had made to the factory since 1955, and that he had been unemployed for a long time. The response was again negative.

Two years later, after a speech given by Kıvılcımlı in Eyüp in the wake of the 1957 snap elections, the dp arrested thirty-eight party members, including Ahmet (see Figure 31). The police tortured them; one of them heard Ahmet begging for water when the police brutally inflicted bastinado on him.¹⁶⁷ After two years of imprisonment, all members were acquitted and released. The party would exist only on paper afterward. In the 1960s, Ahmet joined the Labour Party of Turkey (Türkiye İşçi Partisi). Established in 1961 by progressive labour union leaders, the Labour Party of Turkey has been the largest and most durable of legal socialist parties in Turkey. Ahmet never got his job back at the Bakırköy Factory, and he died a communist.

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Ahmet Cansızoğlu in prison with Hikmet Kıvılcımlı and other Homeland Party members, c. 1957

TÜRKİYE SOSYAL TARİH ARAŞTIRMA VAKFI ARŞİVİ

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While Ahmet was experiencing these turbulent times, things were looking stable for Enver. The mkp remained small and ineffective, and finally dissolved in 1958.¹⁶⁸ By then, Enver had already joined the dp. But the dp was also fast approaching its end. Turkey’s first military coup d’état happened on 27 May 1960, when the Turkish armed forces overthrew the Democrat Party government and arrested all of its leaders. At the end of the trials, four received death penalties, and three were ultimately hanged. One of the many accusations they faced was inciting the people against the chp leader, İsmet İnönü, in May 1959. On 18 August 1960, Enver was arrested on the factory grounds and charged with taking part in the attack. He spent a month in prison, was acquitted, and returned to his job at the Bakırköy Factory (see Figure 32).

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Enver Tenşi in front of the prison, c. 1960

courtesy of tenşİ family

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8 Conclusion

The end of the Second World War ushered in political pluralisation in Turkey. Already shaken during the war years, the chp’s hegemonic grip soon weakened in the postwar period. With the end of the single-party era, labour became a political category, and political leaders began to pursue the option of mobilising workers as a political base far more extensively than before. Beside the simmering tensions in the workplace, workers found themselves in the midst of rapidly escalating political rivalry and an unexpectedly fast-growing and potentially militant union activity. The repeal of the ban on class-based association brought the undercurrents of leftist politics to the surface, making it clear that trade unions could not be allowed to grow unchecked. The challenge, then, was to develop an alternative that would allow the trade union movement to develop within the confines of acceptable bounds that would pose a threat to neither Kemalist political rule nor industrial productivity. By the time the founding party made a move to incorporate the working class into the national political arena, the effort was too little, too late.

Albeit lacking in actual numbers and fervent strength, the potential threat of the communist labour movement shaped the course of labour policy. Trade unionists operated on slippery ground that was constantly being reshaped by two sets of forces. On the one side was the political expansion of citizenship as an enabling force. On the other side were the quickly developing Cold War tensions in the furthest geographical outpost of the non-communist world. As communism became a popular smear word, the trade union movement had to put a foot on the brakes to protect itself from state repression and strong proletarian anti-communism. Furthermore, the absence of strikes and strong collective bargaining, the fragmented nature of unions, and the prohibition on union involvement in politics and its abuses all seriously hindered the growth of effective unionism. These three elements working together made wage and employment negotiations specific and confidential. Workers were left with little recourse for their complaints because the individual contract continued to be the only method used to determine wages.

In this chapter, I followed two Bakırköy Factory workers whose life experiences reflected the tumult of the 1940s and 1950s. Their life stories gave human form to these macrostructural developments, and depict a political atmosphere that was at once chaotic and dangerous, and exciting and hopeful. Their stories also demonstrate the dynamic and processual nature of working-class political identity as an outcome of everyday material and discursive social practices. Both Enver and Ahmet were dissidents who challenged the government and its control over the trade unions, but their political paths diverged completely. While Enver stayed within the hegemonic boundaries of Kemalist nationalism and its authorised discourses, Ahmet gradually became radicalised and became a communist. Both workers ended up in prison at some point in their lives, a commonality that is evidence of the precarious character of working-class politics. But, while Enver’s one-month imprisonment in 1960 did not alter the course of his life, Ahmet would pay the price for his politics with a life-long struggle just to get by.

No matter how precarious, subordinated, and controlled they were in most cases, trade unions were not the mouthpiece of the state. Conflicting class interests and organisational alternatives did exist but they were frozen until the mid-1960s within the labour movement. By the end of the 1940s, the existence of workers as a social and political force was confirmed. Their existence deeply influenced the politics and, indeed, the whole of society in the following decades. A factory consciousness developed during these years, which played an important role in the privileging of the industrial workplace as a site of class struggle. The foresight of Ersoy in the mid-1950s is striking. Worker education, he said, is the principal job of the trade union until conditions make it possible for unions to actually advance workers’ rights. The union’s role, he said, will be performed “tomorrow, not today.”¹⁶⁹ In 1954, thirty-eight out of forty-nine union leaders supported Ersoy’s observation by responding in the negative to the question as to whether one party was clearly more favourable to the unions.¹⁷⁰ But the highly anticipated change was not realised when the old dissidents became the new rulers.

Yet “tomorrow” arrived faster than expected. The trade unions began to play an increasingly important political role after the military takeover in May 1960, and especially after the adoption of the liberal 1961 constitution. The Constituent Assembly of 1961 included six trade union leaders. In 1961, the Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions was permitted as an affiliate member of the icftu. The new labour laws of 1963 also granted the trade unions a considerably increased scope of action, including the rights to strike and engage in collective bargaining. As a new period of accelerated industrialisation and planned economic development was beginning, the ruling elite tried to build a more centralised and peaceful system of industrial relations. They failed; the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the politicisation of trade unionism, and the rise of the factory as a privileged site of struggle.¹⁷¹