The arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu has prompted more than a month of protests in Turkey. The demonstrations have rallied many working-class Turks, but they’ve also shown the limited strength of organized labor.
“This is what we’ll do. We won’t work on March 27 and 28. Take sick leave, take a day off, turn off the switch, shut down your computer. Let your absence be felt — make yourself heard!” That was the call from Başaran Aksu, leader of Umut-Sen, a socialist organization supporting workers and independent unions in Turkey. At first glance, the appeal might seem like a minor act amid the wave of social outrage following the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, on March 19. In the first two weeks of protests, universities came to a halt, businesses linked to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government were boycotted, and an “economic standstill” was staged — a day of refusing to spend as a form of protest.
Yet Aksu’s proposal is another drop in a rising tide of mobilizations, with growing calls for a general strike from multiple fronts. “The general strike aims to address the real problems of 80 percent of society — lack of future prospects and economic insecurity — beyond this political blockade and systemic clash,” Aksu explains. “It’s about opening a debate on the problems society faces beyond İmamoğlu.”
İmamoğlu’s party, the center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) — Turkey’s main opposition in parliament — gathered crowds outside Istanbul’s city hall during the first week of protests. There Özgür Özel, leader of the Kemalist CHP, announced that “when necessary,” it would call a general strike to deny the government “room to breathe.” But the warning went no further. “The CHP doesn’t hide its distance from the working-class struggle, aligning with its own interests. At its core, it has no fundamental difference from Erdoğan’s AKP [Justice and Development Party] when it comes to protecting capital,” says Ali Ergin Demirhan, a journalist and analyst for Sendika.org. “The phrase ‘when necessary’ reflects the CHP’s needs, not the working class’s.”
Islands of Organization
Demirhan recalls that during the 2013 Gezi protests — the largest demonstrations against then prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — union confederations called a general strike. But after objections from major CHP-aligned union federations like the Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions of Turkey (DISK) and the Confederation of Public Employees’ Trade Unions (KESK), many workers did not join. “Most of Turkey’s working class isn’t organized. A general strike that brings life to a standstill and forces the government to retreat can’t happen through union confederations alone — it needs rank-and-file workers,” he argues.
Excluding the public sector, Turkey has around 17 million workers, only 15 percent of whom (totaling about 2.5 million) are unionized. But the close ties between these unions, corporations, and political power have bred skepticism about any strike call.
“It wouldn’t be a full mobilization. For example, DISK [a trade union confederation whose main faction is aligned with the CHP] can’t effectively respond to such a call, except in CHP-run municipalities. Meanwhile the AKP can neutralize any action by its members, including many union leaders,” Aksu says.
Yet over the past fifteen years, spontaneous forms of worker resistance have emerged, some union-led but many driven by grassroots worker groups. The largest was the 2015 “metal storm,” where over 150,000 metalworkers occupied their workplaces across nearly a dozen provinces. Workers challenged the ban on their demands in court, and three years later, the Constitutional Court ruled in their favor, forcing the government to compensate them.
“Since then, labor struggles have continued like a passing torch — uninterrupted,” says Aksu. In fact, Turkey did not see such large mobilizations again until after the pandemic, as millions of households struggled with currency depreciation and soaring inflation. The strikes and occupations that followed have been far more decentralized. According to a 2022 study by the Society for Labor Studies (ETC), after the pandemic, there were 1,556 worker and public employee protests scattered across the country. However, these were sporadic actions, and when adding up the participants, they amounted to a total of 155,000 people — meaning that the count from over a thousand labor protests was the same as the “metal storm” of a decade ago.
Sevda Karaca, who is MP for Gaziantep, an industrial city in southeastern Turkey, and vice chair of the left-wing Labor Party (EMEP), attributes the weakening of labor organizations to government pressure: “The failure to build lasting unity even among workers in the same factory, mutual distrust, the mindset of ‘we won’t achieve anything this way,’ and obstructive union bureaucracy,” she describes. “Today [someone] joining a union risks getting fired. Even in the simplest fight for rights at any factory, police and gendarmerie oppose workers at the bourgeoisie’s orders. Governments issue rulings that practically forbid workers from even breathing.”
Part of this pressure stems from the legal ban on strikes. Since the AKP came to power in 2002, restrictions on collective action have affected over 200,000 workers, according to research by the economist Aziz Çelik. Until 2017, under Turkey’s parliamentary system, banning or postponing a strike required a cabinet decision. But after transitioning to a presidential system via referendum, the authority shifted to the president — who has since banned every strike. “With us, what you call ‘strikes’ no longer exist. Now there are no strikes. If there are no strikes, it means workers are being given their due and their rights are protected,” Erdoğan declared in a 2018 speech.
“Working-class citizens realize there’s no longer any connection between them and the authorities,” says Aksu.
After İmamoğlu’s imprisonment, the key factor mobilizing workers was the realization by 80 percent of society that they have no right to be elected. We can’t be MPs, mayors, or even full union members. The only link left is that we can’t be elected — we only have the right to vote.”
Student Leadership
For now, even though workers and unions are surely present in the streets, they are not the most active group. Neither are leftist parties, weakened by post-Gezi crackdowns and constant arrests for street actions. University students were, from the very first day, the social group with the most presence and initiative in the protests. Like other parts of society, they share certain parallels with workers in terms of the erosion of rights and economic capacity. According to data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK), 40 percent of university students today both study and work, whereas the rate was around 20 percent a decade ago. Every year, about 200,000 students drop out of their degrees, either for financial reasons or because they transition into full-time work.
Primarily from public institutions, students have carried out the largest street demonstrations in recent years — against government interventions, such as the imposition of rectors affiliated with Erdoğan’s party, as well as protests over their declining economic position. Slogans like “We Cannot Shelter” (against rising rents for rooms and dormitories) and “We can’t make it to the end of the month” have also been adopted by working-class Turks.
It was this groundwork that led students to take the lead in protests following the arrest of İmamoğlu. It all began on March 19, when students from Istanbul University — the institution that stripped the mayor of his diploma hours before his arrest — managed to break through a police barricade to march toward the city hall. The revocation of İmamoğlu’s diploma, a requirement to be able to run in the presidential elections, was widely perceived in Turkish society as an attack on institutions, where nothing holds value anymore and everything can be changed or canceled at any moment.“The demolition of this barricade became the symbol of a movement that, the next day, spread to other universities across the country. It was a decisive factor in the days that followed,” explain Ezgi Tatlı, a student at Yıldız Technical University, and Taylan Özgür Delibaş, a student at Istanbul University, both members of the Labor Youth (Emek Gençliği).
While the trigger for the protests was the jailing of an electoral contender, the slogan “Salvation lies in the streets, not in the ballot boxes” spread across the country, with the creation of student committees and protest actions on campuses and in city centers, along with calls for a total boycott of classes. They rapidly got the support from a teachers’ union called Eğitim Sen. Tatlı was one of the students who took the stage at the large protests outside Istanbul’s city hall, reaching out for unity. “We promise to continue our struggle until this decision is overturned, and all detainees are freed. As universities declare boycotts one after another, we call on workers, laborers, unions, and professional organizations: let us organize a general strike and a mass resistance,” she told the crowd.
“We are aware of the limits of student and youth struggle. Even if we fill the squares and organize massive marches, we know that the collapse of the ruling order depends on the working class and laborers joining the movement,” Tatlı and Delibaş explain.
“The fundamental issue uniting people in the squares is anxiety about the future and economic struggles. As the spokesperson and enforcer of the capitalist class, the AKP has long used this economic pressure as a tool to suppress movements that would rise up against attacks on rights and freedoms,” they added.
Despite everything, everyone agrees that this process marks “the beginning” of something. The president has labeled the protesters “terrorists” and “marginal elements.” But the authorities can no longer cover up problems with identity-based attacks. The protesters come from diverse backgrounds and have different ideological influences, yet the system’s shortcomings remain the same. It remains to be seen whether the demonstrations will be able to appeal to the broader working class. “We can expect that in this new phase of struggle — where ‘we are only at the start’ — there will also be room for a workers’ movement, much like the astonishing youth movement we are witnessing now,” concludes Demirhan.