Highway and Transportation Workers’ Union (Türkiye)
Starting in the 1980s, the imperialist-capitalist system launched a policy of full subjugation by imperialist capital against the working class worldwide, through what it termed “neoliberal policies”: privatization, the spread of precarious work, and flexible forms of employment. These attacks left union leaders with two choices: either face the onslaught or surrender. Union laws were reorganized in a way that both protected privileges and restricted industrial action. Unions that did not conform to the “New World Order” were shut down, and their leaders were arrested. The majority of those dominating the leadership of large unions and confederations chose to protect their own existence and privileges in the face of these attacks. In the Global North and in many developing countries, the perspective of struggling for the protection and advancement of labor rights and for the liberation of labor was abandoned. Unions were redefined as “social partners” or “corporate structures providing services.” Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBAs) began to be signed behind closed doors in favor of capital, without being submitted to the workers’ approval. The demands of the class were blunted at “social dialogue” tables, and workers were coaxed into submission through various schemes. Union presidents and executives turned into bureaucrats earning incomes many times higher than the workers, completely detached from the reality of workers’ lives. Workers began to view unionists as an extension of the employer, almost like a human resources manager in the workplace. Collaborationist unions and the union bureaucracy deepened divisions within the working class—such as subcontractor vs. permanent, blue-collar vs. white-collar, production vs. service, and worker vs. public servant. On the other hand, the unionization rate was driven down through all kinds of pressure, isolating the majority of the class and making exploitation unrestrained.
In our country, according to official figures, the unionization rate “among registered workers” is 14%. As unions distanced themselves from being the schools of struggle for the working class, the minimum wage became the average wage in our country, as it has across the world. The subcontracting system spread to all sectors, starting with public institutions, and flexible working became normalized.
In our country, especially with the economic crisis that deepened after the pandemic, a significant rupture emerged among the rank and file of system-integrated confederations and so-called “acceptable” unions. Despite all pressures, 150,000 workers left these acceptable unions in the first six months of 2025 alone. A militant union line came to the fore. This new wave continues to rise through independent unions and grassroots organizations. Decisions for action are taken in worker committees established in front of factories and in resistance areas, despite the reactionary attitudes of acceptable unions. In a period when existing union laws effectively ban strikes, workers are adopting a line of direct struggle. Through diverse and creative forms of action, they render the bans of capital and the government effectively null and void. The sectors where exploitation is most intense—which yellow unions avoid confronting or choose to ignore—are mobilizing. We see stirrings in areas where precarity is most intense, such as subcontracted workers, drivers forced to rent their vehicles, warehouse workers, private hospital staff, private school teachers, private mine workers, construction workers, call center employees, and the retail sector. If workers have mobilized and a union is by their side, that union is a militant union. The leaders of militant unions do not ride in luxury vehicles; they live like workers, walk with workers, confront police barricades at the very front lines of actions, and get detained or arrested. This situation rebuilds trust in union organizing, which had been eroded by the targeted efforts of capital.
The break from the collaborationist union line in Turkey manifests not as an intellectual preference, but as a survival reflex of the working class. The existing acceptable unions are in a structural crisis and are destined to wither away. The newly developing militant line places the workers’ self-organization, decisions, and committees at the center. We view this form of struggle—which ceases to be a mere “economic apparatus” solely bargaining over wages, and instead becomes a platform where workers develop their own class stance and embrace the liberation of labor and the demand for political and social transformation—as the only real path of struggle before the working class in our country and across the world.
Today, international capital conducts an organized struggle against the working class with all its national and international organizations. The load on the back of a worker in a logistics warehouse in Izmir and the load on the back of a worker in Frankfurt, Mumbai, or Detroit are parts of the same international monopolies and supply chains. While capital is so fluid, so integrated, and borderless, the confinement of the working class struggle solely within its own national borders, or even within its own factory, means the class is literally going to the front lines with insufficient ammunition.
A direct link established by a militant union in Turkey—for example, a cargo, construction, or metal union—with the struggle organizations of the same company in Korea, Germany, or the UK is the greatest fear of national and international capital. Simultaneous actions in front of the company’s main headquarters for a worker fired in Turkey also render capital’s threat of “shifting production to another country” obsolete.
The tactics of international capital, its methods of de-unionization, its subcontracting games, and its legal justifications are the same everywhere. The international bonds to be created will carry the workers’ unity of struggle into the international arena and, to the extent achieved, will add strategic momentum to the class movement.
There are international structures that have operated from the past to the present, such as the ITUC (International Trade Union Confederation) or the ETUC (European Trade Union Confederation). These international superstructures, like the yellow unions in Turkey, have lost themselves in the corridors of “social dialogue” within the boundaries set by the bureaucracy.
The anchoring of the entire horizon of structures like the ITUC and ETUC to ILO (International Labour Organization) standards is, in fact, one of the ideological and practical shackles placed upon the global labor movement. The representatives of capital tell us: “You may seek your rights, but only in the courtroom we have built and by the rules we have written…” The greatest power of the worker is the power derived from production. For example, the ILO-indexed line accepts only those strikes that are “permitted by law, pre-notified, and delimited.” It rejects solidarity strikes, political strikes, and workplace occupations. This collaborationist, liquidationist line has completely removed the goal of the liberation of labor—the historical mission of the revolutionary union movement—from the agenda.
The ITUC and similar structures represent the organizations of the imperialist-capitalist system within the working class, aligned with imperialism’s financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank and sovereign state structures, shaped by anti-communist reflexes, and dissolving the class struggle at “social dialogue” tables.
What the working class needs in the face of these attacks is not union presidents meeting for dinners in Brussels, but steps that will enable construction workers, healthcare workers, drivers, metalworkers, or couriers in Turkey to establish direct links with their fellow workers around the world. It is the creation of a militant front that will pool the experience and struggle of the class with fellow workers from all countries.
The concept of unity of struggle does not express an abstract spiritual bond between a strike in a factory and an action in another construction site. This concept also dictates the establishment of practical, logistical, and financial coordination encompassing all processes of action. Unity of struggle is not a temporary partnership formed merely to squeeze out a few extra pennies in collective agreements. Every initiative for the unity of struggle of the working class, by its very nature, carries a political and internationalist horizon. Today, a barricade is forming in our country against the gangrenous usurpation of rights, tax injustice, the seizure of severance pay, and bans on organizing and striking, and this struggle also manifests the will for the liberation of labor.
The union path of the working class must converge on the international unity of the working class against imperialism, fascism, and capitalist exploitation, whose foundations were laid in 1945. For the vanguards carrying out the class struggle in the unions, the path to international unity lies in insisting on an anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and anti-capitalist line of class war. Only this insistence will bring us together at the common barricade against imperialism.
Yellow unionism constantly whispers the most backward politics to workers: “We are a union, we do not interfere in politics.” This discourse is a lie fabricated to distance the working class from class politics and to enslave them to dominant politics, nationalism, sectarianism, and chauvinism.
The poverty and deprivation experienced by the working class are directly related to everything implemented by the governments of capital to pave the way for national and international capital. There is a direct relationship between the curtailment of social rights, the rapid estrangement of the rights to education, healthcare, and housing from working people, and imperialist wars. The structural crises of capitalism are also directly linked to the fascist oppression exerted upon all working people. Therefore, unions cannot merely bargain over wages in workplaces. Unions must be at the very forefront of the ecological struggle against the plunder of nature, the struggle against all forms of discrimination, and the struggle against imperialist wars and occupations.
The duty of revolutionary vanguard workers is to unite the local experiences of militant unions in a common struggle along the internationalist class line of the anti-imperialist platform. It is to bestow an international identity upon local worker groups. The militant stance rising in a construction site, enterprise, or factory in Turkey must be able to become a part of the global anti-imperialist labor movement experience.
Capital’s transition from the Fordist mode of production, which brought thousands of workers together in massive factories, to flexible production is one of the most strategic blows dealt to the working class struggle in the last half-century. This transition is not merely a change in the technical structure of production. It atomizes the unity of the working class in production areas, shatters organizing dynamics, and yet encompasses many models that both distance and connect various sectors with one another. In our country, too, with this mode of production, the output of a single monopoly has spread—as it has in most countries of the world—to hundreds of small subcontractors in Organized Industrial Zones (OIZs), to hundreds of homes, and to different countries across the globe. In our country, in 50 different workshops standing side-by-side in a single OIZ, there are tens of thousands of workers producing parts for the same brand, yet completely unaware of each other’s lives. Capital constantly imposes a “race to the bottom” by threatening workers in Turkey, who are under the pressure of unemployment, with wages in Bangladesh, and by threatening permanent workers in OIZs with rented or subcontracted workers in the same production zone.
The line of acceptable unionism has completely failed in the face of this transformation, because its representatives still want to organize only those factories where they can obtain authorization and sign collective bargaining agreements, thereby gaining access to worker dues. However, workers in the same factory are divided among dozens of subcontractors. For this reason, most union leaders have created a comfort zone for themselves for years, limiting organizing to the dues of the same number of workers in the same enterprises.
The vanguards of militant unions must treat an OIZ or a specific logistics or production zone as a single enterprise, a single factory. Workers from different sectors—be they metal, plastics, textiles, transport, or any other branch of industry—must organize together in Workers’ Councils and production zone committees within that zone. The unity of struggle of the logistics driver, the metalworker, and the office worker can acquire a concrete body by expanding from these production zones to the country as a whole.
Even though capital has fragmented production, it has also dispersed the fragments far and wide. Militant unions must expose which global or national giant brand, which parent company, the striking workshop is producing parts for, and they must carry the action in front of the parent company’s headquarters and stores.
Today, the assembly line of an automotive monopoly in Italy depends on cables produced in an OIZ in Turkey, and that OIZ depends on ore coming from South Africa. A planned and militant stance at a single link of the chain has the potential to lock and shake the entire global system. The vanguards of militant unions must turn this delicate balance of imperialist monopolies to their advantage.
Capital has demolished the physical walls of the factory, fragmenting and dispersing production. Therefore, we must equip ourselves with new, creative methods of struggle. We must lift our unions out of sectoral narrowness and create the tools required by the struggle. We can and will build another world by organizing the grassroots committees founded by vanguard, revolutionary workers into councils on a production zone scale, and by establishing international bonds with fellow workers around the world through this unity, guided by an anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist perspective.
LONG LIVE THE WORKERS’ LEAGUE OF STRUGGLE
LONG LIVE PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM
