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[...] As of 2011, UPS has six subcontractors and uses 256 agencies. In addition to its permanent workers, the company is also recruiting workers under fixed-term employment contracts, corresponding to a highly flexible labor regime, a strategy which compounds the difficulty for unions in gaining a majority of signed-up workers. [...]
the fucking same everywhere
In 1987, Topkapı-Istanbul transport warehouses were in operation and 1100 workers were working in 110 workplaces, and Tümtis has organized 37 of 110. The biggest employer was employing 55 workers. In the majority of the workplaces, employers were only hiring six or seven workers. When unionization started in one of these workplaces, employers were increasing the total number of workers by hiring their children as workers on paper while half of the workers were already working informally. [...]
hahaha this is just wild
In Turkey, employers seek to prevent unionization in three primary ways. First, they establish separate companies and transfer unionized workers; second, they use anti-democratic laws against trade unions: objecting to the threshold and re-enumerating the number of workers by appealing to the labor court or objecting to unions' branch of activity; and third, they try to force workers to quit their union, and if they refuse, fire them without compensation. Although employers could face imprisonment of six months for breaking the labor laws, in practice this penal imposition is rare in Turkey. [...]
Companies with foreign capital avoid unionization through extending the authorization process, while pressuring workers to quit their unions; laying off unionized workers or threatening dismissals; helping to organize company (compliant) unions; shifting production out of union jurisdictions; and withdrawing from the market and re-entering the market again under a new registration:
[...] at Mersin International port, where subcontracted workers were organized in a union, the main employer cancelled the subcontracting agreement and transferred all the workers to become permanent staff of the main firm in order to remove the union. Of course, even if the union loses representation in cases like this, the workers have achieved employment security as the result of the union's struggle, which is an obvious achievement in neoliberal Turkey. [...]
something to watch out for