Only Way Out: Workers’ Struggle, Unity and Solidarity

We are leaving behind a year that has been difficult in every respect. However, as working people, almost all of us agree that 2025 will be a more challenging year. This is because the capitalist class and the government keep making us pay for the economic destruction they have caused. Mehmet Şimşek was appointed Finance Minister in June 2023 as he was expected to bring the economy, which has been rolling downhill since 2018, back on track. As soon as he took his seat, he announced the most important points of his method of ‘bringing the economy back on track’: "We will keep pay rises extremely limited! We will raise interest rates. We will give all credits and funds selectively to large companies. We will restrict the credits available to the working people. In this way, we will make them consume even less. We will impose new taxes, expand the taxation to the bottom and provide funds and resources. We will wipe out the tax debts of large companies and provide them with all kinds of favours. We will implement this economic programme at all costs. We will not take into account any objections from working people!” Of course, Mehmet Şimşek did not express the government’s evil plans so bluntly. As always, he hid them behind complex sentences, ambiguous terms, fancy words and lies.

As an example, the government was boasting of a huge pay rise in the minimum wage in 2023, posing as if they made a great favour to the workers. They claimed that they had increased the minimum wage by a total of 80 percent annually, far above the inflation rate. However, in the same year, the real inflation rate was 127 percent. In 2024, those in power put on the same face and lied that they did not let the workers be crushed by inflation. However, the minimum wage was increased by only 49 percent. In other words, the workers’ economic decline, far from being compensated, worsened and worsened. The minimum wage being 17 thousand liras, workers were kept in poverty and misery. Yet, the minimum wage was not increased in July. As of November 2024, when the breadline for a family of 4 has reached 21 thousand liras, the bosses’ organisations arrogantly say the following: ‘The minimum wage for 2025 should not be increased by more than 25 percent!’ This attitude is a great attack on the working class. This attitude is a great attack on the working class. This is suppressing and keeping wages low, this is making workers work for peanuts.

Yet, the attacks of capitalists and the government are not only limited to cutting down the wages. From severance pay to job security, all workers’ rights are also being eroded and destroyed. From the Unemployment Insurance Fund to other public funds, all funds are being plundered and handed over to the capitalist class. More ways are being sought to collect more taxes from working people. All public services such as health, education and transport are made more expensive and their quality is degraded. Job cuts are accelerated on the grounds of the economic crisis. Child labour is becoming more common... In other words, slavery conditions are imposed on workers under the law of the jungle. But capitalists and the government, which knows no limits in exploitation and plunder are not satisfied with this. According to the government’s Medium Term Programme, it is planned to amend the Labour Law based on the demands of the capitalist class. And this means that the worst is yet to come.

It is very clear that in 2025, our poverty, our livelihood problems, and our troubles will grow and deepen. So will our struggle, to find a way out, to solve our problems. And this is the key point that everything hung on.

What is the workers’ way out, and where is the solution to their problems? To answer these questions correctly, let’s think about the problems we face as workers: Low wages, severe working conditions, production pressure, poor rest break hours, risks caused by the lack of workplace safety measures, poor and unhealthy food, unpaid overtime, delayed payment of wages, underpaid or unpaid insurance premiums, lack of job security, arbitrary departmental changes and many more... Is it possible for a worker to solve any of these problems on his/her own? Is it possible to solve these problems without workers organising at the workplace, without unity against the bosses, without acting together?

It’s all clear as daylight. The only way out for workers is unity, solidarity and struggle! Indeed, the first reflex of workers who are overwhelmed by problems and seeking a solution is to tend to unionisation in the workplace. In every sector, unionisation struggles, wildcat strikes and strikes are getting more and more frequent. Workers who go on strike (wildcat or official) begin to realise the great need for solidarity with workers from other workplaces, sectors and even internationally. They learn by experience that the attacks faced by the working class can only be defeated by standing together.

The capitalist class and the government are trying to block our way out by attacking our unity, weakening our solidarity and suppressing our struggle. Those who have built a brutal regime in Turkey, aim to keep the working class under complete control and to keep exploiting, plundering and enriching themselves unlimitedly. For this reason, as in the recent example of the Polonez struggle, they put the police, gendarmerie, laws and order, governors and muftis against the workers who seek their rights. They illegitimate, criminalise and punish the seeking of rights. They provoke nationalism and set dangerous traps to turn Turks against Kurds, Alevis against Sunnis, and natives against immigrants. They keep elected MPs in prison, replace elected mayors with appointees and step up political repression. They try to violently intimidate those who stand up to protect nature, protest trade with Israel and demand their democratic rights. Because they intend to crush our will to stand together against the attacks, before it even takes root. No matter how difficult it may seem, we must organise our unity, defeat the pressures and traps, and fight back the attacks together.

From Palestine to Lebanon, Yemen to Syria, and Iran to Ukraine, when we think of the ongoing imperialist war, we can grasp more clearly the importance of our unity and solidarity as the working class.  If the workers in these countries had strong unity, would there have been such great suffering and destruction? Wouldn’t workers all over the world, united by feelings of fraternity and solidarity, stand against the war plans of the imperialist-capitalist powers with strikes, actions and rebellions in which they stop all production and transportation? Wouldn’t they fight tooth and nail and take action to overthrow capitalism, causing catastrophe after catastrophe for humanity and our planet?

It is the nightmare of the rulers who try to keep their exploitation system standing; that the workers choose the path of struggle, that the feelings of unity and solidarity among the workers and the feelings of fraternity among the people flourish and grow stronger, and that the workers’ anger targets capitalism. It is up to the world working class to make this nightmare come true. This is also the concrete mission that history has laid out for the working class. No matter how the capitalist rulers fill the minds of the workers with false ideas to prevent the working class from realising its own power, the result will not change. The working class will eventually find the way out. The capitalist system of exploitation will be destroyed with the fist of the world working class that takes the path of unity, solidarity and struggle. The call of the workers’ struggle organisation UID-DER and Workers’ Solidarity, which has now reached its 200th issue, to all workers is to be a part of this just and honourable struggle.