The Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions (), known as TÜRK-İŞ, is a national trade union centre in Turkey. It was established in Ankara on 31 July 1952. The oldest of the country's workers' confederations, it has been based historically on unions of public sector workers. In July 2026 its thirty-two affiliated unions had 1,260,109 members between them, 51.8 per cent of all union members in Turkey. It is affiliated to the International Trade Union Confederation and the European Trade Union Confederation, and is a member of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD.
At its fifth general assembly in 1964 the confederation wrote into its constitution a commitment to remain independent of the political parties. The formula, partilerüstü politika or above-party politics, gave TÜRK-İŞ its general political line. It was never uncontested within the confederation. Differences over industrial action, and over relations with the Workers' Party of Turkey, produced a breakaway in the middle of the 1960s: seventeen unions met in Istanbul in January 1967 and agreed to set up the rival Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions (DİSK), which held its founding congress the following month. More unions left for it in the early 1970s. TÜRK-İŞ set the principle aside at the general election of 1977, when it came out for the Republican People's Party, and the following year its president Halil Tunç signed a wage restraint agreement with the government of Bülent Ecevit.
The military government installed after the coup of September 1980 closed DİSK, HAK-İŞ and MİSK. TÜRK-İŞ was not shut down, although it too could not carry on trade union activity. Its general secretary Sadık Şide took office as minister of social security in the military government, and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions suspended the confederation's membership in 1981. Unofficial action by public sector workers in 1989 led to a settlement that ended a decade of falling real wages. The confederation's headquarters had neither called for that action nor sanctioned it, but moved quickly to support it. Through the 1990s TÜRK-İŞ organised large demonstrations and, in the autumn of 1995, public sector strikes at workplaces employing some 300,000 people.
Under governments led by the Justice and Development Party from 2002 the confederation took a more conciliatory line towards the government than its rivals did. Workers facing reassignment after the decision to close the leaf tobacco plants of the state monopoly TEKEL camped outside its Ankara headquarters over the winter of 2009 and 2010, in the largest labour protest of the period. Its share of Turkey's union members then fell from 70.8 per cent in 2013 to 55.4 per cent in 2022 as HAK-İŞ grew. Ergün Atalay has been president since 2013.
History
Foundation, 1946–1952
Law no. 5018 of February 1947 allowed workers and employers to form unions and federations. Its fifth article barred unions from political activity, political propaganda and political publishing, and from acting as a vehicle for any political body. A breach could be punished by closure for three months to a year.
TÜRK-İŞ grew out of the unions founded after 1946 and the regional federations they formed. Yıldırım Koç calls it the outcome of a merger process already under way, and the first organisation in Turkey to cover almost every branch of industry nationally. A meeting at Bursa in April 1952 decided to create a confederation. Kemal Sülker proposed the name. The confederation was formally established in Ankara on 31 July 1952. Its founders also imposed a restriction on themselves: article 41 of the statute barred anyone holding office in TÜRK-İŞ from taking a post in a political party, or from using a union title for party, religious or commercial ends. Anyone who did so was treated as having resigned.
Koç rejects the account that TÜRK-İŞ was set up at American instigation. He points out that its first statute used the term "working class", that the United States did not then have the influence in Turkey to produce such an outcome, and that the American labour movement was itself split between the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Koç argues that the more important factor, and the less studied one, was direction by the Turkish state, particularly through the labour bureau of the Republican People's Party.
Ronnie Margulies and Ergin Yıldızoğlu take a different view. Writing in 1984, they call the confederation's credentials as an independent body dubious from the start. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the American Federation of Labor supplied money, advisers and training, in an attempt they describe as building unions on the American model. The minister of labour attended the first TÜRK-İŞ meeting at İzmir. On their reading the confederation went on to play a fundamentally restraining part in workers' struggles through the 1960s and the 1970s.
Aziz Çelik places himself between the two accounts. American trade unionists took an interest in the founding, he writes, and tried to shape it. The Cold War explains why. A confederation in Turkey that leaned West mattered to both union and political calculations. Çelik argues the interest still cannot be read as an American operation. Doing so would set aside the internal union and political dynamics, which he treats as the decisive ones, together with the accumulated experience of Turkish workers. American influence did become marked later. He dates it to the 1960s, when the leadership moved into the orbit of American trade unionism.
A provisional executive committee ran the confederation until its first general assembly. Ömer Akçakanat chaired it, Şaban Yıldız was general secretary, Seyfi Demirsoy treasurer, Mehmet İnhanlı auditor and Adil Boğakaptan member. A biographical note in the DİSK history edited by Aziz Çelik, drawing on Kemal Sülker, records that Yıldız did the work of the committee and signed the founding declaration. Koç names Akçakanat as the confederation's first president and İsmail İnan as its second.
Çelik writes that Şaban Yıldız drafted the first statute. Yıldız was a socialist, later one of the founders of the Workers' Party of Turkey. Socialists and the principles of class unionism carried weight in the confederation's leadership from the founding until the İzmir congress, on Çelik's account, and were then cleared out of the top posts. Yıldız recalled a visit in May 1952 from Mükerrem Sarol, the Democrat Party's Istanbul provincial chairman, who offered 5,000 lira towards the cost of setting the confederation up. He wrote that he refused without hesitating.
The first general assembly met at İzmir on 6–7 September 1952. It elected İsmail İnan president, Muammer Özerkan general secretary and İsmail Aras treasurer, and resolved to join the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, though the authorities later objected that the decision was defective. Affiliation was approved by a majority at an extraordinary second general assembly in Istanbul on 8–11 August 1953, which elected Naci Kurt president and İnan general secretary. Şaban Yıldız did not keep the general secretaryship at İzmir. The same note records that the right wing of the delegates withheld their votes from him because he was a progressive, and that Muammer Özerkan was put in his place after a hard contest.
The 1950s
Naci Kurt was elected a Democrat Party deputy in 1954 and gave up his union post. The executive chose not to replace him, and İnan carried out the president's duties in practice from 1954 to 1957. The third general assembly, held in Ankara on 19–21 June 1957, elected Nuri Beşer president. Beşer was a close friend of the prime minister, Adnan Menderes. Koç describes the leaders of TÜRK-İŞ and its affiliates in this period as seeking individual relations with the Democrat Party, and to a lesser extent the Republican People's Party, in the hope of influencing their policies and of being elected as deputies on their lists.
TÜRK-İŞ supported the military intervention of 27 May 1960 at once and without reservation. Its executive met in extraordinary session the next day, and members collected signatures to force Beşer out. He resigned on 3 June and was expelled from the confederation by its disciplinary board on 18 June.
Growth in the early 1960s
Writing in the International Labour Review in 1964, the Istanbul University economist Orhan Tuna observed that until TÜRK-İŞ was founded in 1952 Turkish unions had no central body to speak for them, although the need for one had long been felt. By the time of his survey its affiliates were ten federations, twenty-four industry-based unions and twenty-one directly affiliated unions, with 294,697 members between them, about three-quarters of all trade unionists in Turkey. Union membership nationally had risen from about 52,000 in 1948 to some 420,000 by 1963.
Tuna also recorded that governments had refused union requests to affiliate with international organisations until 1960, and that permission began to be granted from February 1961. The largest workers' demonstration Turkey had yet seen took place while that growth was under way. The coalition government's programme, read out on 27 November 1961, promised laws on collective bargaining and the right to strike. To hold it to that, the executive of the İstanbul İşçi Sendikaları Birliği, the city's union council and a TÜRK-İŞ affiliate, resolved on 1 December to hold a rally and told the confederation three days later. The military governor of Istanbul, General Refik Tulga, refused them Taksim Square, citing the Istanbul pogrom of September 1955 that had followed a meeting there, and offered a site outside the city. One union leader asked whether they would be fired on if they went ahead anyway. Yıldırım Koç records that the governor gave no answer.
TÜRK-İŞ backed the rally. A circular over the signatures of Seyfi Demirsoy and Halil Tunç complained that every party had put collective bargaining and the right to strike in its programme and competed over them at elections, and that nothing had changed in practice. About a hundred thousand people came to Saraçhane Square on 31 December 1961. İbrahim Denizcier read a resolution in three parts. He headed the tobacco, drink and food federation then, and became president of the confederation eighteen years later. The resolution asked for union freedom in full and at once, and for immediate recognition of the rights to strike and to bargain collectively. Its third part warned that if those rights were withheld the workers could not be held responsible for the strikes that followed. It carried by acclamation.