ISTANBUL – May Day is a national holiday in Turkey. But these past two years Turkey’s cities have not had parades or pageants, and instead have seen running battles between protesters and police intent on breaking up even small gatherings.
Istanbul was no exception earlier this month, with small bands of masked slingshot-wielding protesters facing down armored police trucks spraying water cannon and firing tear gas down narrow streets.
Adjar Hasan, a 40-year-old electrical engineer, said working people have had enough of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decade-long rule.
“We have been led by a dictator for the last two years. It should be more right to say in the last 10 years, but he showed his real face in the last two,” Hasan said over a beer with friends at a Besiktas beer hall just around the corner from the May 1 melee still in progress.
“Especially after the resistance over Gezi Park all kinds of people are coming – people who were apolitical, people who didn’t know the meaning of the first of May, people [who] are rebelling against the dictator.”
Hasan’s assessment is arguably optimistic. The prime minister continues to enjoy popular support, especially among the poorer, more religious classes that make up Turkey’s demographic majority. Accusations of fraud notwithstanding, his ruling AKP cruised to a comfortable victory in April’s local elections, handing a renewed mandate to the strongman leader who intends to run for president this summer.
That riot police denied thousands of leftists and union activists in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir the right to gather on a holiday is a good metaphor for the AKP’s attitude towards organized labor, which has found its ranks diminishing as the government pursues a neo-liberal agenda.
“De-unionization is a global phenomenon and after the neo-liberalization of Turkey in the AKP-era, we’ve seen de-unionizing of the workforce,” Ercan Akkaya, a union organizer and political science researcher at Bosphorous University, told Occupy.com.
So when a disaster at a coal mine this month claimed the lives of more than 300 workers it could be expected that the populist prime minister would reach out to those affected, his core constituency in a rural province in western Turkey.
But rather than call for an immediate investigation, the prime minister dismissed the tragedy as the cost of doing business.
“These are usual things," Erdogan said a day after the May 13 coal mine blast that left hundreds trapped underground. “I went back in British history. Some 204 people died there after a mine collapse in 1838. In 1866, 361 miners died in Britain. In an explosion in 1894, 290 people died there.”
The conjuring up of Victorian England – when children dug coal by candlelight and worker safety regulations were non-existent – caused a surge of anger and disbelief.
Akkaya says it’s all part of a pattern in which the government covers up for its political allies who enrich themselves over public resources like coal mines.
“In other deadly accidents – I am saying accidents but it’s really murder – the government and the judiciary has done nothing to hold responsible the employers, the people responsible, for workplace safety conditions.”
When the prime minister visited the town the following day, a livid crowd confronted him, forcing him to seek refuge in a local supermarket.
Compounding the PR disaster, one of Erdogan’s senior advisers was caught on tape kicking a protesting miner as he was being held down by the prime minister’s security detail.
The adviser was later granted a week’s sick leave for reported injuries to his foot he’d sustained while kicking the defenseless man.
Prosecutors have launched a probe of the deadly mine blast, Turkey’s worst in modern history, though a court has declined to arrest the mine operator’s chief.
Historically it’s been technocrats rather than those who design and run the system that get prosecuted in Turkey, said Asli Odman, a professor at Mimar Sinan University and campaigner with Istanbul Health and Safety Labor Watch.
“The middle managers are called to justice but the senior CEOS and members of the board are not,” she said.
Establishing the causal link between the disaster and responsibility is complicated but not impossible, she explained. The mine is still owned by the state but leased to private operators – in this case, Soma Holding Company – which subcontracts the labor.
The state buys up as much coal as the operators can extract, encouraging speed and penalizing investments into safety measures that slow production.
“There’s no supply and demand equilibrium. It’s not a capitalist approach, it’s neoliberal,” explains Selcuk Kozagacli, head of the Progressive Lawyers Association in a 10-minute interview posted online.
“In the capitalist approach, if you supply without demand, you can’t get returns. You’ve mined for nothing.”
But in Turkey, with the state buying whatever gets produced, through a series of private subcontractors, each contractor competes with others to extract more with overlapping shifts while taking shortcuts in health and safety.
“Here you already have the state as a regular customer and the more you dig out, the more money you make.”
The tragedy in the mining town of Soma has reawakened people's conscience and shifted attitudes toward the country's industrial workers. Candlelight vigils and student sit-ins have continued far beyond the government’s proscribed three-day mourning period.
The upshot, Odman says, is that the plight of workplace safety – and the AKP’s willful denial of the problem – is now being openly discussed in Turkish society.
“There’s really been a change in discourse,” she said. “This is the first time really we hear about workers talking about their experiences in the workplace. Usually the mainstream media is completely silent on the experiences on the workplace.”
If Erdogan has taken any notice, it’s not clear from his public statements. He continues to rail against his critics saying they are using the tragedy to score political points. He’s accused the BBC of using stage actors in the place of mourning miners’ wives. And more recently he returned to a familiar narrative: that Turkey’s detractors are trying to use the incident to undermine the country’s progress.
“No one should fall into the trap of being a tool of those who are trying to abuse Soma for use against the government,” Erdogan warned on May 19.
His narrative, however, is slipping. Back in April, it was Erdogan's own ruling party that scuttled a motion by the opposition to investigate mine safety in Soma. Little more than two weeks before the disaster, an MP from the district warned on the floor of parliament that 5,000 accidents had occurred in Soma district in 2013.
“Ninety percent of these accidents took place in mines,” nationalist MP Erkan Akcay said in remarks widely quoted after the disaster. “Burn injuries share a considerable number of all mine injuries. However, hospitals in Soma lack the necessary burn units, and time is wasted on the road in transferring such injured workers to nearby hospitals.”
Mourners have begun donning the white construction helmets in solidarity with miners. The fact that these are same helmets worn during last spring’s Gezi Park uprising may indicate the prelude to another summer of discontent.
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