Wednesday, April 23 2025

After a few days in Istanbul, I’m now heading down the coast to Izmir. The coach ride is long, about eight hours, and I spend the time catching up on articles on Umut Sen’s website.

They’re looking towards the future:

After May 1st, agitation over the minimum wage in July could spread this cycle [of struggle] among working-class people. Farmers’ unrest could also lead to the spread of tractor-driven protests similar to those in Yozgat in rural areas, if government procurement prices for produce are still determined in accordance with the Şimşek program. It’s important to remember that farmers have been training since last summer.¹

About an hour into the trip, I get a message from a friend in London asking if I’m okay. There’s been an earthquake in Istanbul. I quickly Google “Istanbul earthquake” to try to find out what’s going on. Building regulations are notoriously weak in Turkey - one reflection, alongside a historically dogged commitment to low interest rates, of the importance of construction capital for the AKP’s development strategy (and its politicians’ personal wealth).² A massive earthquake in 2023 killed over 50,000 people and made more than 2.7 million homeless. Lax building regulation is widely understood to have contributed to many thousands of those deaths. I text Ayse, and thankfully, she reassures me that everyone’s fine. It was just a small one, this time.

I arrive in Izmir to a warm welcome from Emre, another member of the group. He has a thick moustache, icy grey eyes and a laugh that puts me instantly at ease. We sit on his balcony in the sun with the smell of the sea salt in the air. It feels much more like a holiday resort here than I expected. We talk about TikTok and its increasingly prominent role in the international labour movement. At Amazon, among couriers, increasingly diverse parts of the Turkish working class. Almost everyone I’ve ever known who grew up in a working class family has had some kind of escape plan, a conscious or unconscious plan for escaping the life they grew up in. Sometimes it’s university, or a better job, or sports, or music, or a relationship. Increasingly, it’s TikTok. We talk about workers we know who’ve built big profiles through disputes, or had them already and leveraged them effectively. On the one hand, Tiktok undoubtedly helps the struggles to spread and grow, but it can come with all kinds of downsides. “Their ego grows and grows - until it eats them!” Emre says and laughs.

We take a walk by the sea just as the sun is beginning to set. As the clock strikes 9, a nearby balcony erupts into flashing lights and chaotic clanging sounds. I look around in confusion. Emre laughs and explains that this is a nightly balcony protest in solidarity with the street movement. Back in March, it would last for half an hour and echo through the city. By this point, however, it’s normally finished by ten past 9.

Thursday, April 24 2025

Every member of Umut Sen gives me a slightly different answer when I ask about their background and ‘tradition’. Over börek at a little breakfast cafe, Emre tells me some of the older generation descend from Devrimci Yol (DEV-YOL, Revolutionary Path) - an armed struggle movement active in the late 1970s. They were Marxist-Leninist, but, unlike other groups who advocated ‘anti-imperialist’ alliances with the national bourgeoisie, were distinguished by their view that the struggle against imperialism and the struggle against the national bourgeoisie were one and the same.

Before the coup in 1980, they held a mayoral seat in Fatsa and led an experiment in self-administration there. As political violence escalated throughout the country at the end of the ‘70s, Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel directed the military’s attention to Fatsa. A so-called “point operation” followed, militarily crushing the project of self-administration in an act widely understood as a rehearsal for the coup d’etat. When the national coup did eventually arrive, in September 1980, thousands of DEV-YOL militants were detained. Four were formally executed, and a further seven died in custody.

Emre tells me there is widespread respect for DEV-YOL within Umut Sen, but also a firm recognition that times have changed and some of these old methods no longer make sense for the present. Their current task is one of reconstruction, but not repetition.

Another member of the group picks us up, and we drive out to Telus, a content moderation office on the outskirts of the city. We arrive at a nondescript industrial park on a hill overlooking the city. It takes us a few moments to weave our way through the dusty car park, but soon pull in by a little plastic gazebo outside an imposing office block. We’re here to meet Hasan, a young worker who was sacked four months ago under the same “inappropriate behaviour” code as Caner from the Hrant Dink Foundation. Hasan is a leader in the content moderators’ union, sacked for allegedly writing union slogans in the toilets. He’s maintained a daily protest outside the office ever since, although today he’ll finally disassemble his little camp since he’s being flown out to Kenya tomorrow for an international meeting of content moderators’ unions.

We get out of the car, and Hasan gives us a warm welcome. It’s nice to see the obvious friendship between him and the members of Umut Sen. We pull up dusty palettes and take a seat around a little fold-out camping table under the gazebo. Hasan seems popular, and various people drop by during our visit to donate coffee and cigarettes. On their breaks, the workers from the office mill around smoking outside or come over to hang out at the tent. They all look young, like students, in their late teens and early twenties.

Hasan explains that the Telus office has a few small customer service contracts, but its main business is content moderation for TikTok. These kids smoking and chatting opposite spend all day locked up in that building, getting paid next to nothing to screen out the most horrific shit you can imagine from the TikTok feed. 1,000 workers. Four shifts. Open 24/7. Hasan says most of them are on antidepressants, and the windows barely open to prevent suicides. Appointments with an internal psychologist are mandatory - but last just ten or fifteen minutes and are dismissed by the workers as a box-ticking scheme. The building doesn’t even have a proper fire escape.

I try to process everything Hasan’s telling me, but feel so disturbed that it’s hard to concentrate. I notice stickers of a cute child on the back of his phone, and he tells me they’re pictures of his son. Tentatively, I ask whether he thinks his job should exist. “Yeah, without a doubt,” he replies, through translation, “as long as AI can’t do it reliably, then we need people to make the platforms safe for people to use.” I ask how he thinks the job should be improved. “Longer breaks, better pay, much shorter working hours, and proper psychological support.” We joke grimly about the fact that in social media headquarters, the staff get free gyms and yoga classes, while at the most brutal end of the labour process, these workers don’t even get proper break rooms.

A worker swipes his keycard through the security gates and walks over to pull up a palette beside us. It’s his last day. The company, like many others in Turkey, is laying people off, although in this case, the workers have seen the accounts and know Telus is doing just fine. They’re trying to use the crisis as an opportunity to shrink their workforce and impose work intensification on everyone who remains. The workers have been trying to work out how to respond.

They’ve been building a union here for a while now already, although the company has been taking full advantage of Turkey’s hostile legal environment to throw obstacles in their path. The first union they built was deregistered after Telus changed its ‘industrial classification’ in court. This is a common tactic among employers. Since a union must legally correspond to a specific industrial classification, employers frequently change classifications to break unions and have them legally deregistered. Unions can appeal these manoeuvres, but the process can take years, and you don’t automatically get your members back at the end. Despite deregistration, the workers here have continued to act as a union, and Hasan has continued to act as a leader. Even with turnover, the literally traumatising labour process continues to generate new layers of workers bound to each other and determined to get back at their employer. As we pack up to leave, I scan their faces one last time and picture them storming the gyms and yoga studios of Silicon Valley.

From Telus, we drive to the Kemalpaşa Temel Conta site, a silicon parts factory on the far outskirts of the northeastern side of the city. Temel Conta produce car parts, mostly for Ford but also for Tesla. The workers here are all out on strike. We pull up, and I’m immediately struck by a camp unlike the others I’ve seen so far. This is much bigger and obviously better organised. There are several distinct shelters built out of pallets - a storeroom, a cafe, a reception area. Most significantly, the whole site is clean, free of the cigarette butts which carpet every other picket. As we get closer, I notice tea urns and palettes of water bottles, then a group of mostly middle-aged women chatting and crocheting in one of the shelters. The Temel Conta workers. Emre introduces me to Sinem, one of their leaders, who exudes quiet and unassuming charisma.

She tells me they’re on strike because their boss is out of control. He treats the workers like property and speaks openly about how he tries to hire people with no other options (of the 24 workers, 23 are women over 30, and the other is a 68 year old man). When he found out they’d unionised, he locked them out of the toilets, turned off the factory ventilation and screamed at them for hours. They’re striking now, partially over his behaviour, partially over his refusal to recognise the union and negotiate with them.

The first time they tried to unionise was two years ago, but he blocked them by changing the site’s classification from “automotive” to “chemical”. This time, they’ve gone with Petrol-iş, a chemical union affiliated with TÜRK-İŞ. Despite being one of the bigger unions in a “yellow” confederation, Emre acknowledges that the Temel Conta workers have been able to maintain a fairly independent and militant position, and have actually been fairly well supported in that by the union, a fact he attributes to the determination of the workers.

The same company has another, bigger site about 20 minutes away. That plant produces metal parts, with about 80 workers and a more even split of men and women. The silicon workers have been agitating there and trying to spread the strike. Emre laughingly describes the union at the bigger site as “dark yellow” - meaning extremely unwilling to challenge management. At some point, the boss began offering bonuses to any worker who provided him with screenshot evidence that they’d quit the union, and they didn’t even challenge that.

I comment on how much nicer the camp is than the others I’ve seen, and everyone laughs and asks what I expect when women are the ones organising the struggle. I ask what other differences there are when women organise the struggle here. Sinem tells me that when they first started, many of the women were nervous about getting involved in something like this. Even when they’d been personally persuaded, almost two-thirds still felt that they had to ask their husbands for permission to join the union. “The experience of the struggle has changed all of that though.” By learning to rely on one another and seeing their strength and capability in organising and enforcing the strike and the camp, the workers have become more confident and independent. And it’s changed the dynamic in their personal lives. The husbands - some of whom, by reflex, would try to speak to the media on their partners’ behalfs - have also been changed by the strike, and have learned to respect their partners’ independence and leadership.

As we’re talking, an expensive-looking SUV pulls out of the factory gates, and the workers laugh and wave. It’s the boss. He’s been holed up in there day after day, working alone in the shuttered factory, trying to prove some kind of point. As he leaves, I notice a security guard in a cabin on the inside of the gates. I ask what their relationship with the guards has been like. Sinem smiles and tells me that the boss has already had to change the security firm twice because they keep making friends with the guards. They’ve been on strike for a while now, though, and recognise that they need to escalate. They’re planning to move their protests to the boss’ front lawn. Sinem smiles mischievously again, “we’re going to teach him a lesson.”

We arrive back at Emre’s flat that evening to news from Istanbul. The construction company conceded. The workers won.

Friday, April 25 2025

Today’s my last day touring unions. I’m heading north to Bergama to meet with the coincidentally-named Umut, president of an independent agricultural workers’ union and a full timer for Umut Sen. The group doesn’t ‘employ’ him formally. He lives part-time from his car, doesn’t pay rent, and receives financial support from his comrades and family. While driving around later between greenhouses and coal mines, he’ll explain to me that Umut Sen, out of practical necessity, recognise the need to build a cadre of “professional revolutionaries”, although they’re trying to experiment with what form that can and should take under current conditions.

Throughout the trip, I’ve met members embedded in full-time manual jobs, part-time or precariously employed professionals dedicating their free time to the group, and now Umut, working full-time for the cause. Each approach has its positive and negative sides, but the division of labour between roles that the group has achieved, much aspired to throughout the socialist movement but rarely realised, has been extremely impressive to see firsthand. The group feels tight, self-disciplined, and effective, but without also feeling completely divorced from human reality. People you can hang out with and have a laugh with, while also trusting to be absolutely serious in their politics.

It takes me three hours to reach Bergama (one hour by metro and then two hours by bus). On the way out of Izmir, densely packed tower blocks eventually open out onto rolling hinterland. A container port and massive industrial plants give way to olive groves and hilly fields. I meet Umut in a roadside park under the blazing sun. We make our introductions and then jump in the car. Umut Sen are opening a little office in town, shared with TARIM-SEN, the farm workers’ union. Umut Sen have little offices like this, most places they’re active, spaces to meet with workers and hold events. Their aim is to have a presence in every Organised Industrial Zone in the country, with regional industrial concentrations at the heart of the government’s development strategy. Umut tells me the left has spent too long in the city. They want to get out to the periphery, “where the radical left isn’t.”

The new office looks like it was once somebody’s flat. There are a few chairs and tables scattered around, but otherwise it’s not really furnished yet. There’s a nice balcony in the direct sun that overlooks the street. The walls are still bare, apart from a few posters for the union, TARIM-SEN. Umut explains that they’ve been around for a couple of years now. They had a big dispute two years ago in some nearby greenhouses supplying tomatoes for Lidl. About 450 workers worked there, of whom 80 were members. When they started to organise, some union members were sacked,7 so they started a campaign to demand compensation. The workers held protests and strikes and set off on a protest march to Ankara, a tradition picked up from the local miners. And just like the construction workers in Istanbul, the greenhouse workers struck against their immediate employer but directed their main focus upwards, at Lidl, demanding compensation from them too. Their campaign worked, in the sense that Lidl felt the heat, but the retailer responded by simply dropping the contract. The greenhouses downsized in response, shrinking from 450 workers to 150 and union membership tumbled to thirty.

Since then, TARIM-SEN has been trying to rebuild. We get back in the car, and Umut takes me on a tour of the greenhouses. They’re mostly staffed by women, while men from the region tend to work in the mines. The independent agricultural workers’ and independent miners’ unions work closely together, with men from the mines coming to help recruit at the greenhouses. The Agrobay farm, where the strike took place, looks pretty big from the road. Not quite on an American scale, but towards the bigger end of British industrial greenhouses. Row upon row of white polytunnels carpet the valley like military barracks, while power cables run overhead to the surrounding hills, blanketed by solar panels.

We pull up on a dirt road and survey the industrialised landscape in silence. I watch Umut’s eyes scanning the greenhouses and imagine all the hours he’s spent here on these roads, snatching conversations with workers in the early hours of the morning. I see myself in him - remembering early morning buses to the Amazon warehouse in Croydon, or weeknights wandering the streets looking for couriers to flyer. For a moment, it feels unreal that the whole immense weight and diversity of human history could be so compressed by the power of the market. That from councils estates in Yorkshire to Anatolian towns on the Black Sea, from tiny villages in rural Ghana to the Pearl River Delta, that billions of us could come to live such similar lives. A global working class. It feels almost like an acid flashback, but then Umut asks if I want to see the mines, and I snap back to focus. “Yeah definitely”

We circle back on ourselves and drive up into the hills. I don’t know enough about mining to really make sense of what I’m seeing - the mines I’m used to have all been closed for about four decades. The pits here look much fresher, almost clean, like the white cliffs of Dover gouged into forested hillsides. We wind through the hills for a while and eventually arrive at a pit. This now is actually filthy, everything covered in a thick layer of grey dirt. Filthy trucks shuttle in and out, but the aboveground activity seems fairly minimal. Two workers amble out of the front gate slowly, looking to see if we’re lost. We take a few moments to watch the trucks, then turn back toward the road to Soma.

Soma is really the reason I’m here to begin with. Notes from Below interviewed two miners from the Independent Union of Mine Workers (Bağımsız Maden İşçileri Sendikası), headquartered there, for Issue 23.³ The discussion was facilitated and translated by Umut Sen, and it’s through those connections that I was invited to visit. The union formed in 2018 as a breakaway from Dev-Maden-Sen (The Revolutionary Mine Workers Union, affiliated to DİSK). The founding members had been local leaders of the previous union, but split when the national leadership intervened to sabotage their growth rather than risk losing seats to them in upcoming elections.⁴

We arrive at the union headquarters, and I’m introduced to two more members of Umut Sen, who dedicate their time to supporting the union, and to the president and general secretary of the union. Everyone is warm and very generous, ordering round after round of tea and inviting me to stay the night if I’d like to. They tell me that after a major victory against the notorious Fernas company last year (the subject of the Notes from Below interview), management in the region has changed their approach to the union. They’ve become much more open to negotiations and resort less readily to overt repression. The union has grown to over 950 members, and they’re in regular contact with thousands of supporters. The economic crisis is biting here too, and redundancies are widespread, but for the time being, they mainly affect members of the yellow unions. They don’t fight back and are easier to sack. They tell me, though, that under the current conditions, many workers are happy to take the redundancy payments. They’re often heavily indebted and will use the cash to get clear, then pick up day work in agriculture or construction in cities.

For the time being, their main focus locally is preparing for mayday. The miners voted not to go to Taksim this year but instead organise a rally in Soma. The impact of the recent protests has been complex. The general secretary tells me that it’s temporarily slowed their industrial work, partially because many workers have been focused on the political crisis, but also because so many are scared of more aggressive repression. The workers, though, generally identify with the protests, even AKP supporters, because they see it as such a blatant issue of rights and freedoms. He goes on to explain that in the most recent election,s large parts of the Turkish working class backed right-wing opposition groups, but Soma was an exception. The majority of Soma’s workers turned out for the CHP, he argues, because despite recognising them as an establishment party, it’s been the electoral advance of the CHP, not smaller protest parties, that’s provided the main catalyst for the opposition movement and recent mass protests. This, he claims, is the main contribution that the union has made to the political movement: to show the workers in practice the power of resistance and direct confrontation.