Statement by the DİSK Enlarged Board of Presidents, which convened on Tuesday, June 24, 2025, at the General-Is Headquarters in Ankara.
Humanity is under great threat. We are living in a period where hunger, poverty, inequalities, injustices, discrimination, wars, and massacres are increasing all over the world. A system that was presented to us as the “end of history” half a century ago has plagued the world with a recklessness that could bring about its end, from nuclear war to the climate crisis.
For half a century, democratic rights have been eroded along with wages to “increase profit rates.”
All universal rights are being destroyed along with trade union rights so that “workers do not speak out.”
Civilizations, nature, and the world are being annihilated so that “all of humanity bows to the greed of capital.”
Those who govern the world are doing the exact opposite of the International Labour Organization’s century-old slogan, “If you want peace, cultivate justice”: they are trying to sustain an unjust order through wars. They are spilling the blood of people in our region, from Palestine to Iran. They are planning to multiply the budget allocated for armament in all member states as a key agenda item of the NATO summit. They are deciding to cut from education, health, and pensions to allocate a larger portion of the value we produce to war and arms dealers.
On the other hand, everywhere in the world, dignified resistance, opposition, and struggles are rising against both the injustices created by capitalism and the imperialist aggression, dictators, and racist, discriminatory, and reactionary political movements that protect these injustices.
To pull the world out of this dark tunnel, struggles for democracy, peace, justice, and a world where we live humanely and in brotherhood are rising everywhere, especially on the shoulders of the working class and laborers. As the world’s population becomes rapidly proletarianized, the salvation of the world falls more and more under the responsibility of the working class.
In our country, as it becomes increasingly difficult for laborers to survive under the pressure of distributive injustices, we are also experiencing one of the most severe periods of oppression in the history of the Republic. We are living in a Turkey where everyone who objects and opposes is attempted to be silenced with pressure.
The AKP, which has made it impossible to gain public support with its class and political choices aimed at making the poor poorer and the rich richer, is trying to maintain its power by challenging the will of the people. It is attempting to govern this country of wage-earners with more pressure and a politicized judiciary; while freedom of expression and trade union rights are suppressed, our right to vote and be elected is also being encroached upon. As prisons fill with politicians and mayors who defeated the AKP at the ballot box, Turkey moves further away every day from being a country where those elected by the people leave office through elections.
As prisons fill with imprisoned unionists, journalists, and politicians, children go to school hungry; they lose their lives in workplaces they are sent to instead of school; millions whose trade union rights are usurped are condemned to the minimum wage; pensioners, whom we should be providing a humane life for, are fighting for survival; femicides and mafia feuds become commonplace on the streets; our nature is plundered on the orders of corporations. As Turkey distances itself from democracy, our bread, our future, our nature, and our country are being stolen from us.
Precisely for this reason, the Turkish working class is being kept under a great blockade and siege so that this massive cycle of plunder and injustice is not broken. Trade union rights are trampled underfoot, and going on strike is almost considered a crime. The collective bargaining system is effectively being destroyed. Even enforcing existing collective bargaining agreements has become an issue.
The Global Rights Index prepared by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), of which DİSK is a member, was announced to the world at the ILO Conference. The published report has confirmed that our country remains among the world’s 10 worst countries for worker rights in 2025 due to the conditions we are living in. We regret to state that the Turkish working class does not deserve this grim picture.
It is our duty to end this shame for our country by growing our organization and struggle; by breaking the barriers and overcoming the obstacles for all our unions; and by ending the dominance of the mentality that prevents unionization and boasts about strike bans.
It is the primary concern of the working class to get rid of those who consider it their right to disregard the law and violate the Constitution. As the law becomes a completely political tool, we are all losing. The Turkish Statistical Institute, a public institution, continues to toy with the bread of workers, laborers, and pensioners by not complying with court decisions we have won in lawsuits. With concealed data and an understated inflation rate, the bread of workers, laborers, and pensioners is shrinking. In an environment where the rule of law has vanished, those who consider themselves superior are impoverishing us.
As DİSK has always said, “democracy is the bread of the worker.” For this reason, we are carrying out the labor struggle and the democracy struggle together. We have acted and will continue to act with this awareness while growing our organization; while fighting for humane working and living conditions in workplaces; while organizing women’s strikes; while holding the most widespread, well-attended, and “youngest” May 1st rallies of recent years; and while bringing the struggle for justice and democracy from workplaces to public squares during the “March 19 process,” when the right of the people to vote and be elected was being encroached upon.
The imprisonment of our comrades, General-Is Izmir Branch No. 8 President Deniz Şahin Gümüştekin and Izmir Branch No. 3 Women’s Commission President Mine Bilir, who organized this dignified struggle, will not deter us from our path; on the contrary, it will strengthen our will and determination to carry out the labor and democracy struggle together. The groups that have systematically targeted, singled out, and demonized DİSK with “copy-paste” clichés, ready-made trolls, and a politicized judiciary have achieved no other result than to strengthen our unity, our struggle, and our solidarity, and they will not. DİSK will not take a single step back from its struggle for labor and democracy against this order of oppression and exploitation.
In light of these findings, our Board of Presidents has decided to:
- Strengthen solidarity and the struggle at the national and international trade union movement level for the release of our imprisoned Presidents, Deniz Şahin Gümüştekin and Mine Bilir.
- Continue the legal and de facto struggle against the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK), which plays a significant role in the increasing income inequality within the framework of “justice in income, justice in taxes, justice in the country”; and within this scope, to organize a widely attended meeting with other labor and professional organizations in front of TÜİK in Ankara on July 3, 2025.
- Intensify efforts to develop common action and discourse unity with labor organizations on fundamental issues of labor, including the compensation of workers’ losses in the Public Framework Protocol, the updating of the minimum wage in July, and Justice in Taxation.
- Continue the struggle against the denial of pensioners’ right to organize and against their being condemned to hunger/poverty, and within this scope, provide confederation-level support for upcoming actions and events.
- Conduct training activities in various areas, especially for women and young workers, to train cadres who will carry DİSK into the future.
- Plan events and activities, with the participation of the DİSK Central Executive Board, across Turkey through our Regional Representatives, in line with the “DİSK Organizing Mobilization” we will launch with our call, “Don’t be condemned to a minimum existence, become a union member.”