The Perception of the Relationship between Trade Unions and Politics in Turkey: A Tracking on the Related Acts

Abstract

As a country located at the outside of ‘center’ according to conceptualisation of Immanuel Wallerstein, the born and rising of trade unions in Turkey has been in a quite late date when compared to the ‘central’ countries, especially to Britain. It’s understandable for every country to having its own traditions and cultural approaches toward labour relations. So there are several (may be more) industrial relations approaches (or traditions) in labour relations history. In some industrial relations systems, the raison d’etre of trade unions has been to protect and improve labour conditions and other labour issues via collective bargaining. In some traditions trade unions means more than that: to war with capitalism or to collapse it. And while in some traditions politics has been one of the most effective weapons for trade unions to protect working class, on the other hand in some systems politics has been one of the most dangerous activities of trade unions and in those systems usually political activities has been banned for the unions. Looking at the labour history in Turkey the latter tradition is a quite familiar approach. More than one century, all the acts that regulate the area for trade unions have seen the political area for unions as an unwelcome field. In that paper I intend to present all the related acts that had such a tendency and explore the main reasons under that approach. For that aim, I am going to examine the Act of 1909, first labour code (1936), Acts of 1947, 1963, 1983 and 2012.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n9p212