News

The Turkish Post Office, PTT (The General Directorate of Posts Telephone & Telegraph Corporation) has been dismissing subcontracted workers in preparation for the Privatisation of the Turkish Post Office. The number of workers who have been dismissed is 178 in Istanbul and 82 in Ankara. Throughout Turkey, 10 – 15 % of the PTT workers have lost their jobs.



These subcontracted workers are not doing anything different from the permanent workers. But the difference is that they are not part of the collective labour contract and they lack and form of job security.



UNI Post & Logistics Turkish affiliate, Haber-Is reports that the problems of the sub-contractor workers in Turkey is a gigantic issue.

Recently many leading companies in Turkey began to break the workers tasks into parts and hire subcontractors to undertake these tasks. In Turkcell for example the number of big sub-contractors is 72, excluding the small firms.

This poses enormous difficulties for the Turkish unions in organising the workers employed by these firms. The award of a certificate of competence to conclude a collective labour agreement is also a very time consuming process in Turkey often taking several years.

One other big difficulties for these postal workers is the duration of the contract concluded between the administration, i.e. PTT and the Sub-Contracting company, as it is normally for one year. At the end of the contract period, the tender is renewed and of course a new comer is always a strong possibility, particularly if the union has made serious gains in their organising efforts. This is why Haber-Is is having such difficulty in organising postal workers as there are now about 12,000 sub-contracted postal workers.

The more than 250 subcontracted workers who have lost their jobs have been the victims of the fact that a sub-contractor could not win the tender. Because of the processes going on in PTT to set the company up for a privatisation, a new tender was issued but with a lot less workers proposed, and therefore the number of the workers employed was reduced meaning workers were fired.

The PTT Administration did not declare the dismissals all at once, to try and prevent a massive reaction from the dismissed workers who were not given any rights and notice before dismissal.



The workers are fighting back and have set up a tent city outside the Ankara PTT headquarters. The dismissed sub contracted postal workers have said;



“We will not submit to the conditions. We will hold fast to our job, our bread and our honour. We are firmly resolved to struggle to the last.



Therefore we will not make for home since we were dismissed. We will not leave our workplaces until we get back our jobs. We set up a resistance tent on 5th January in front of PTT. Now we are at our third month of resistance.



We loudly say once more that we’ll get our jobs back, that we will not let the PTT be privatized and that we will never bow down to the enslavement under the name of subcontraction. We make our call to all the workers, labourers, syndicates and all the powers of social opposition for solidarity to our resistance and make it stronger”