04.02.2010

Sacked workers step up protest

Workers are resisting attempts to make them pay for dismantling the state's tobacco monopoly. Esen Uslu reports

Marquees erected by tobacco workers camped in thecentre of Ankara signify their determination to fight. But they are just one symptom of Turkey’s rapidly changing agricultural and industrial relations.

The tobacco and alcohol monopoly, Tekel - one of the state economic enterprises (SEE) that have been the mainstay of Turkey’s import-substitution and autarchy-seeking nationalist economic policies - has ceased to exist. Its dismantling follows a long-drawn-out struggle between those politicians who enjoyed the patronage of ‘jobs for votes’ as well as ‘farming subsidies for votes’, on the one side, and the international tobacco companies and finance capital seeking to cream off the lucrative profits from cigarette-making, on the other.

During the financial crisis of 2001, when the state-guaranteed banking system of Turkey collapsed, the so-called ‘IMF programme’ insisted on the demise of Tekel as one of the conditions for a $15 billon emergency loan. A new finance minister was ‘imported’ from the World Bank, and he put 15 new laws before the Grand National Assembly for quick adoption in order to remove all obstacles in the way of the loan.

The passage of the Tobacco Act was not easy, despite the desperate financial situation. A minister resigned in protest, the president vetoed it after it was quickly voted through parliament, and it had to go through various parliamentary stages before becoming law in January 2002. The act regulated and reorganised the tobacco industry from cultivation to cigarette manufacture.

Leaf tobacco used to be one of Turkey’s prime exports - a rare commodity earning much needed foreign currency. However, oriental tobacco, which was once king, has lost its importance in the face of competition from Virginia varieties, which are used more widely in modern filter cigarettes. Now oriental tobacco is mainly used as a 10%-15% flavouring ingredient added to Virginia.

Since the late Ottoman era, the state has had a monopoly on tobacco cultivation and cigarette production. It enjoyed both foreign currency earnings and tax returns from the industry, and encouraged widespread cultivation. The Aegean and Black Sea coasts became prime tobacco-growing regions, as was the Turkish part of Kurdistan, renowned for a particular oriental cultivation among the arid hills. This variety was not legally exported, but was widely available and much loved in the Middle East in the form of rolling tobacco, especially in Syria and Iraq.

The law abolishing the tobacco monopoly brought in a new form of production: growers now need a purchase contract from a producer or exporter before cultivation. The result was to reduce both the area taken up by tobacco and the number of growers. Before the 2002 act, there were about half a million tobacco growers, but this figure has now been reduced to about 200,000.

The law also created a secondary ‘securitised’ financial market, where purchase contracts are traded. Consequently most of the sharecroppers who used to cultivate tobacco on land rented from large landowners went bust, and became migrant agricultural labourers. The Kurdish growers suffered most, since they were unable to find any lawful export agency to fix a purchase contract.

The second important aspect of the Tobacco Act was the immediate termination of state subsidies in the form of the ‘price-supporting purchase’ of tobacco by Tekel that had ensured tobacco farmers received a guaranteed income. For years this situation had been ridiculed in the liberal press as an example of SEE inefficiency, as Tekel was obliged by law to purchase all tobacco that remained unsold. Some was used to produce the cheap and low-quality cigarettes that are now unfashionable, and the remainder was stored in depots at great expense for up to six years before eventually being burned as waste.

There was a theatrical ritual every year following the declaration of the annual purchasing price. The growers would always dispute the initial figure and demand a higher one. During election years or when a shaky coalition government was trying to weather some storm, they usually got what they wanted. And towards the end of the purchase season Tekel was frequently unable to pay the agreed price for what it had purchased, since the treasury would not honour its obligation and provide the necessary sums in time. When conditions became desperate, the opposition - even the revolutionary youth - helped small-scale tobacco-growers to organise demonstrations against the purchase price or unpaid state bills.

Tekel’s critics said that direct income support for farmers threatened with loss of livelihood would be more cost-effective. They claimed that all the corruption caused by the existence of a state monopoly would be ended if a free market were established between competing private enterprises in industry and export, and growers would benefit from prices determined by the international leaf tobacco market. Such claims have, of course, been proved false. Tekel and all its paraphernalia have been abolished, but it is the tobacco workers and small growers who have been made to pay the price.

Privatisation

Tekel previously owned six cigarette factories employing around 3,000 workers and several leaf tobacco handling facilities. It enjoyed a 70% share of the cigarette market.

The privatisation of cigarette-making facilities was implemented through a tendering process. After two previous failed attempts the tender was completed in just 17 minutes in February 2008, when British American Tobacco completed an assets-only purchase: that is, it acquired only the factories and the stock of tobacco without any obligation regarding the workers. BAT has since closed five of the six factories and reduced the number of workers to 400. The one remaining factory provides BAT with a much reduced one-third share of the cigarette market.

During the privatisation, the bitter pill of redundancy was sugar-coated for workers with the option of transfer to Tekel leaf tobacco handling facilities, which remained in operation. Those facilities employed over 9,000 workers, who prepared the tobacco purchased from growers for processing and storage. About 2,500 workers transferred from the privatised cigarette-making facilities inflated the numbers employed in leaf tobacco handling to almost 12,000.

However, as the new regime of contract-based cultivation became the norm, there was not much demand for Tekel’s remaining leaf tobacco handling facilities. The workers discarded by the privatised cigarette factories had been transferred to dead-end enterprises. Now they too are to be closed and their employees declared redundant. The government says that the workers had been paid a full wage for doing nothing for more than a year and this could not be sustained.

The workers have now been offered employment in the other state-owned companies, but on a temporary basis, under clause 4c of the Public Employment Act. That statue removes all previous so-called ‘privileges’ enjoyed by state-employed workers compared to those in the private sector - ie, protection from redundancies and higher wages. The ‘4c status’ of the ex-Tekel workers means four to 10 months temporary work to be offered within a year, but on reduced pay and without seniority benefit (this entitled workers to a lump sump payment determined by length of employment when their employment contract was terminated).

The transfer of workers to the handling facilities had the effect of deferring the crisis by reducing the initial anger against privatisation and redundancies. However, when the time came to close down the handling facilities, the offer of employment under 4c status was seen as the sop it was.

Union reaction to the closure of the cigarette factories had been very muted. The protests organised by the workers soon fizzled out when union support was not forthcoming. However, when the government insisted that leaf tobacco handling facilities must close and offered only temporary employment to those made redundant, the widespread discontent of the workers forced the union to act.

There was an unofficial ballot of tobacco workers on January 6 and the proposal for direct action was adopted by a wide margin. This was the first example of democratic decision-making in Turkey’s red-tape-ridden trade union movement for some considerable time.

Tobacco workers have not only forced their union to take action, but forced the trade union confederation Turk-Is to support them too. As there had seemed no chance of an official strike, the workers devised new methods of struggle. They heckled prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at an event organised by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), and staged demonstrations and sit-ins. They occupied the Turk-Is building, forcing the confederation to call a demonstration on January 17 in Ankara. When this was held, a group of workers occupied the platform and demanded support for continuous action, including a general strike, until victory. They also upped the ante by staging a hunger strike when the government tried to use police to disperse the demonstration, setting up camp in the middle of Ankara.

Although the government has offered concessions, including an increase in the guaranteed period of employment from 10 to 11 months (!), it was adamant that the redundancies must be carried out on January 31, provoking the resumption of the hunger strike by militant workers. Six union confederations called a one-day protest strike for February 4.

According to Erdogan, “The Tekel workers’ strike is illegal and this illegal strike has exceeded its initial goals. It has now turned into a campaign against the government. The workers should end their protests ... otherwise the government will use all legal means to end their actions.”

Unexpected Support

Up to very recently the story had been a repeat of what has happened in several other sectors of Turkey’s economy where privatisation has been the order of the day. The state’s holdings in the glass, paper, sugar, textiles, meat, fish and leather industries have all been sold off one by one. Many of the privatised facilities were subsequently closed, workers were made redundant and numerous small farmers lost their livelihoods.

Almost all of these attacks were met with scant resistance and were virtually ignored by the social democrats and other parliamentary opposition parties. However, the tobacco workers have received unexpected support. The leader of the so-called social democratic Republican Peoples Party (CHP), Deniz Baykal, has backed them against the government. There is more than a hint of encouragement from the parliamentary opposition for workers’ radical action to bring down the AKP: “It is not the military, but Tekel workers who will throw you out of power,” Baykal warned the government.

The CHP believes that the AKP is now on shaky ground. Its initiative to move towards a resolution of the long-frozen Kurdish, Armenian and Alevi ‘problems’, as well as its attempts to push out the junta nostalgics in the armed forces and state bureaucracy, have created a nationalist and reactionary backlash. In the face of this opposition the government has back-tracked and reeled in its initiatives, leading to disappointment among its own supporters. These vacillations have provided the opposition with an opportune moment to trigger a political crisis and the CHP is now playing that card for all its worth.

And the left has jumped on the bandwagon. All the left publications have declared their fundamental opposition to privatisation and many have strongly supported direct working class action, including calls for a general strike. Several left organisations have seen in the tobacco workers’ struggle the awaited vanguard action heralding a resurgent working class after such a long hiatus. Some have also claimed that the tobacco workers have proved that the dynamics of Turkish society do not revolve around the “national-democratic” struggle of the Kurds or the “religious-sectarian demands” of the Alevis, but depend on workers’ struggles over jobs and wages.

I am afraid I would not give much credence to such views, since the action of the tobacco workers is not that of a vanguard of the resurgent working class, but the rearguard action of a section of working class which has already lost the initiative, and is chasing a losing cause. Despite the noises of the parliamentary opposition, they are not capable of bringing about a political crisis that would topple the government. And despite the positive achievements of workers’ direct action, which have undermined nationalist and religious illusions at least temporarily, the tobacco workers’ basic demands have aimed to protect their ‘privileged’ status separating them from the rest of the working class.

Nevertheless, a skirmish between a section of the working class and the bourgeois government will certainly provide lasting lessons.