The Lezita strike, which started on March 7 in the Kemalpaşa district of Izmir, is still ongoing. Workers organized with Öz Gıda-İş, affiliated to Hak-İş, started the strike after the Lezita bosses refused to sit down with Öz Gıda-İş. When Lezita bosses realized that a strike was coming, they tried to use foreign workers from India as strike breakers. The International Communist Party rejects all discourse that seeks to divide the working class, be it religion or race. Based on this, we need to state from the beginning that reaching out to foreign workers to include them in the strike is essential for the success of the Lezita strike.

The strike of nearly 2,000 workers against poor working conditions, low wages and overtime pressure has still not reached a definitive conclusion. Two days before the strike, on March 5, the company hired foreign workers in order to use them as scabs. It must be added that in this case the hired workers are not to blame; the blame lies with the boss himself and his cheap scab tactics. Of course, when it comes to profit, the bourgeois do not refrain from such acts. In order to break the strike, they first tried to buy the vacant area where the strike was taking place. When that didn’t work, they surrounded the strike site with wires and tried to drown out the workers’ voices with loudspeakers. When that didn’t work, they hid behind their biggest defenders: helmets and gendarmes. At the request of the gendarmes, the service shuttles attempted to illegally prevent participation in the strike. But despite the outrageous efforts, workers’ participation in the strike continued to grow. Workers demonstrated in the squares as a symbol of the determination of the striking workers. Both fascist and bourgeois left-wing parties tried to use the sensation created by the strike for their own ambitions, linking it to a struggle for national identity. The International Communist Party will tirelessly repeat what has been said, from Marx to Lenin: Workers have no homeland! The main enemy is at home! The efforts of the bourgeois parties to hide the class struggle behind a national identity will bring nothing but harm to the working class. In order to destroy proletarian class unity in the strike, the bourgeois left is attempting to exonerate the bourgeoisie, the perpetrators, by portraying the strike as a struggle between people with Turkish identity and those without, i.e., Indian workers. The bourgeois left has once again shown its ineptitude in hiding its nationalism under the name of patriotism, at the slightest opportunity showing once again that it prefers the national flag of the bourgeois nation to the flag of proletarian internationalism.

Abalıoğlu Holding, to which Lezita belongs, grew aggressively between 2004 and 2016. Founded in 2006, Lezita, which grew with employment incentives and loans, was of course not satisfied with this and did not pay overtime wages to its workers. In short, Abalıoğlu Holding, and therefore Lezita, benefited from the current government as much as possible. But by August 2016, Baha Abalıoğlu was arrested in a FETÖ (Fetullah Gülen Terrorist Organization as the Gülen Cult is referred to in Turkey) investigation and released after a night in custody.

It is unusual and misleading for a Hak-İş union to appear so instrumental and even leading such a strike. Lezita workers should not lose sight of the fact that the Hak-İş leadership stands behind their strike only for show, while simultaneously calculating how to undermine and end the strike at the first opportunity. It should not be forgotten that the regime unions, as an apparatus of the bourgeois state, have historically served the interests of the current government, not the interests of the working class, and that Hak-İş, which was founded to represent bourgeois Islamist ideology in the trade union arena, is the private sector confederation most preferred by the current government.

The enemy of the Lezita workers is not the foreign workers brought in to break the strike and who are unaware of what is going on. In reality, the enemies of Lezita workers are the company bosses, the bourgeois parties that try to use the struggle for their own ambitions, and the Öz Gıda-İş and Hak-İş piecards who look for every opportunity to undermine the struggle.