In December 2025, workers at the Şık Makas textile factory in Turkey called on workers’ organizations abroad to participate in a week of international solidarity after months of unpaid wages, mass layoffs without compensation, and sustained pressure to accept employer-aligned union representation. Their struggle developed through prolonged resistance to stolen wages, repression by the bourgeois state, and attempts by established unions to shut down independent organizing. Rejecting state mediation and corporatist unionism, the workers organized from below through collective assemblies, walkouts, and pickets, maintaining direct control over their struggle and coordinating with independent class-struggle unions such as BİRTEK-SEN (United Textile, Weaving and Knitting Workers’ Union of Turkey).

Because the conflict was embedded in global garment supply chains, workers abroad responded by organizing coordinated informational pickets outside distributors connected to the Sik Makas textile factory beyond Turkey’s borders in an effort to demonstrate solidarity with the struggle of Turkish workers as a show of proletarian internationalism, even if such tactics in of themselves can not directly mass greater leverage against the employer, they can raise workers spirits and will to struggle.

The International Week of Solidarity with Şık Makas workers (December 13–21, 2025) marked a small moment of solidarity between organized class unionist forces, as militants of the International Communist Party, working within the Class Struggle Action Network, coordinated solidarity actions alongside BİRTEK-SEN. These efforts led to actions in four Turkish cities, four U.S. cities, and one Canadian city, raised 21,517.54 Turkish lira for the strike, established links with Italian textile workers in SUDD COBBAS, and demonstrated in practice the necessity of international working-class action beyond national and corporatist limits.

Turkish State Control and Worker Rebellion

The history of Turkish unionism demonstrates a consistent pattern of state domination over working-class organizations, interrupted periodically by explosive rank-and-file rebellions that break through legal constraints. In the midst of a deepening economic and social crisis, contradiction between the working class’ need for genuine defensive organizations clash with the capitalist state’s imperative to contain and neutralize working-class militancy.

The 1960s and 1970s saw remarkable rank-and-file workers’ rebellions, most notably the June 15-16 revolt in 1970 involving hundreds of thousands of workers around Istanbul fighting against the capitalist state’s attempts to subordinate the union movement to its power by outlawing the Confederation of Revolutionary Workers’ Unions (DİSK), the main confederation of base unions in Turkey at the time and consolidating the organized workers into the already existing confederation of regime unions, the Confederation of Turkish Workers’ Unions (Türk-İş).

Following the 1980 military coup when DİSK was finally outlawed, the Turkish state restructured labor relations to eliminate any remnants of independent working-class organization. The subsequent legal framework created a system where officially recognized unions function as appendages of capitalist state control, their leadership integrated into mechanisms of social pacification. Strikes were severely restricted, collective bargaining circumscribed by state arbitration, and union recognition made contingent on demonstrating "peaceful" relations with employers and state authorities.

This collaborationist structure resembles what occurred in Italy under fascism and what exists in various forms throughout the capitalist world, such as in the US with the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Following the 1980 coup in Turkey, Türk-İş has continued to be the largest labor confederation, operating firmly within this framework of class collaboration, its leadership maintaining close ties to both capitalist state apparatus and employer associations. As for DİSK, refounded in 1992, while still a confederation of base unions including several that are quite combative, it translates its name as “Progressive” rather than “Revolutionary” nowadays and often limits itself to symbolic actions.

When workers have attempted to use official union structures to defend their interests, they invariably find themselves betrayed. The Şık Makas textile workers who were members of Öz İplik-İş, the regime-controlled textile union belonging to Confederation of Real Turkish Unions (Hak-İş) which directly aligns with the ruling party and Islamist bourgeois politics. For roughly a year Şık Makas workers were consistently paid late. When workers finally said “enough” and stopped work to demand their unpaid wages, they were met with threats and insults from the employer and Öz İplik-İş, who sided with management over workers.

When workers resigned from this collaborationist union and joined the combative union BİRTEK-SEN, Öz İplik-İş handed over their names to the employer. What followed was predictable: mass terminations, with more than a thousand workers fired.

Repressive legal architecture cannot eliminate the antagonisms between capital and labor. When exploitation intensifies beyond tolerable limits, when wages disappear entirely, when workers face destitution, the class struggle erupts regardless of legal prohibitions.

BİRTEK-SEN: A Class Union in Formation

In 2020 textile worker uprisings spread across 35 factories in southeastern Turkey. Workers organized strikes, workplace occupations, and confrontations with police outside official union structures. Workers won concrete victories at facilities including Artemis, Şireci, and Marbit despite, or rather, because of, their willingness to break through legal constraints.

BİRTEK-SEN emerged in 2022 from these struggles, formed by union militants who recognized that genuine working-class defense requires organization independent from both state control and employer collaboration. The union’s formation is precisely the process true communists have long identified that when material conditions deteriorate sufficiently and existing organizations prove themselves enemies of workers interests, workers will create new structures capable of actual struggle.

Since its formation, BİRTEK-SEN led the Özak Textile struggle in Urfa in November 2024 and the strike wave at the Başpınar Organized Industrial Zone in Antep in February 2025, (reported in TCP no. 56 and TICP no. 63). In these struggles the union sharpened the piercing strength of the workers by generalizing the strikes across factories rather than leaving workers isolated or relying on pressuring the companies with lawsuits. During the Başpınar strike wave, capital’s thugs cracked down on workers, arresting and imprisoning chairman Mehmet Türkmen on charges of "violating freedom of labour" and "incitement to commit a crime" for supporting the textile worker struggles. Still, both the Özak struggle and the Başpınar strike wave pressed forward and won on major demands.

Additionally, BİRTEK-SEN has made concentrated efforts to organize Syrian immigrant workers facing super-exploitation in Turkish textile factories regardless of their documentation outside of their official membership, and has mobilized to support struggles across sectors such as the native and immigrant foundry workers’ strike in Gaziantep in January 2023 (reported in TCP no 51).

BİRTEK-SEN has consistently supported the most combative worker actions. When over 1,000 Şık Makas workers were fired for leaving Öz İplik-İş and joining BİRTEK-SEN, the union organized workplace occupations and reached out internationally for solidarity rather than retreating to legalistic appeals. Now, Öz İplik-İş is labeling the union as a terrorist organization.

BİRTEK-SEN has not yet achieved the full program of class unionism, but its emergence marks the maturation of genuine working-class defense organizations born of the increasingly worse material conditions of capitalist exploitation.

The Şık Makas Struggle

At the Şık Makas factory in Tokat, producing clothing for Zara, H&M, Mango, Levi’s, and other international brands, over 2,200 textile workers have been kept at wages below Turkey’s official poverty line. Starting in August 2024, hundreds stopped receiving wages entirely. Workers were forced to resign or were dismissed without severance, facing evictions, debt, children pulled from school, and severe psychological distress while global fashion corporations continued profiting from the factory’s production.

When workers stopped work over unpaid wages in October, Öz İplik-İş immediately sided with management, pressured workers back to work, and helped justify mass firings by spreading false accusations of violence. Hundreds of workers subsequently left the regime union and joined BİRTEK-SEN, recognizing that their official union functioned as an instrument of their exploitation rather than their defense.

The Şık Makas workers’ struggle encapsulates the broader crisis facing the working class globally with the intensification of exploitation within global supply chains, collaborationist unions betraying workers at every turn, and the necessity of organizing outside official structures to wage genuine struggle. Like their class brothers and sisters in many other countries outside the West, Şık Makas workers produce products sold in stores throughout North America and Europe, their exploitation being directly connected to the profits extracted from retail workers in those regions – all serving the same multinational corporations’ accumulation drive.

International Coordination

Upon receiving BİRTEK-SEN’s call, ICP militants within CSAN organized coordinated responses. Actions in Turkey including Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Tokat, and in the US in Oregon, Illinois, North Carolina, and New Mexico as well as in Canada.

The working class confronts the same enemies across borders. When Zara and H&M exploit Turkish textile workers through their supply chains, they implement the same profit-maximization strategies driving exploitation throughout their global operations. Workers in different countries fighting the same corporations must coordinate their struggles.

Cross-sector coordination strengthens working-class power. The campaign called on workers throughout the supply chain production, logistics, retail to recognize their common interest in supporting the Şık Makas workers’ struggle in Turkey. While practical limitations prevented full realization of this coordination, it is an important step in the direction that workers must take if their organization is to take on the attributes of a struggle capable of defending itself against the interconnected global capitalist agenda.

The Party’s Task

We are not in a revolutionary situation. The working class remains largely atomized. Yet capitalism’s contradictions continue producing explosions of struggle. Communist militants must participate in these struggles and work toward their maximum development.

BİRTEK-SEN’s emergence represents an objective process driven by material conditions. When exploitation intensifies beyond tolerable limits and existing organizations prove collaborationist, workers create new structures. Communists do not "create" these developments, but must recognize their significance and work within them.

What makes BİRTEK-SEN significant is its break from collaborationist unionism. Its formation outside legal structures, organization of exploited immigrant workers, and rejection of collaboration emerge not from revolutionary ideology but from practical necessities workers face under intensified exploitation.

This is how class unions emerge, not from declarations but from material conditions making collaboration impossible and independent struggle necessary. Textile workers facing wage theft and mass firings have no recourse within official structures. They must organize outside the legal apparatus or accept absolute exploitation.

Supporting such developments means participating in struggles, clarifying their broader significance, and building international connections. We prefigure necessary organizational frameworks anticipating sharper confrontations to come. As crisis deepens and inter-imperialist tensions escalate, ruling-class assaults on working-class standards will intensify, producing explosive responses. The existence of embryonic class unions and practical international coordination experience will prove invaluable.

The road to revolution remains long and difficult. Yet even in periods of working-class retreat, the fundamental antagonism continues producing struggles pointing toward revolutionary conclusions. BİRTEK-SEN’s emergence, Turkish textile uprisings, and Şık Makas international solidarity demonstrate that class struggle continues even when the revolutionary party remains small and the working class atomized.

Our task is steadfastness in this work, participating in every genuine working-class struggle, clarifying revolutionary implications, and building organizational frameworks that will prove necessary when conditions sharpen toward revolutionary confrontation.

The Şık Makas solidarity campaign demonstrated that international working-class coordination remains possible even in difficult periods. Workers across multiple countries organized coordinated actions to support Turkish textile workers’ struggle against multinational corporations. They raised money, built practical connections between workers in different countries, and applied pressure on the corporations profiting from exploitation. This work represents a small but significant step toward the international working-class organization that the struggle against capitalism requires.

Solidarity with Şık Makas Workers!

For Combative Class Unions!

Workers of the World, Unite!