Communists and Compromisers: Explaining Divergences within Turkish Labor Activism, 1960-1980

In the mid-1960s, a schism split the Turkish labor movement into two confederations. One, the Confederation of Turkish Labor Unions (Türk-İş) continued to pursue a path that rejected militant activism and radical ideologies in favor of an American-inspired business unionism. The other, the Revolutionary Confederation of Labor Unions (DİSK), criticized Türk-İş’s policy of remaining “above party politics,” embracing both a radical socialist ideology, and organizing the most militant actions in Turkish labor history. This paper explores why these two confederations, facing the same set of incentive structures and background structural conditions adopted radically different courses of action. I seek to explain the split within the Turkish labor movement in the 1960s by focusing on how alternative ideologies emerged within the Turkish labor movement, in conjunction with alternative institutions. Insofar as the existing economic policies and the regime of labor relations in Turkey was increasingly seen as unfair, the founding members of DİSK developed a counter ideology characterized by a more radical political agenda that called for greater direct action on the part of Turkish workers. What emerged in Turkey was an ideologically fragmented labor movement where different institutions maintained (at times) distinct goals for the political and economic development of Turkey, distinct conceptions of the role labor unions should play politically, and as a result, different levels of collective political action