Bahar works as a factory operator on Türkiye’s Aegean coast. The married mother of three previously had a good friendship with the man who became her harasser, a fellow employee at her factory. “We called each other brother and sister,” she tells Equal Times. But as time went on, he began to stare at her and send her more intimate text messages. It was seven years ago, and Bahar (not her real name) still hasn’t recovered from the trauma it caused. She says that she has lost trust in men.

“At first I didn’t understand what was happening, I couldn’t put a name to it. Then I thought that maybe I had caused him to behave like that,” she says.

She stopped replying to his message and even blocked him but he found other channels to keep sending her messages. “I felt more and more stressed, more and more angry,” she says. Women are the minority in her factory, so she didn’t know who to talk to. After three weeks, she went to the union.

That’s where gender equality expert Nuran Gülenç (of the worker’s union Birleşik Metal-İş) stepped in and came up with a simple solution: she had the work shifts of Bahar and her harasser changed. Even then, he continued to seek her out at shift changes and approach her outside the factory. In front of other employees, he pretended that their relationship was normal, common behaviour for harassers. Gülenç suggested that the company fire him but Bahar didn’t want further retaliation: “We both needed the job”. She had to take medication for a while. The memory of the harassment she endured still fills her with stress and anger.

The regression of women’s rights in Türkiye

A feminist, mining engineer, consultant, auditor and labour relations expert for 25 years, Gülenç is the field agent responsible for analysing and resolving such conflicts in a country where at least 40 feminicides are registered every month and two out of 10 women suffer gender-based violence. In spite of this, Türkiye has not only failed to ratify the International Labour Organization (ILO) Violence and Harassment Convention, 2019 (No. 190, which is now five years old and ratified by 41 countries) and its accompanying Recommendation (No. 206) but also withdrew from the Istanbul Convention in 2021.

After the failed coup d’état in July 2016, the conservative Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became increasingly autocratic, taking steps to curb the independence of the judiciary, parliament, media, universities, and thus also human and women’s rights.

Erdoğan’s excuse for distancing himself from women’s and LGTBQ+ rights is that they are “an attack on the institution of the family”. In other words, women do not exist outside the family.

According to official Turkish data, the informal economy fell from 50 per cent in 2010 to 33 per cent in 2018. However, trade union audits indicate that the informal sector still accounts for 60 per cent of the country’s economy. The textile industry, one of the largest in the country whose main customer is Europe, employs 90 per cent of Türkiye’s working women, as well as a significant number of the country’s four million (primarily Syrian) refugees.

“One of the main problems in the textile industry is that almost all subcontractors are small, unlicensed workshops that account for almost all informal work and employ the majority of migrant workers without permits, so gender equality laws are not applied. Many foreign companies don’t know how much of their supply comes from these informal workshops,” explains Gülenç. She is working with the trade union confederation DISK to implement C190 provisions in practice using innovative and creative solutions.

She also works with the Dutch foundation Fair Wear to ensure good practices in the global textile industry. According to their audits, the high rate of informality in the Turkish sector is the main stumbling block for improvements, leading to less unionisation, more injustice and a larger gender pay gap (Türkiye was ranked 124th out of 146 countries in the World Economic Forum’s 2022 Global Gender Gap Report). Since 2016, Gülenç has intervened in some 40 cases of gender-based violence in the metal and textile sectors.

Foreign investment, the big incentive

“Since the pandemic, many Turkish companies have relied on investment from institutions such as the World Bank, the EBRD [European Bank for Reconstruction and Development] and large European companies. This means that they have to comply with the social values of these institutions in their business. The fight against violence and harassment is very important for these institutions. So we tell Turkish companies that if they don’t apply quotas and prevent gender-based violence and discrimination, they will simply lose these investments,” Gülenç tells Equal Times.

This strategy works. Foreign money and capitalism’s own mechanisms act as an incentive for companies to implement improvements.

Gülenç is part of a network of social partners, trade unions and feminist associations that promote rights through information campaigns, training and audits, and by forcing their application as occupational risk prevention in collective bargaining agreements. The best strategy to curb violence, they argue, is to increase the number of women among union representatives and in leadership positions. In the unions with which Gülenç works, their numbers have risen from zero to 30 per cent.

Tuğba Kahraman, an industrial engineer working in telecommunications, did her thesis in 2016 on female university students’ knowledge of women’s rights. She found that most of them had no knowledge of these rights. Kahraman herself was threatened with losing her previous job if she became pregnant. “I am considered a troublemaker for being a feminist. There are hardly any women in my sector,” she tells Equal Times.

Union action

In one instance, a couple was working in the same metalworking company when the union representative discovered that the woman was suffering domestic abuse. The union spoke to the manager and was able to secure her two months’ salary in advance to prevent her partner from leaving her penniless, so that she could proceed with a divorce.

To prevent violence against women within the family and at work, trade unions rely on UN conventions such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and national legislation such as Law 6284, passed in 2012 following Türkiye’s ratification of the Istanbul Convention in 2011. The trade unions concern themselves with domestic violence in addition to workplace violence because the perpetrators of domestic violence may also be work colleagues of their victims or may follow their victims to their workplace or meet them there.

Domestic violence is also linked to absenteeism, loss of concentration and motivation, and ultimately loss of employment for the abused person. C190 thus calls on governments to take appropriate measures to “recognise the effects of domestic violence” and “mitigate its impact in the world of work”.

“But these laws are not respected and national legislation is sometimes not even implemented. Conservative parties say they harm the family,” says Döne Gevher, general secretary of KESK Women, which brings together unions in the public sector representing education, health and municipal employees, among others. According to field studies, harassment is most reported in this sector, even though it is not the sector with the most harassment, thanks to a system of detection and reporting.

Gevher explains that her union has organised information campaigns on social networks and protests on important dates such as 8 March and 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. KESK advocates for a quota system to ensure parity in union representation and demands compliance with international treaties in its collective agreements. They also have a team of lawyers and take legal action where necessary.

At DISK’s headquarters in Istanbul, members recall a training session on gender-based violence when one of the workers there stood up and said: “I’ve slapped my wife before. You’re not going to tell me that that’s a crime?”

DISK general president Arzu Çerkezoğlu explains that in addition to the solutions mentioned above, including quotas for women, her confederation also demands “psychological support for victims and sanctions against male workers who inflict violence on their wives, including dismissal” in its collective agreements. DISK also demands the application of ILO Convention 100 on equal remuneration and 111 on discrimination, both ratified by Türkiye, as violence and harassment exacerbate inequalities, and inequalities fuel violence and harassment. In 2022 they secured a meeting with the then Minister of Labour Vedat Bilgin to demand the ratification of C190, though the government has yet to respond.

Equal Times contacted the Turkish Ministry of Labour to enquire about possible ratification but has not received a response at the time of publication of this article.

Güldane Yeni, a specialist at the TÜRK-İŞ union in Ankara, reports that her union conducts awareness-raising trainings on C190 in all Turkish provinces, as well as on social media, and has updated its statutes to include gender equality. The union also includes violence prevention, breastfeeding, maternity leave, childcare and child allowances in its collective agreements, and advocates for the care of children, the elderly and the disabled to be provided by the state.

The HAK-İŞ confederation has succeeded in getting companies in its sector to sign a “zero tolerance document against violence and harassment. For the first time in history, one of the ILO conventions is being implemented before it has been ratified,” explains Pinar Özcan, the union’s gender equality officer.

Like the other three unions, HAK-İŞ uses other international and local laws to implement many of the provisions of C190. “We have also created a social dialogue platform with the participation of all social partners, including the ILO, the UN Population Fund, the Ministry of Labour, the Ministry of Family, academia, Inditex, H&M, employers’ unions and garment industry unions,” Özcan adds.

A spokesperson for H&M told Equal Times that “all its suppliers must sign the company’s sustainability commitment,” and that they support all measures such as C190 and the accompanying Recommendation 206.