Tanya Singh: Can you tell us about your union?
Bala Ulaş Ersay: Back in 2013, DGD-Sen was founded by workers who had been fired from Migros Turkey’s warehouses — the same company we’re striking against now. When they first tried to organize in 2009, none of the traditional unions wanted to organize subcontracted warehouse workers. So they had to build their own union, one that would actually fight for precarious, subcontracted labor in these giant retail warehouses.
This was happening at a time when retail in Turkey was transforming. These big companies had existed since the ’80s, but after the neoliberal turn in the ’90s and 2000s, they swallowed up small shops and built massive warehouses on the outskirts of cities like Istanbul. That’s where DGD-Sen took root.
But there was a hurdle from the start. Changing the status of occupation through legal loopholes is a common tactic among corporations in Turkey. Previously, warehouse workers were typically divided into the “Shipbuilding, Maritime Shipping, Warehousing, and Storage” and “Transportation” occupations by employers — a legal trick that blocked them from choosing their own union, standing united, and negotiating a real collective agreement. This is a clear scam to strip workers of union rights. DGD-Sen has been engaging in a legal battle to stop this union-busting practice since its foundation. Seeing the rapid growth of the nationwide strike, Migros declared that it would transfer all of its subcontracted warehouse workers into its staff, but also change their occupational status to “Trade/Office” workers to prevent DGD-Sen from organising in its warehouses entirely.
In 2022, we organised a strike at the Migros warehouse in Esenyurt, Istanbul, lasting around 16 days. When the company began firing organizers, DGD-Sen took the resistance straight to the company owner’s mansion. We held a peaceful demonstration to put pressure on the company management to recognize DGD-Sen and start the formal negotiations with the union, but the police arrested the organizers and Migros workers.
Now, it’s happening again, but this time it’s spread like wildfire: 12 warehouses across 10 cities in Turkey. And after seeing this grow, workers from other retail giants started organizing under DGD-Sen by forming committees, and some of those warehouses have already launched their own strike. For the first time in DGD-Sen’s history, we have a real shot at winning multiple collective agreements at once.
TS: What are the workers striking over?
BUE: In Turkey, most companies did not announce new salaries at the beginning of the new year. You end up realizing your new salary when it hits your bank account in February. But Migros made a strategic ‘mistake’: they announced the new salaries of their workers a week early and assumed they could easily convince the workers that they made a decent pay increase. Workers saw the numbers — barely 1% above the minimum wage, way below the poverty line — and exploded with anger. They reached out to us and quickly mobilized.
We already had many members in the Esenyurt warehouse, and once the strike organizing began there, workers in other locations joined in. That spread is crucial. If it were just one warehouse, it wouldn’t have been as impactful as it is now. But now it’s nationwide, and it’s pulling in other parts of the working class.
The salary offer was a hunger wage. With inflation, workers lose 3–4% of their pay in a single month. By mid-year, their wages evaporate through taxes and inflation. You can’t live on this, even without a family.
But beyond wages, there’s another attack we take very seriously: the illegal changing of workers’ occupation status.
TS: Could you talk about why Migros's attempt to reclassify workers from Sector 16 (Transportation/Storage) to Sector 10 (Trade/Office) is dangerous? How does it hurt worker safety and the union?
BUE: Trade/Office line of occupation in Turkey has 4 million registered workers, and there are effectively only two unions with enough members to sign a collective agreement for these workers: Tez-Koop-İş and Koop-İş, both of them are yellow unions. Transferring workers from the subcontractor into Migros staff was one of our demands when we went on strike, and we still insist on this. But Migros announced that they are formalizing the transfer into their staff with a change in the formal occupation status, just to force the workers to become members of their preferred corporate friendly union and ban DGD-Sen from their warehouses.
What we see clearly today is a systemic issue with many stakeholders. Corporations can instantly change workers’ occupation status to kick out an independent union and force their workers to become members of their preferred ones. Even though this is illegal, the court cases take up to three years. So workers are forced to become members of a yellow union, suffering poverty wages, and by the time the court rules in our favor, the damage is done.
There is also a life-and-death safety issue. Migros warehouses are being registered under the “Trade/Office” sector, like cashiers in the stores, which means far weaker safety regulations. They’re trading workers’ physical safety for control and union-busting.
And workers are left with only two “choices,” both yellow unions bound by what they call a “gentleman’s rule”: if you resign from one, you can’t join the other. You’re completely alone against the company, and with them working as extensions of the company’s HR department, they often snitch the workers’ names to the company as “provocateurs” and get them fired. The relationship between the yellow union Tez-Koop-İş and Migros is like a revolving door of exploitation. Veyzel Cingöz was a senior member in the management of Tez-Koop-İş and later became the owner of the subcontractor firm at the Esenyurt warehouse, exploiting the same workers he was supposed to represent earlier. These alone show the level of corruption and impunity within the yellow union and how it operates as an extension of the company’s HR department.
That’s why the current strike is so explosive. At its peak, nearly 5,500 of Migros’s 7,500 warehouse workers walked out—an absolute majority demanding the right to a union of their choice. And how has the company responded? By firing around 300 active organizers under “Code 46,” a clause for criminal acts like theft or assault. They’re treating strikers as criminals, even though firing workers before negotiations is illegal.
TS: With Migros firing people en masse, how is the union fighting illegal corporate actions in the courts while simultaneously sustaining the morale and collective power of workers facing such severe personal and legal retaliation?
BUE: That’s actually a great question. What keeps us motivated is a simple fact: we’ve already beaten this brutal company before. In 2022, we won—in one warehouse, but it was a huge victory. It was the first time we officially got our foot in the door. And now, the pioneers leading this strike are the ones who gained their experience from that fight. They’re the ones saying, “If we don’t give up, we will win.”
But we know it won’t happen overnight. The company and its collaborators are powerful, with strong links to powerful structures. And now, they have even more to lose. Letting us into one warehouse is one thing; letting an independent union into all their warehouses means facing the same threat every single year. If they try to pay poverty wages again, workers can strike across the entire network. The company management knows this—they’ve already lost a massive amount of revenue in the past two weeks, but they fear greater losses in the long-term if they let DGD-Sen organize in their warehouses.
At first, some of us and our supporters were a bit confused by their stubbornness. You can see the public reacting, boycotting, protesting: Why would you make the entire nation hate you just to avoid paying workers a few thousand liras more? But it’s not really about the money. It’s about power. They’re terrified of letting an independent union into the warehouses. And Migros isn’t fighting alone. Its leadership is part of TÜSİAD, a huge association of employers in Turkey that includes other retail giants. They all know: if Migros falls, they’re all vulnerable.
Right now, the company’s main tactic isn’t even a formal, legal process—it’s psychological warfare. In Turkey, if you’re legally fired, you get an official notice from the social security authorities. But with many of these workers, the company just sent an SMS through their internal digital platform: “Hey, your job is terminated.” That has no legal basis. They did this haphazardly—some got official notices, many didn’t, some got them much later—all to create confusion and collective anxiety. The goal was to make workers think, I have more to lose than I could win, and scare them back to work.
Our non-negotiable demand is clear: every single fired worker must be returned to their job. That’s the line.
TS: How is DGD-Sen organizing to counter misinformation and protect workers from divide-and-conquer tactics by Migros, both legally and on the shop floor?
BUE: Every time the company’s human resources department put out a big announcement, our lawyers would go live. We’d stream, dissect their documents line by line, and expose the fiction.
And the workers knew. Our lawyers could dismantle the legal claims, but when it came to the numbers—the bonuses, the salary statements—the workers themselves were the proof. They’d tell us, “That’s not what they told us in the warehouse.” We’d hear one story from the HR memo, and a completely different reality from the managers on the ground.
Just last week, the CEO went on a journalist’s YouTube channel and made outrageous claims. He said workers’ salaries had already increased significantly. It’s a total distortion. Maybe if you count every cost the company bears, but that’s not what a worker takes home. They’re playing with numbers, hiding behind complicated bonus structures and bureaucratic tax rules, trying to confuse everyone.
So our job became translation: first, we explain facts plainly to the workers. Then, we turn it into myth-buster statements: clear, public corrections, so their families, supporters, and the public can see through the lies.
TS: You mentioned that the strike has also spread to other retail giants. Is DGD-Sen's strategy also focused on using this moment to organize and coordinate demands with warehouse workers across the retail sector?
BUE: What’s happening now is exactly what we initially hoped for. When the Migros strike took off, it sent a shockwave. We suddenly started hearing from representatives at other warehouses—places we had never been able to reach before. We knew about them, of course. We’d even posted anonymous letters from workers there, exposing the exploitation. But this is different.
For the first time, those workers are taking direct courage from the Migros warehouse workers’ fight. They’ve started organizing within their own warehouses, reaching out to us to be a part of DGD-Sen. Right now, the process at these other locations is mostly in a self-organizing phase, but our organizers are now showing up at their meetings and picket lines.
The whole working class in Turkey is watching. They’re waiting to see how this first major battle turns out. The outcome here will be their signal to escalate their own fights across the country.
TS: What comes next for DGD-Sen after this strike?
BUE: If this strike is successful, it will trigger an avalanche. Workers at other lines of occupation and members of other unions would demand more from their companies and unions, while knowing independent organizing of workers actually works and can lead them to victory. For our comrades abroad, I can confidently say that this avalanche might eventually lead us right into the ports. In Turkey, warehouse workers share the same occupation status as port workers. If we can become the independent union for warehouses nationwide with enough members for collective agreements, we could build the capacity to organize dockworkers too — especially in ports like Mersin and Ceyhan, which handle trade with Israel.
No independent union currently has the collective agreement power to force its way into those ports. But if we can come to represent the majority of warehouse workers in Turkey—and that's not a utopian estimate, it's the direct goal of this fight—then that's exactly where we'll go eventually. But organizing in warehouses is the ultimate precondition: we need to build the power at the warehouses within this business line if we could ever to finally reach those docks.
Think about the connection: the yellow union, Liman-İş, which controls the Mersin and Ceyhan ports—the very ports that transfer oil from the BTC pipeline to Israel—is part of the same union confederation as Tez-Koop-İş, the yellow union we're fighting in the warehouses. They're two heads of the same beast. If we defeat Tez-Koop-İş here, we might break their power and build the capacity to defeat Liman-İş there.
DGD-Sen was founded in the Migros warehouses. We've won strikes at different retail giants. But we haven't yet moved into the port side of this vast line of occupation. We're known. We have a huge solidarity network among warehouse workers—that's our home. But once we free this part of the line of occupation from the grip of collaborators, we won't stop. We will eventually force our way into those ports once we have the capacity.
TS: What is your most important message to workers of the world?
BUE: We need to recognize what we can learn from each other. These anti-worker structures—the union busting, the yellow unions, neoliberal corporate friendly legislations—operate in very similar ways across our geographies. Back in the 70s, breaking a union wasn’t this easy. But in today’s neoliberal landscape, it’s become the norm. The only way we can defeat these systems is by learning from one another and building real, actionable solidarity.
That’s why I want to make a direct call to workers and unions abroad. Follow our struggle. Realize what we’re fighting against here. This isn't just about one retail giant, or even the entire retail sector. We’re breaking the entire cycle of the accelerated exploitation of the big corporations and their yellow union system.
When the strike started, shocking details were leaked to us about Tez-Koop-İş management from inside the union. We learned their senior management staff are making 500,000 Turkish Liras (11460 Dollars) per month. Compare that to the average warehouse worker they supposedly "represent" at Migros, who makes 28,000 (642 Dollars). 28,000 to 500,000, that’s the union top-level management salary. (According to an independent report, a senior manager at Tez-Koop-İş has refused those claims, adding his salary was 160,000 with no bonuses reaching 500,000. Also, according to the report, former union managers, who were asked about this, partly verified the bonuses.) And journalists released photos of Hakan Bozkurt, general secretary of Tez-Koop-İş in Northern Cyprus, gambling at luxury casinos, playing the slot machines.
This is what we are fighting against. So we are calling on all unions facing similar yellow union structures and union-busting tactics: stand in solidarity with us. If you have the capacity, raise your voice, make it clear that you stand with us against retail giants and corporate-friendly structures that call themselves a ‘union’. Help us spread our call for boycotting Anadolu Group, the parent company of Migros Turkey (also owning the beer company Efes), and expose Tez-Koop-İş, raise questions, demand accountability and transparency about their organizing practices.
Stand in solidarity with DGD-Sen and the striking workers at Migros warehouses. Our enemies are globally present, collaborating and learning from each other’s new methods of intensifying labor exploitation and union-busting. And we can only emerge victorious in our interconnected struggles by giving strength to each other through international solidarity.
Photo credits: Bala Ulaş Ersay.
