We have reached the stage of the most painful vaudeville of the year for the working people. The working people have long ago given up hope of the Minimum Wage Determination Commission, the tent troupe that will decide how much below the hunger line millions of working people and their families will have to live on in the coming year.
Turkish Labor, which was already seated at the table on behalf of the workers, withdrew from the negotiations by admitting that its presence at the table did not even have as much impact as a pastry with olives, saying ‘Most of our members are not minimum wage anyway’.
In recent years, there is already a concept that this union has brought to the history of trade union struggle: ‘Resentment unionism’
This union, which sits at the table representing millions of laborers, instead of negotiating at the table and fighting in the streets ‘sulking’ He's walking away from the table!
Because the unions themselves turn yellow as the collar of the laborer turns black ‘strike’ and ‘action’ they have already removed such concepts from their agenda.
Let's talk about the minimum wage.
Turkish Labor, which left the table sulking, demanded 39,525 liras.
“The minimum wage should not be set lower than a certain percentage of the Gross Domestic Product per capita (e.g. 60 percent),’ DİSK said, calling for the minimum wage to be set twice a year until inflation falls to single digits.
Hak İş has not publicly announced a figure so far, but Minister Vedat Işıkhan announced that he had received the minimum wage demands of both confederations during his visit to Türk İş and Hak İş.
So far, no figures have been received from the employer representative TİSK and no figures have been received from the government.
Over the weekend, the Laborers“ Movement Party (EHP) organized the ”Symposium on an Alternative Economic Program".
“In the second day session titled ”Method and Struggle in Minimum Wage Determination‘, I had the opportunity to watch presentations by economists who do not look at the economy from a ’market' perspective, such as Prof. Dr. Ceyhun Elgin, Prof. Dr. Aziz Çelik, Özgür Müftüoğlu, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ümit Akçay and Prof. Dr. Hayri Kozanoğlu.
One of the main issues that came to the fore at the symposium was the fact that the minimum wage is no longer an issue that concerns only the lowest income group of wage earners, but a wage that directly concerns almost all wage earners.
Prof. Dr. Aziz Çelik's speech on the AK Party government's wage policy, especially the minimum wage “A tool to intervene in class distribution, not between classes” was in fact the clearest description of the labor policies implemented by the government for 23 years.
In other words, the government, unable to achieve a qualified increase in the wages of those at the bottom, has resorted to an ‘intra-class’ balancing act by reducing the wages of wage earners who earn a little more to minimum wage levels.
Of course, it was no coincidence that the working class, whose class consciousness has declined considerably since 1980, has in recent years been drawn into a trap of competition between the wages of working people rather than the share of national income and welfare.
It was a result of this class atrophy that the white collar did not worry about the top 10 percent owning 90 percent of the wealth as much as the blue collar did about their income.
As a matter of fact, according to a report published a while ago by DISK-AR;
While the rate of those earning 5 percent more than or below the minimum wage increased from 27.8 percent in 2002 to 38.2 percent in 2024, the rate of those earning more than twice the minimum wage decreased from 40.1 percent to 29.4 percent in the same period.
In other words, the minimum wage has become the common wage or average wage in the country.
In recent years, a labor minister has openly admitted that the ratio of minimum wage earners to total wage earners is not as high as the statistics show, that many employers insure workers on the minimum wage, but that more wages are paid by hand, and that the future security of workers is openly usurped by employers.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in a recent speech to representatives of employers' organizations “There are no pockets” and asked the bosses to take matters into their own hands.
The exploratory and formal negotiations of the dysfunctional so-called Determination Commission will continue for some time, and of course Erdoğan will have the final say on the matter. Of course, it is not difficult to guess that the figure announced will actually be a figure approved by the bosses.
Leaving aside the main opposition, which is represented by 5 deputies in the General Assembly of the Turkish Grand National Assembly while the 2026 budget is being discussed, what are the trade unions and working class parties doing to correct this slipping scale?
Undoubtedly, the unorganized society created by the September 12 regime makes it very difficult to resist the systematic attack of capital.
But is it possible to create a line of resistance in the intellectual sense before moving on to action?
Today, even a laborer trying to live below the hunger limit with a minimum wage ‘Don't raise the minimum wage too much, then inflation will explode’ the struggle must first start from intellectual resistance.
Without the defeat of real socialism and the overthrow of the ideological dominance established by the Christmas offensive, it is not possible to succeed in the organized struggle for a world in which the broad masses of working people can live justly, starting with the minimum wage.
That is why the EHP's symposium once again showed us how essential it is to rebuild class consciousness against ideological domination.