Read this article in:
12 March, 2007
Union members of Lastik-İş, ICEM’s Turkish trade union affiliate in chemicals and rubber, returned to their jobs at a pharmaceutical factory in Istanbul, following a six-day plant occupation that ended on 6 March by police force.
Workers became angry when the Turkish arm of the Menarini Group, an Italian-based pharmaceutical firm, sacked ten union leaders after it became evident that the company, İbrahim Etham İlaçlari A.Ş., would not abide by a Supreme Court of Appeals decree recognising Lastik-İş as the workers’ bargaining representative.
Armoured police, together with security personnel and company management, forcefully ended the workers’ occupation on 6 March. Workers then gathered at plant gates, but police physically dispersed the assembled. Managers fired seven more Lastik-İş leaders in the final days of the occupation, bringing to 17 the number of sackings in this blatant abuse of trade union rights.
During the six-day occupation, managers locked the gates to the plant cafeteria as a prelude to the stronger force that was to come. Workers improvised by bringing food from the outside past management’s security team. Management has now agreed to meet with workers’ representatives, but not with Lastik-İş officials.
Lastik-İş General President Abdullah Karacan spoke to family members, supporters and other workers outside the factory each day of the occupation. DISK President Süleyman Celebi spoke as well. Lastik-İş is part of this national labour centre.
Lastik-İş President Abdullah Karacan meeting outside the plant on 28 February
In mid-February, following the Supreme Court’s decree, Lastik-İş called a workers’ meeting to discuss the decree and a future course of action. Menarini bosses countered by scheduling overtime work in efforts to prevent the meeting. Workers responded by occupying the plant, for the first time, on 21-22 February. On 28 February, the company fired five union activists. It repeated that illegal action on 2 March by sacking five more.
In the days leading up to the second plant occupation, Lastik-İş did force one meeting with management, which included representatives from KIPLAS, the chemical employers’ association. İbrahim Etham İlaçlari managers promised to take the global labour standards issue to Italian headquarters of Menarini in Florence. At that point, workers and their union, Lastik-İş, promised to stop the job actions.
But the truce was short-lived. Plant managers claim they are following corporate guidelines from Menarini by staying within the bounds of Turkish national law, even though such appeals have come to mean staunch union-avoidance by employers in Turkey through endless legal delays.
In an 8 March letter to Menarini Chairman Alberto Aleotti, ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda said the company’s anti-worker behaviour is “flagrantly violating accepted trade union and human rights laid down in the core Conventions of the International Labour Organisation.”
The ICEM letter added: “For the last two years, your company has cynically abused the present Turkish legislation to make, what we are reliably informed, are spurious appeals, to the court system, and in this intervening period mounted major attacks on the right to freedom of association of your workforce in an attempt to pressure workers to resign their union membership.”
The ICEM is demanding that Menarini immediately intervene “in what now has become a very volatile labour dispute to resolve the differences between the workers legally and lawfully represented by Lastik-İş and … this subsidiary company.”
Menarini is a privately-held, 121-year-old company priding itself on research and internationalisation. It is Europe’s twenty-fourth largest chemicals company and does business in therapeutic areas, including cardiovascular, gastro-intestinal, antibiotics respiratory, anti-diabetics, and anti-inflammatory analgesics.