Observers noted that workers are packed like sardines in mass transport every day as they go work in unsafe conditions, but commission members held their meetings safely online.
Amid the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the minimum wage increase is far from compensating the decline in workers’ living standards. Throughout the pandemic, as workers and their families fell ill and often paid with their lives while forced back to work, they also face a severe social attack by the ruling class.
State officials work to boost the profitability and global competitiveness of major banks and corporations. Big business representatives work to make the working class poorer every year with overt or covert collaboration from worker union officials.
With the policies implemented by the Erdoğan government during the pandemic, wages have melted compared to the cost of living. Millions of workers were left unemployed or sent to unpaid leave with an only 1,170 TL (US$ 156) for a month, and the general impoverishment of the working class has seen an unprecedented acceleration.
While billions are pumped into the ruling class through low-interest loans and stimulus packages in Turkey and internationally, this debt must be paid by the working class through increased exploitation and attacks on basic social rights.
Tragically, the generalization of social misery after the pandemic has also increased suicides among workers. Recently, a musician who became unemployed after the pandemic and could not benefit from any social aid committed suicide in Istanbul. A 45-year-old man hanged himself in the northern city of Samsun after writing “job” and “food” in his hands.
Nearly 10 million workers in Turkey, almost 50 percent of all wage laborers, have been condemned to a minimum wage that means misery.
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