The international week of solidarity with Şık Makas textile workers in Turkey (December 13–21, 2025) demonstrated the power and necessity of cross-border working-class coordination. Through collaboration between the Class Struggle Action Network and the combative union BİRTEK-SEN (United Textile, Weaving and Knitting Workers’ Union of Turkey), solidarity actions took place across four Turkish cities, four US cities, and one Canadian city. The campaign raised 21,517.54 Turkish Lira, connected BİRTEK-SEN with Italian textile workers in the union SUDD Cobas (Unity, Democracy, Dignity Union – Base Committees), and showed that international working-class action is possible even in difficult times and challenging conditions.
The Şık Makas struggle reveals how genuine class unions emerge when workers face intensified exploitation and boss- and state-linked unions prove themselves as collaborators with management, failing in the task of being bodies of economic defense for the working class.
When Boss- and State-Linked Unions Betray Workers
At the Şık Makas factory in Tokat, which produces clothing for Zara, H&M, Mango, Levi’s, and other international brands, over 2,200 textile workers have been kept at wages below Turkey’s official poverty line. Starting in August 2024, hundreds stopped receiving wages entirely while global fashion corporations continued profiting from the factory’s production.
For roughly a year, workers were consistently paid late. When they finally said “enough” and stopped work to demand their unpaid wages, they were met with threats and insults from both the employer and their official union, Öz İplik-İş, which belongs to the regime-controlled confederation Hak-İş and is aligned with the ruling party.
When workers resigned from this collaborationist union and joined the combative union BİRTEK-SEN, Öz İplik-İş handed over their names to the employer. What followed were mass terminations. More than a thousand workers were fired simply for switching unions.
This betrayal demonstrates a pattern across Turkey and globally. Official, state-sanctioned union structures, constrained by laws designed to pacify workers and integrated into state control mechanisms, consistently side with employers when push comes to shove. Workers facing wage theft and mass firings have no recourse within these structures.
BİRTEK-SEN: Building a Class Union
BİRTEK-SEN emerged in 2022 from widespread textile worker uprisings across southeastern Turkey in 2020. Workers organized strikes, workplace occupations, and confrontations with police outside of the official, state-sanctioned union structures, winning concrete victories at facilities including Artemis, Şireci, and Marbit.
When material conditions deteriorate sufficiently and existing organizations prove themselves enemies of workers’ interests, workers create new structures capable of actual struggle that fights the capitalist class, interrupting its ability to accumulate profit in order to force it to meet workers’ demands.
Since its formation, BİRTEK-SEN has led the Özak Textile struggle in Urfa (November 2024) and the strike wave at the Başpınar Organized Industrial Zone in Antep (February 2025). In these struggles, the union strengthened workers’ power by generalizing strikes across factories rather than isolating workers or relying on legal channels. When police arrested and imprisoned union chairman Mehmet Türkmen for “violating freedom of labour” and “incitement to commit a crime,” the strikes continued and won major demands.
BİRTEK-SEN has also made concentrated efforts to organize Syrian immigrant workers facing higher rates of exploitation in Turkish textile factories, regardless of immigration status, uniting native and immigrant workers. It has mobilized to support struggles across sectors.
What makes BİRTEK-SEN significant is its break from collaborationist unionism. This includes its formation outside legal structures, its organization of immigrant workers, and its rejection of collaboration with management.
When over 1,000 Şık Makas workers were fired for joining BİRTEK-SEN, the union organized workplace occupations and reached out internationally for solidarity rather than retreating to legalistic appeals. Now, Öz İplik-İş is labeling the union as a terrorist organization, a clear sign that BİRTEK-SEN’s militancy threatens both employer profits and the official, state-sanctioned union’s control over labor.
International Solidarity in Action
Upon receiving BİRTEK-SEN’s call for international solidarity, CSAN organized coordinated responses across borders. Actions took place in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Tokat, and cities across Oregon, Illinois, North Carolina, New Mexico, and Canada.
This coordination matters because workers confront the same enemies across borders. Şık Makas workers produce products sold throughout North America and Europe. Their exploitation directly connects to the profits extracted from retail workers in those regions, all serving the same multinational corporations’ drive for accumulation.
Cross-sector and international coordination strengthens working-class power. The campaign called on workers throughout the supply chain, including production, logistics, and retail, to recognize their common interest in supporting the Şık Makas workers’ struggle. While practical limitations prevented full realization of this coordination, it represents an important step in building the kind of organization workers need to defend themselves against global capitalism.
The Path Forward
The working class remains largely atomized, and our organizations are still weak. When exploitation intensifies beyond tolerable limits and existing organizations prove collaborationist, workers create new structures. This is how class unions emerge: not from declarations, but from material conditions making collaboration impossible and struggle necessary.
During the international week of solidarity, workers across multiple countries organized coordinated actions, raised money, built practical connections, and applied pressure on corporations profiting from and exploiting the working class. This organizing represents a small but significant step toward the international working-class organization that is required to meet the challenges and needs of the working class in the class struggle against the capitalist class.
As capitalism’s crisis deepens and inter-imperialist tensions escalate, ruling-class assaults on working-class living standards will intensify, producing explosive responses. The existence of embryonic class unions like BİRTEK-SEN, and practical international coordination experience, will prove invaluable as conditions continually deteriorate leading to more intense class confrontations.
Solidarity with Şık Makas Workers!
For Combative Class Unions!
Workers of the World, Unite!
