Turkey -More dismissals of union members -September 24, 2014

Deva Holding a Turkey-based pharmaceutical company belonging to EastPharma Ltd., established in 2006 and incorporated in Bermuda, has sacked 24 workers, simply for signing up with a union. Four years ago, the company management used different tactics to demolish a 40-year-long union existence, contractual labour relations and mature social dialogue with trade union Petrol-Is. Management announced that there would no longer be a collective agreement using the pretext of high production costs and government policies in the pharmaceutical industry. It exerted pressure on workers to sign individual labour contracts in place of the collective agreement and then dismissed 70 employees because they had refused to sign individual contracts. The local labour courts ruled that Deva terminated employment contracts of the dismissed workers on unjustified grounds and all of them must be reinstated. However not one sacked worker has been able to return. Over the years, working conditions have deteriorated with low wages, insufficient social benefits and continuous threat of dismissal, mobbing, unsafe and unhealthy working conditions. In June 2014, an overwhelming majority of Deva workers started to re-join Petrol-Is.

English: http://www.industriall-union.org/turkey-deva-continues-to-sicken-union-members ...   

 

For more information, please contact the editor Jan Cremers, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) cbn-aias@uva.nl or the communications officer at the ETUI, Mariya Nikolova mnikolova@etui.org. For previous issues of the Collective bargaining newsletter please visit http://www.etui.org/E-Newsletters/Collective-bargaining-newsletter. You may find further information on the ETUI at www.etui.org, and on the AIAS at www.uva-aias.net.