The Ministry of Labour’s July figures reveal the biggest decline in unionisation in the last 12 years. The government’s policies of dismantling organisation among workers have become increasingly evident in the data. While the number of registered workers rose in six months, the number of union members fell by 95,000.
The consequences of the AKP government’s anti-labour policies and efforts to weaken workers by stripping them of union representation are now reflected in official data. The Ministry of Labour and Social Security has released the number of workers and union members by sector for July. The data announced in the official gazette has once again been tainted by suspicion.
According to the figures, the number of registered workers increased in the first half of the year. Despite this, union membership dropped by 95,000. This marks the steepest decline since unionisation levels were first calculated in January 2013.
Only 2,429,527 workers in registered employment are unionised. While the unionisation rate stood at 14.97 percent in January, July figures show that only 14 out of every 100 workers are now union members.
The number of registered workers increased from 16,864,733 in January to 17,326,143 in July, an increase of 461,410 workers.
The decline in unionisation and the decrease in the number of union members was also influenced by retirement patterns. Workers who would have suffered pension losses had they retired in 2025 opted to retire in 2024 instead. However, those who replaced them in the workforce did not unionise. In this context, the AKP’s policies to weaken union presence played a significant role. As a result of anti-labour policies, union organisation was further eroded.
According to the data, Türk Metal became the union with the highest number of members. It was followed by Hizmet-İş and Öz Sağlık-İş. Due to unclear sector boundaries, many workers failed to meet the unionisation threshold in the “commerce, office work, education and fine arts” sector — which, with 4,526,306 workers, is the largest in terms of employment. The metal sector, with nearly 2 million workers, and the construction sector, with 1.8 million, ranked among the top three.
The Ministry of Labour’s data were also called into question. The United Agriculture and Forestry Workers’ Union (BTO-Sen), affiliated with the DİSK confederation, protested that many of its current members were not reflected in the data. Despite nearly half of its members being excluded from the count, the union still surpassed the 1 percent sector threshold. BTO-Sen emphasised that their application for sector status in December last year affecting 800 workers has still not been processed, which impacted their official member count.
The union also pointed to employer objections over union authorisation as another factor distorting the data. In a statement, BTO-Sen said, “The Ministry has merely stood by as employers carried out unlawful sector changes, resulting in the cancellation of nearly 1,400 of our members’ registrations.”
In a statement posted on its social media account, the union said the data have “become as unreliable as TurkStat figures,” and added: “In our sector, where the union threshold fluctuates between 1,800 and 1,900, the disappearance of over 2,000 of our members far above that threshold, from the statistics was carried out under direct ministerial oversight. Nearly one in every two of our members has been erased by the Ministry itself.”
