Dear Sisters,
Every day we are getting poorer and face problems with employment opportunities. Even if we can find a job, it is usually an insecure, part-time, and flexible job. The labor market and public sectors offer this type of position only. And these circumstances are presented to us as good news by authorities. We are told that we can do housework and take care of the children, the sick, and the elderly and work simultaneously.
Deepening multiple crises and lack of government policies to deal with these crises, on the one hand, the government’s withdrawal from İstanbul Convention and its agenda to abolish Law No 6284, on the other, makes women more open to male violence. By deepening gender inequalities, the ruling power paves the way for the enforcement of anti-secular and anti-mixed sex education policies, which it can use to violate girls’ right to education. It appears clear that in the days ahead, the ruling power will strengthen its attacks against women’s labor and women’s identities.
Thus, we are in the collective bargaining negotiations process covering 2024-2025 while our rights, lives, and labor will face more attacks.
The confederation, which holds the majority and has the most powerful position to represent all public employees, has been cooperating with the government. This confederation signed CBA agreements that resulted in more and more impoverished for the previous six terms. The executives of this confederation ignored severe problems, including terminating our job security and achievements. The authorized confederation will certainly ignore our demands in the CBA negotiations to be held in August.
These facts also underline that the negotiation table ignoring women and discussing only the percentage salary increase will also be anti-democratic in any other aspect. Thus, we should raise our struggle; we should stake a claim to our rights, get involved in this process by insisting women specific demands, and continue our persistence in setting a negotiation table where the CBA parties will negotiate women’s demands as a separate agenda.
We invite you to stand up for our demands, to organize in KESK, to raise the struggle for equality, freedom, labor, peace, secularism, and democracy that we have been waging for years, and to voice our demands together by standing up for our rights.
OUR DEMANDS
- Withdrawal from İstanbul Convention cannot be acceptable. Withdrawn decisions should be annulled, and Law No 6284, an essential protection in the cases of violence against women, should be effectively enforced. Women’s shelters should be opened for women and children subjected to violence and abuse in the municipalities whose population exceeds 50 thousand. Transwomen could also access such facilities.
- Demands for appointment and change of place made by women laborers who are subjected to mobbing, violence, harassment, and exploitation should be accepted without any requisite to submit any documents to prove their situation.
- The government should ratify the ILO Convention No 190 on Violence and Harassment and eliminate any form of discrimination, violence, harassment, and mobbing against LGBTQs and women in workplaces. A working environment should be gender friendly.
- The 8th of March should be adopted as a day that women shall be off without losing any social benefits or pay.
- Gender equality mechanisms, which could secure the promotion of women public employees and places for women at the board level, should be established and applied.
Parental leaves, including maternity leave (before and after birth), should be arranged in the parents’ favor.
- There should be eight months before birth maternity leave and 24 months after birth maternity leave; after that, six-month unalienable parental leave should be applied for both parents.
- Regulations should be made allowing 2-day leave during the period of menstruation for women.
- The products that women use during menstruation should be free.
- HPV vaccine should be part of the national vaccination schedule, and every woman can be vaccinated for free by 45.
- Generally speaking, sexist understanding according to which domestic and care workers (childcare, eldercare, patient care) are considered women’s work should be abandoned, and social policies should be developed instead.
- The employment rate of disabled women in the public sector should be increased. To ensure the enforcement of such a policy, disabled girls’ access to education should be facilitated.
- Education curricula should be regulated by gender equality understanding. There should be compulsory Gender Equality classes in the schools.
- Vocational retraining for public employees should be organized to raise gender equality awareness.
We continue to struggle
- to reach a democratic society and thus working life which is based on a gender equality perspective,
- to secure the establishment of a negotiation process through which women’s policies should be discussed as a separate subject matter by a delegation including women representatives from confederations and
- to get an agreement in which women’s demands can find a place under a separate heading.
- We invite all women public employees to walk on the path with us, to organize through KESK-affiliated trade unions, and to struggle.
LET’S GET ORGANISED, LET’S RESIST, LET’S CHANGE!
LET’S STAND UP FOR OUR LABOR AND OUR RIGHTS!
LET’S RAISE OUR VOICES, WORDS, AND OBJECTIONS TOGETHER!