The list went viral. The list of textile businesses in Gaziantep that had coronavirus infections but continued operations. The list of plants with coronavirus cases became the goto information for the workers there because nobody trusts anything the Turkish government ever says.

Gaziantep is a province in south eastern Turkey where many textile factories are located. Textile business is dead in Turkey, compared to its heyday about 10 years ago. The world markets and mostly Chinese textiles simply killed it so fast nearly nothing was left in few years.

Whatever survived is on its last legs around Gaziantep. Being very close to the Syrian border, owners of businesses can hire the Syrian workers at nearly or even less than half the amount a Turkish worker would get.

These textile factories survive by contracts, mostly to foreign accounts, but they are under business contracts and deadlines to deliver. Profits must continue to come whether the world is hit with a deadly pandemic or not.

When Turkey, with being the country where the coronavirus spread speed is the fastest in the world was hit, it left no room to wiggle for the textile owners. They were determined not to shut down, workers’ health be damned.

Despite having many positive tests for coronavirus most of the textile plants didn’t bat an eye and continued. They would not listen to the pleas of the workers to get protective gear.

The list literally went viral as shocked people shared the names, the cases, the response and the current situation in the textile plants. This gave workers who were already demanding protection some leverage against the bosses because they had not heard about other workers who were suffering from the same indifference of management they were experiencing in their own plants. Some workers went on a wild cat strikes. Some walked out. Some stopped work. Others wanted the union to start a general strike so they too could participate.

While the list was making its rounds, Mehmet Türkmen, representative of DISK, the Confederation of Progressive Labor Unions, shared in his social media post that two workers at the Melike textile plant had been infected.

That is when things started to get ugly. Turkish government, trying its best to hide the coronavirus cases and its spreading news, found the information and the study offensive. At the beginning of the disease the Turkish police had threatened that any information shared on the internet that differed from the official truth would be prosecuted and punished.

With the union study circulating and Mehmet Türkmen, the regional union representative exposing the case of the two workers, the laborers in the Melike Textile plant stopped work. However, this did not stop the bosses from forcing the workers to continue in these dangerous conditions.

Trying to prevent spreading of the truth and keeping its promise to punish any information that contradicted the governments’ information, the police captured the union representative Mehmet Türkmen and took him to the police station for questioning.

Türkmen was still under detention at the time of publication of this report.

Sendika.org news (M.B.)