People and Nature

Thirty-five years ago, Turkey was shaken by strikes. An eight-week stoppage by mineworkers, between November 1990 and January 1991, won support from other workers, and took up political demands. It was a turning point for the workers’ movement. At that time I was working for the North East Area of the National Union of Mineworkers here in the UK, editing their newspaper. With their support, I travelled to Turkey, and then published a pamphlet about the workers’ movement. Here’s a PDF version: please download, share and copy it.

And here is the introduction and chronology with which the pamphlet began. Simon Pirani, January 2026.

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The Turkish miners’ strike of November 1990-January 1991 was far, far more than just a strike.

Firstly, it brought into action not just the strikers but the whole community: this it had in common with all movements that really challenge the established order of things. The most downtrodden people in Turkish society, the women, were on the front lines.

While in many strikes the majority of participants are only occasionally called to picket lines or demonstrations, in this case the daily marches involved most strikers, and their families too. The march to the president’s palace in Ankara, begun by this activated mass on no-one’s instructions – and ended only by heavy police and army intervention – was the spontaneous movement of the working class in a most spectacular form.

The second reason this was far more than a strike was that it began with a demand for more pay … but rapidly went on to demand “bread, peace and democracy”. Zonguldak [the mining town on Turkey’s north coast] saw its action as political – and this on the eve of the Gulf war in which Turkey was an essential part of the US-led alliance. At the end of December [1990], 150,000 metal workers joined the miners on strike; in mid-January textile workers came out. A general strike on 3 January was supported by 1.5 million.