Doany was speaking to a press conference on a strike his company's employees started Tuesday morning. Collective bargaining talks concerning 26,000 Turkish Telekom employees failed on Tuesday during talks that started on Monday and lasted until the early morning hours of the following day; the workers have now announced a strike. Members of the Turkish Telecommunication Workers’ Union (Türkiye Haber-İş) came to their workplaces early Tuesday morning, but only to put up legally required notices declaring that Türk Telekom employees are on strike. This was the first strike in the history of the Turkish telecommunications giant.
Maintenance and repair in communication networks will not be taken care of during the strike. The activities of the banking and communications sectors are expected to be worst hit by the strike. However, talks between Türkiye Haber-İş and Türk Telekom will continue.
At yesterday’s press conference Doany said the company pays its employees good salaries, adding that they thought their offer to the union was also very good. Doany said the company had offered a 10 percent raise in salaries despite an 8 percent increase in the inflation rate in 2007. Türk Telekom proposed an additional 4.4 percent increase for the next year; however, the parties failed to agree. In addition to disagreement over the pay raise percentages, the issue of wages of some 5,000 technicians and assistant technicians was another point the parties failed to agree on. Doany said the company had offered improvement to the technicians’ wages, but the union was not satisfied.
Doany said he believed the strike would not last for very long, or that at least a resolution would be reached through a mediator. Doany said although he respected his employees’ right to go on strike, he expressed that this did not include the right of harming company property.
Doany showed pictures of fiber optic cables, vital to the functioning of the Internet, which were intentionally cut in various cities.
Haber-İş President Ali Akçan strongly denied the allegations in a conference. “This is slander. Our union has nothing to do with any of these incidents. Let them find those responsible, and we will punish them together,” Akçan said.
Türk Telekom, in a statement it released on Monday, said it would be doing its best to ensure that the services it provides would continue without any interruption and that it would try to minimize the possible negative affects of the strike. The company blamed the union’s uncompromising attitude despite Türk Telekom’s “well meaning and constructive” efforts.
The statement said the average salary of Türk Telekom employees was 59 percent above the market average, noting that this figures was calculated by a leading independent research company based on the salaries of public and private agencies in Turkey. The company said it respected its employees’ legal rights and decisions and promised it would work to minimize the effects of the strike.
Akcan also made a statement in front of Türk Telekom’s Ankara Provincial Directorate, saying, “I call on the government: If you want to be fair, don’t let foreign capital crush your citizens; don’t cancel the strike.” Akcan also congratulated the workers on the strike. Expressing that Türk Telekom had realized many firsts so far, Akcan said, “Today we are adding a new one to these firsts. We are slightly vexed, a little bit concerned, but also very proud.”
Celaleddin Dinçer, the assistant general manager of Türk Telekom, said serious problems were occurring in the network, citing 13 different problems caused by fiber optic cables cut off with pairs of scissors.
Akcan also claimed that the administration was forcing its employees to strike instead of taking heed of the rightful demands of Türk Telekom employees. Meanwhile, communication was already negatively influenced in almost all provinces of Turkey starting from the early hours of the morning. In Antalya and Burdur, for example, as in many other places across the country, there was no Internet access for some time, while some press organizations were left deprived of telephone communication. There were no reports of problems on emergency phone lines such as the medical emergency line 112 or the police at 155.
The Telekom administration contacted the prosecutor’s office on Tuesday demanding an investigation into the problems arising due to the alleged sabotage. Türk Telekom has also laid out an emergency plan to address the problems.
In a statement made in the evening, a spokesperson for Haber-İş said the union has decided not to intervene in any problems, regardless of what their cause or location may be. The spokesperson was responding to a question on whether workers would intervene to fix damaged cables providing communication access to a hospital.
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