With a fateful decision by the rulers at last Week, a new huge wave of unemployment in Turkey in the summer was more or less sealed. The prohibition of dismissals, which was decided due to the workers' resistance and because of which employers were forced to find other similar ways (which was often the unpaid leave, as a result of the protest against this they then had a reason to dismiss workers then), is now to expire with the month of June. Millions of "overdue" jobs in the ailing bureaucratic capitalism in Turkey are then acutely threatened to be destroyed.
Protests against the dismissals, unpaid leave, wage theft and worse working conditions were organised, among others, by motorbike couriers from a storage facility in Izmir, who were dispersed by the police and threatened with prosecution. The different strikes and protests in the past period prove that the workers' masses in the country are determined to organise themselves.
The struggle is also developing in the countryside, these days again with the expansion of the protest against quarrying - this week in Denizli, where the operation of a new quarry is threatening agriculture in the nearby thyme fields. The peasants' struggle against the destruction of the land and ground is taking on ever greater proportions at the moment, so that, for instance, tons of trees being cut down in Sirnak in the south-east have to be guarded by soldiers.
Meanwhile, the student movement continues the struggle at Istanbul's Boğaziçi University against the appointment of the reactionary new rector Melih Bulu. Student protests there are now threatened by private security units and prisoners are now also maltreated by them, but yet time and again students manage to gain access to the campus during protests in defiance of armed patrols and iron bars at the entrance.