The Existential Dilemma of TEKEL Workers: “Death Before Retreat”

This study is an attempt for understanding the TEKEL workers’ 78- day protest experience. The main data used in this study is the interviews conducted with 35 workers. Tobacco workers were exposed to lower wages and poor working conditions after the privatization of cigarette production followed by the enclosure of TEKEL factories. TEKEL workers started to take action when the legal period for them to accept the unsecure working was about to end up. They struggled for persuading the government to abandon this implementation. Violent attacks of the police forces in the first day of the workers’ protest could be considered as one of the reasons for a pertinacious resistance. The topic of this article includes the public sphere in Ankara and the public discourse created by the workers, their consciousness raising process and their existential dilemma which they were in actually from the very beginning of the protest. In the first part of the article how the TEKEL workers articulated their own concepts to the public sphere through the protest is explained. The second part is about the way that protest transformed their consciousness state. The final part emphasizes the existential dilemma that the workers were in. They disappeared as TEKEL workers since they did not retrieve the previous working conditions. However, thanks to the protest experience, they are already the winners of this resistance.