We are farmers and agricultural workers.
As farmers who work their land for tea, hazelnut, fig, olive, tobacco and more, alongside seasonal workers and immigrant workers, we have united in one fist as agricultural workers. In so doing, we have understood that the problems we face are fundamentally interlocked. It is with this mindset that we founded TARIM-SEN (Agircultural Workers Union) to fight for all who make their living working in agriculture.
We, agricultural workers, bear no name, no rights, and no social security in this country. We produce a variety of food and nutrition for this country and others; however, we are forced to work under wage-slavery, for a few dimes for our honest work. Most of us are housed in tents, facing the threat of communal and contagious diseases. We are often killed in “workplace incidents” making our way to fields in unsafe transportation. We are ever more impoverished by the governmental push to regulate agriculture, forcing us into pre-harvest contractual farming, and we end up resorting to work in industrial parks. All of this is happening as our land is plundered by the expansion of mining, tourism, and energy industries.
We refuse to sit silent and submit to this system. We are hereby united under the umbrella of an independent union where the workers hold the all the power. We set on this road to learn from and grow with the revolutionary history and present of the working class.
We are coming together to mobilize a thoroughly independent and combative union—where we remain free of the influence of the state and capital, where we organize our workplaces by means of workers’ committees and councils, and where we rely on workers’ power alone. We take justice and solidarity to be our guiding principles, and we take direct actions such as occupations and strikes to be our means to those ends. We promise to stand in solidarity with the working people’s movement and unite with those organizations and comrades at home and abroad. We will not stop at better working conditions: we will work together create a system where working-class people have access to good nutrition. We will champion food sovereignty for our class.
Agricultural workers will not be enslaved by companies, merchants, and bosses. We will live in dignity and work for our rights and future at once.
We are rising up from farms, fields, greenhouses, forests, fishing boats, and villages.
There’s power in unity. It’s us versus them!