Workers at İstanbul's third airport construction site on Tuesday climbed up to the tower crane to protest their unpaid. Construction and Building Workers’ Union stated that company executives brought gendarmerie to the area and tried to prevent union members from taking photos and sharing information.
"This morning, workers at state hospital construction in Sakarya’s Ferizli district, whose salaries were also not paid climbed up to a tower crane, now the same situation is going on in another worksite," Construction and Building Workers’ Union said in a statement.
"When it comes to electoral campaigns, some are showing off about building the world’s largest airport. But they keep silent when construction workers’ fundamental right to be paid is not fulfilled. For us, İstanbul’s third airport is a slave camp in which many of our fellow workers lost their lives due to occupational murders, where the workers live in the worst of conditions and yet still not paid for their work... Construction workers will change this order of slavery by getting organized," the union underlined.
The Union announcing that the workers were even not paid enough to visit their hometowns for Ramadan holiday.
İstanbul's third airport is promoted as a great success by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AKP government.
The workers complain about the subcontractor firms that do not pay their salaries on time, whereas the main contractor firms deny any direct responsibility for workers as they pay to the subcontractor firms.
About 30,000 people have worked in difficult conditions on the construction of the airport, which has been marred by occupational murders. As some resources report that around 400 workers have been killed at the site since the beginning of the massive airport project, the AKP government denies such reports and says that only 27 workers died since the construction had begun in May 2015.
The airport project was awarded in 2013 to a consortium of business groups with close links to Erdoğan, namely Kalyon, Cengiz, Limak, Kolin and MNG. The same companies have stood out in public projects for years, winning tender after tender in major sectors such as power distribution and the construction of subways, tunnels and dams.
The project was based on the build-operate-transfer model of public-private partnership. Under the contract, the company gets operating rights for 25 years, during which it commits to paying the government 22 billion Turkish liras ($4.6 billion). In return, the government has allocated more than 7,000 hectares of land for the project and mobilized public banks for financing, in addition to other assistance.
The Treasury will make up for any gap between the guaranteed and actual number of passengers. The contractors have been forcing workers to work day and night under inhuman conditions to finish the project.
