The Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions (Turkish: Türkiye İşçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu), known as TÜRK-İŞ, is a national trade union centre in Turkey. It was established in Ankara on 31 July 1952. The oldest of the country's workers' confederations, it has been based historically on unions of public sector workers. In July 2026 its thirty-two affiliated unions had 1,260,109 members between them, 51.8 per cent of all union members in Turkey. It is affiliated to the International Trade Union Confederation and the European Trade Union Confederation, and is a member of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD.
At its fifth general assembly in 1964 the confederation wrote into its constitution a commitment to remain independent of the political parties. The formula, partilerüstü politika or above-party politics, gave TÜRK-İŞ its general political line. It was never uncontested within the confederation. Differences over industrial action, and over relations with the Workers' Party of Turkey, produced a breakaway in the middle of the 1960s: seventeen unions met in Istanbul in January 1967 and agreed to set up the rival Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions (DİSK), which held its founding congress the following month. More unions left for it in the early 1970s. TÜRK-İŞ set the principle aside at the general election of 1977, when it came out for the Republican People's Party, and the following year its president Halil Tunç signed a wage restraint agreement with the government of Bülent Ecevit.
The military government installed after the coup of September 1980 closed DİSK, HAK-İŞ and MİSK. TÜRK-İŞ was not shut down, although it too could not carry on trade union activity. Its general secretary Sadık Şide took office as minister of social security in the military government, and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions suspended the confederation's membership in 1981. Unofficial action by public sector workers in 1989 led to a settlement that ended a decade of falling real wages. The confederation's headquarters had neither called for that action nor sanctioned it, but moved quickly to support it. Through the 1990s TÜRK-İŞ organised large demonstrations and, in the autumn of 1995, public sector strikes at workplaces employing some 300,000 people.
Under governments led by the Justice and Development Party from 2002 the confederation took a more conciliatory line towards the government than its rivals did. Workers facing reassignment after the decision to close the leaf tobacco plants of the state monopoly TEKEL camped outside its Ankara headquarters over the winter of 2009 and 2010, in the largest labour protest of the period. Its share of Turkey's union members then fell from 70.8 per cent in 2013 to 55.4 per cent in 2022 as HAK-İŞ grew. Ergün Atalay has been president since 2013.
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