For a moment in May 2014, following a mine explosion that killed 301 coal miners in the western Turkish city of Soma, international attention was focused on the plight of the country’s workers. But that spotlight soon shifted, and though the Turkish government finally ratified an international agreement on mine safety late last month, hopes of substantially reforming labor policy in the “New Turkey” have been authoritatively dashed. In fact, with the crucial aid of the state, capital’s offensive against labor has only intensified.

Turkey is indeed a dangerous place for workers — in the first twelve years of the twenty-first century, an astonishing 12,686 workers lost their lives due to work accidents. Last year alone, 1,886 workers died on the job. Protests by miners and construction workers in the aftermath of industrial homicides have been met with tear gas and water cannons from national security forces.

And now the state is attacking the right of labor to use its most potent weapon — the strike. On January 14, Turkey’s United Metalworkers’ Union (Birleşik Metal-İş) announced strikes at forty workplaces after failed negotiations with the Turkish Metal Employers’ Federation (MESS). Following the MESS’s rebuffing of union demands for better wages and more uniform salaries for industry laborers, about fifteen thousand metalworkers prepared to engage in massive work stoppages on January 29 and February 19.