On a bitterly cold winter day in the central Anatolian city of Tokat, the thermometer reads -3 °C (27 °F). Sunduz Akkan, a mother of three, wraps up and walks to the gates of the Sik Makas factory where she worked until October. The plant’s roughly 1,700 employees stopped receiving paychecks in mid‑2025. On October 7 workers went on strike; the next day about 1,000 employees were sent text messages informing them they had been dismissed.
Akkan and colleagues have been protesting at the factory gates ever since, camping in a solidarity tent to highlight their case. Their pressure secured some wins: in January they received back pay and had a “Code 22” notation—an all‑purpose “other reasons” tag that would have blocked unemployment or severance claims—removed from their records. They remain in dispute with management over severance pay. “I worked here for over three years,” Akkan says. “Now we’re being treated like beggars, even though we’re just asking for what we’re entitled to.”
One of the fired workers, spokesperson Buse Kara, says she faced harassment on the job and intense pressure to raise productivity. Kara was later investigated for allegedly insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and spent 16 days under house arrest before returning to the protests. She describes strict rules limiting basic breaks: toilet breaks reduced to five minutes and prayer breaks to 10, and access to a nurse only if a worker was “passed out or writhing in pain.”
Sik Makas denies the accusations, telling reporters its actions complied with Turkish law and labour regulations. The company, founded in 1939 and among Turkey’s 500 largest industrial firms, says it exports roughly 20 million denim items a year—mainly to Europe. Brands such as H&M, Jack & Jones, Levi’s, Only and Zara have produced at Sik Makas, and the company sells its own Cross Jeans label in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. But soaring inflation and high interest rates have squeezed margins and the firm, like several competitors, has shifted some production to lower‑cost Egypt.
The factory’s troubles reflect a broader structural crisis across Turkey’s long‑standing textiles and clothing sector, a pillar of the national economy that supports hundreds of thousands of families. Official statistics place sector employment at about 1.1 million, though unions say that understates reality by excluding many refugee workers, women and children employed off the books.
Mehmet Turkmen, leader of the BIRTEK‑SEN union, says most garment jobs pay at or near the minimum wage, leaving monthly household incomes below the poverty line for a family of four (roughly €650 / $776). Unpaid overtime and mandatory holiday work are common, he adds. Companies are increasingly relocating production to rural areas to qualify for government incentives and to depress wages further amid local unemployment.
The numbers underline how acute the collapse has been: around 380,000 jobs lost over the past three years and roughly 4,500 companies closed in 2025 alone. The most alarming losses are in Turkey’s most important market, the European Union. Between January and May 2025, EU imports of Chinese textiles rose 21.8% while imports from Bangladesh increased 17.9%; in the same period imports from Turkey fell 5.1%, according to the Istanbul Textile and Raw Materials Exporters Association (ITHIB). Of the EU’s ten largest suppliers, only Turkey and Tunisia lost market share.
More than 60% of Turkey’s clothing production is destined for the EU single market, so this decline is existential: 2025 marked the first time in 30 years that Turkey’s share of the EU clothing and textile market fell below 5%, and the first time in 35 years its global market share dropped under 3%.
Industry leaders and unions are largely pessimistic. Seref Fayat, head of apparel and ready‑wear assembly at the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey (TOBB), says there is little prospect of recovery while the government intervenes to prop up the lira. President Erdogan has pledged to raise state subsidies in the sector to 3,500 lira per worker (around €69) and to pursue measures aimed at freezing layoffs and encouraging hiring, but many employers call that insufficient.
“We have hit bottom. Our strength has run out,” warns Mustafa Pasahan, vice president of the Istanbul Apparel Exporters Association (IHKIB). ITHIB chair Jak Eskinazi is more blunt about the political backdrop, accusing the government’s course of harming the industry: “We no longer expect anything from them. We’re just trying to save ourselves.”
For workers like Akkan and Kara, the crisis is immediate and personal: lost wages, uncertain benefits and the daily cost of survival. For the industry, the combination of domestic economic strain, shifting global supply chains and rising competition from lower‑cost producers has produced a structural decline whose consequences are still unfolding.