Haluk Direskeneli Haluk Direskeneli printable version send your friend

Wednesday, 27 January 2010

We are grateful to Mr. Juergen Klute, member of the European Parliament for his support to our displaced local Tobacco workers today in Ankara.

His support is very important for us. These workers are fired from their jobs. They are unemployed. They have no work/no job.

They are unemployed since they let the Government to take decisions to make them unemployed. Governments should create employment, they should NOT curtail.

Most of them voted for the ruling political party. That is the irony. However your writer would like to point out another related ongoing activity.

At this time, engineers cannot find jobs in the local market. Young qualified workers can not find jobs. Because the local investors place turn-key contracts to Far East (Chinese) companies. Far East companies bring their workers by ship, keep the ship anchored offshore if the plant is on shore.

They let the foreign workers work in the thermal power plant site construction premises, 12 hours per day, 7 days per week. They are mostly convicts, or foot soldiers. They sleep 3 in one bed. sanitary facilities are terrible, insufficient number of toilets, and showers. Pay is lowest or none at all.

We tolerate those conditions in our site facilities in KaraBiga, Çatalagzi, BeyPazari, Sirnak, Iskenderun bay to build the cheap cost imported thermal power plants firing imported coal. Our public regulatory enterprises do not care,

That is slavery. That is low cost selling of Chinese industrial plants, poor design but cheap price in competition to world class options. That practice also obstructs local engineering capability, and development of local design based on available poor quality coal firing systems.

Construction of one medium size (150 MWe) thermal power plant needs minimum 100 engineers for design, fabrication, project management functions and more than 1000 qualified workers at site for installation.

If you place the order turnkey to FarEast companies, then you erase all local employment opportunities in the local market. If an investment project does not create engineering jobs for local companies, and does not create jobs for local workers, then we do NOT need that project.

Local Trade unions/ worker unions/ political parties are dump/ unable to hear the complaints. It is my sincere feeling that European Union should warn local public institutes to stop that slavery, and create more local employment.