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Not for Money, for Our Honour

From Ali Şekeroğlu's Banner to Seventy-Five Years of Retirement

Author: Oğuz Demirkapı
Not for Money, for Our Honour

Not for Money, for Our Honour

Retirement Was Not Given, It Was Taken: A History and a Warning to Young Comrades from Ankara

Dear Young Comrades,

Today, on the last Friday of September, a retiree lost his life in front of the Constitutional Court in Ankara.

His name was Ali Şekeroğlu. He was born in 1966, had raised two children, and had spent most of his life as a police officer. (Yeni Ankara) That morning he left his home to voice the same demand as thousands of other retirees. The sentence he wrote with his own hand on the banner he was holding is perhaps the shortest text written to tell the last twenty years of this country:

"Not for money, for our honour."

According to witnesses, the last words he spoke to those beside him turned around this sentence: "I can no longer make ends meet. I want to live not for money, but for my honour." A little earlier, as a grandfather, he had shared his simplest hurt: "I have a grandchild, and I could not pin a gold coin on them." (soL, eyewitnesses) Another witness relays the sentence of a father carrying his family's burden: "I am retired, I cannot make ends meet. My daughter-in-law is unemployed, my son-in-law is unemployed." (Dokuz Eylül) And one sentence more, this time with a clear addressee: "Let those who brought us to this state be ashamed." (Medyascope)

He took his own life. He was taken to hospital and could not be saved. The press statement that was to be read was not read; the voice of those left in the square rose only in anger. At the hour I write these lines, the state has not a single official sentence. (soL)

The rest of this piece rests on a principle. I want to say it at the outset, plainly:

Ali Şekeroğlu's death is not a path; it is a wound.

We will not turn this death into a heroic epic. If a person's whole life had to be fitted into a single sentence that could be heard only through their death, the crime belongs to the order that did not hear that sentence while they lived. Our task is to turn that sentence into the voice of the living, into the organised power of millions. A power such that no one should have to pay this price again.

In this piece we will pass through three doors. First we will stand before that banner and ask why "money" and "honour" stand side by side in the same sentence. Then we will walk through a seventy-five-year history: how a right was founded, how it grew, how it was eroded, and how at last it was turned into a favour. At the end we will turn to you, young comrades. Because the darkest page of this story has not yet been written, and that page is being written in your name, while you are not even aware of it.

Before a Banner

At first sight the sentence looks like a contradiction. How can a person who wants their pension raised say "not for money"?

Yet the contradiction is only apparent. Ali Şekeroğlu was not saying that money is unimportant. He was reminding us what money is.

A pension is not a gift. It is deferred wages. The contribution cut from every payslip for thirty years is the piece of the worker's own labour not spent today but left for tomorrow. To take a pension is not to take alms; it is to take back what remains of a lifetime's sweat. That is why the erosion of the pension is not only a loss of income; it is a loss of standing. The rights-holder is quietly turned into someone waiting for help.

The sentence on the banner says exactly this: I want back what you took from me; I do not want you to behave as if you were giving me something. Not being able to pin gold on a grandchild looks at first like a small money matter. But something much deeper lies under it: a person's being dropped, inside their own family, from the position of the one who gives to the position of the one who receives. Honour here is not an abstract virtue. It is a social relation. It is to be able to stand, in others' eyes and in one's own, as someone who has received the return of their labour.

When Marx explains the value of labour-power he adds a refinement: the worker's subsistence is not only enough for the body to live; it carries within it "a historical and moral element." Every society learns from its own history and tradition what it means to live as a human being. In this land, a grandfather's pinning a small gold coin on a newborn grandchild is part of that moral element. The retiree who cannot do this is not only poor; they have been socially diminished. Ali Şekeroğlu's word is the name of that diminishing.

What the retirees' organisations said the same day was no different: they wanted a life fit for human beings, won by years of labour — not alms. (Dokuz Eylül) One person's banner was a generation's demand.

How Did We Come to That Square?

No death takes place in a void. This death too has a history, a calendar, a file number.

In July 2023 civil servants were given an across-the-board increase of 8,077 TL; the same state's retirees were left outside that increase. A retired member of the Court of Cassation, Seyfettin Çilesiz, took this distinction to the Constitutional Court. On 18 September 2026 the Court's Commission found the application admissible, and the file set out to be examined on the merits. According to the applicant's lawyer, the loss accumulated over thirty-nine months exceeds a million lira per person. (Sözcü)

Retirees were in the square today to push their voices through the small door that decision had opened. In the press two separate figures are circulating: "81 provinces" and "86 points." The reason is that more than one call to action was issued for the same day; we record them one by one below. What matters is this: retirees were on the threshold of turning a struggle they had long waged in scattered associations into a common action unity. (Atilla Özsever, "For the retiree, action unity first")

Some details of the incident change from source to source. One report ties the statement to TEMUD (the Association of Retired Specialist Sergeants); another writes that a different association's logo was on the cap Ali Şekeroğlu was wearing. We do not hide these differences, but they do not change the picture. The question of the association's president, Cahit Koca, stands above all the details: "What does it mean that a person takes their own life saying 'I cannot make ends meet'? It shows the state of the retiree in Turkey." (Yeni Ankara)

The Calls to Action That Were Announced

It is necessary to put on the record what a generation asked for that day, at whose call, and in which words. Because the first step of forgetting is to forget the demand. The calls we could reach were these:

The joint call of twenty-five retirees' organisations: in front of the Constitutional Court and simultaneous action in the provinces

  • Time and place: Friday 25 September 2026, 15.00, in front of the Constitutional Court in Ankara (near Ahlatlıbel Atatürk Park). Retirees who could not come to Ankara were to gather in their own provinces at the same hour; the figure "81 provinces" comes from here. (TR Haberleri, 12 September; TR Haberleri, 25 September; BirGün)
  • Who called: Some twenty-five organisations, twenty of them retirees' associations. Among them are the Union of All Retirees, the Independent Retirees' Union, the United Retirees' Union, the Union of Retirees' Chambers, and organisations of retired civil servants, soldiers and press workers.
  • Demand: Payment of the across-the-board increase not given to retired civil servants in 2023. According to the applicant's lawyer, Ali Erdem Gündoğan, the present equivalent of that increase is 25,250 TL.
  • Campaign: A one-million-signature campaign to speed the Court's decision. The applicant Seyfettin Çilesiz was expected to speak from the platform.
  • Outcome: The statement could not be read. After Ali Şekeroğlu's death the retirees decided not to complete the press statement. (Medyascope)

The Union of All Retirees' call: action at 86 points

  • Scope: Simultaneous action at 86 separate points from Istanbul to Ankara, from Edirne to Adana; the figure "86 points" comes from here. (BirGün, "Retirees are taking to the street"; Gazete Kamu)
  • Demands: An urgent 20,000 TL increase on all pensions, raising festival bonuses to the level of the minimum wage, a life fit for human beings.
  • The core of the call: "Not alms, we want our right."

The İzmir Retirees' Platform's call: Konak

  • Time and place: 25 September 2026, gathering at 14.30 in front of Konak YKM, press statement at 15.00 at the Konak Ferry Pier tram stop. (İz Gazete)
  • Demands: Raising pensions, measures against the cost of living, protection of social rights, the across-the-board increase.
  • The words: "The retiree is not silent, they want their right." And the platform's sentence: "For years we have been waiting for the return of our labour, our right to a life fit for human beings, and our right to the across-the-board increase."

After the death: TİP Ankara's call, this evening on Sakarya Street

  • Time and place: Friday 25 September 2026, 19.30, Ankara, Sakarya Street.
  • The heading of the call: "Give account for those who died for their honour!"
  • The text of the call: "There is an account we will demand from the order that thought this despair fitting for our retired fellow citizen who today, in front of the Constitutional Court, gave up their life saying 'not for money, for my honour'; the order that has abandoned millions of retirees, workers, young people and women to poverty." (TİP Ankara, X, 25 September 2026)
  • This is the first street call announced after the death with a date, hour and place. In the sources we could reach, for now it is the only one.

After the death: the parties' statements

  • TİP Headquarters named the responsibility plainly, citing the sentence on the banner: "It is the Palace government that thinks a life unfit for human honour is what retirees deserve, that thinks of nothing but the bosses' pockets. This dark order is what has brought the working person and the retiree to a state in which they cannot make ends meet, driven those who cannot make ends meet into despair, and stolen from the people." The statement ends with these words: "For a country we can live in, we will change this government and this order!" (TİP, X, 25 September 2026) There is no call to action with a date and place on the headquarters account; the street call came from the Ankara provincial organisation. On the TİP Istanbul and TİP Labour accounts, as of this hour, there is no call on the subject.
  • The Labour Party (EMEP) headed a statement signed by General President Seyit Aslan: "What drove retired Ali to take his own life is the order of capital and the Palace!" It stressed that retirees have been condemned to live on pensions at half the hunger line, that resources have been transferred to capital and to favoured contractors, and ended with a call to unite: "We call to all workers, working people and retirees who feel themselves alone and helpless in this vice! You are not alone, we are not alone! We can change this order of exploitation by uniting! We must unite at once to change this order!" (EMEP; EMEP, X) There is no specific date and place in the statement. On the EMEP Istanbul and İzmir accounts, as of this hour, there is no call to action. EMEP Ankara's X account appears to have been suspended ("Account suspended"), so we could not confirm by that channel whether the Ankara organisation issued a call.
  • The TKP described what happened as "the plainest and most bitter summary of the savage picture this rotten order thinks fit for working people" and called for solidarity: "We will stand shoulder to shoulder, and draw strength from one another, so as not to sacrifice even a single one of our people to this filthy wheel!" There is no specific date or place in the statement. (soL)

All three statements arrive at the same place: this death is not an individual tragedy; it is the result of an order. This common ground matters. But the common ground of statements is not yet the common ground of action. How many separate banners walk in a single cortège this evening on Sakarya Street will show how real that common ground is.

When we set these calls side by side, two things appear. First, the retirees' movement is no longer speaking with a single voice but on three separate layers: in the language of law (the Constitutional Court and the across-the-board increase), in the language of the economy (an urgent rise, bringing the bonus up to the minimum wage), and in the language of morals (not alms but a right). Second, separate calls are being made on the same day for the same demand. This scattering is nobody's fault; it is the natural mark of a movement's growth. But it is a stage that has to be passed. The question of the witnesses in the square asks this in the heaviest way: "We are at the place where words end. What more can we do?" (soL)

The answer to this question cannot be a person's life. The answer is the gathering of scattered voices into a single power.

Update — 26 September 2026, 11.20

Since this piece was published, the new gathering call that has reached us with a date and a place is the funeral. There is as yet no independent report of how last evening's call on Sakarya Street passed. The joint press statement of the twenty-five organisations in front of the Constitutional Court has been postponed to a later date; a new hour and place have not yet been announced. (Halk TV; Evrensel) As of this morning there is still no official statement. (T24)

The funeral: today, Ahi Mesud Söğüt Mosque

  • Time and place: Saturday 26 September 2026, after the noon prayer, Ankara, Ahi Mesud Söğüt Mosque. After the funeral prayer, Elvanköy Cemetery.
  • Who announced it: On behalf of the Across-the-Board Increase Victims' Platform, the lawyer Ali Erdem Gündoğan. (BirGün)
  • This is the second gathering announced after the death with a date, hour and place. If you are in Ankara, you are there today.

Ali Şekeroğlu's own call

This morning his last call, published on social media before he went to the action, came to light. The sentence stands in a different place from the words on his banner; it does not make a person into a hero, it asks that a generation not be left one short:

"On Friday 25 September a press statement will be made in front of the Constitutional Court; if you are not there, one person will be missing. Do not say 'what will happen if I do not come'! Unity is strength. Let us make our voice heard for the constitutional right to live and make ends meet as a human being. You hear the cries inside us, God. Let our state and those who govern us hear them too." (Sözcü; T24)

The Union of All Retirees: the statements will continue

The union has not published a new street call with a date and place after the death. But it has said plainly that it will not stop the struggle: "Retirees do not want alms. They want the rights they earned by working a lifetime, a pension on which they can live as human beings, and an honourable life. The words 'not for money, for honour' must not be forgotten. We will not remain silent at retirees being condemned to poverty. We will continue our organised struggle for our rights and for an honourable life." (marksist.org; bianet)

General President Zeynel Abidin Ergen announced that the press statements will continue, that in those statements Ali Şekeroğlu will be remembered and the policies that drive retirement into destitution will be condemned. He called for the resignation of the Minister of Labour and Social Security, Vedat Işıkhan, and of the Minister of Treasury and Finance, Mehmet Şimşek; he said they expect a satisfactory statement from the President. (BirGün)

New statements after the death

They are not street calls with a date and a place; yet the words that have come from last evening to this morning add labour organisations to yesterday's three parties.

  • TİP General President Erkan Baş: "A thousand times curse this dark order that grudges even their life to the retiree and lets Palace society live in ease. (…) This is the country of those who live not for money but for honour. You trust your money; we will drive you out with our honour. We swear we will demand an account, one by one, for every life we have lost." (Evrensel)
  • SOL Party: "Those who condemn retirees to death will certainly give account. (…) The honour struggle of retirees who have worked a lifetime to walk with their heads high and with honour belongs to all of us." (T24)
  • DİSK: "The retirees' demands cannot be postponed. Pensions must be raised to a level that is enough to live as human beings, and all retirees' rights to housing, food and health must be secured. To build a just order in which retirees will live as human beings is an honour struggle for all of us." (Evrensel)
  • TMMOB: "Our retired fellow citizens cannot be condemned to hunger, poverty and death. (…) An income on which retirees can live as human beings is not a favour of the social security system; it is the return of labour given over years." (Evrensel)
  • Birleşik Metal-İş: It demanded that the across-the-board-increase demand be met at once, that pensions be raised to a level enough to live as human beings, and announced that it will grow the struggle of workers and retirees. (BirGün)

Yesterday's three layers still stand: law, the economy, morals. What is new is that the labour confederations and the professional chambers have also arrived at the same sentence — honour, not alms but a right. What is still missing is the same thing: a new date for the postponed statement, a single calendar, a single platform.

The Order's Watchman, at the Order's Door

I want to dwell on a detail, young comrades. Ali Şekeroğlu was a retired police officer.

He was a person who had stood watch for years at the state's door, who had served for the "security" of the order. In retirement he came to the door of the same state, this time of its high court, to ask for honour. There is a deep historical irony in this scene. Impoverishment no longer stays only in the lowest layers of the class. It is pushing the civil servant, the non-commissioned officer, the specialist sergeant, the teacher, the police officer into the same ditch. Even the sections the order counted as its most loyal learn, bitterly, in old age that the order to which they gave their lives owes them nothing.

What was called the "middle class" was in fact a polite name given to a relatively secured layer of waged working people. That layer is melting. What remains is a very old truth of this country: everyone who lives on a wage ends up at the same table.

A Retiree's Month

We have a principle on this blog: under every claim a figure, under every figure a source. The ratio calculations are ours.

  • Lowest pension (July 2026): 23,552 TL. In January it was 20,000 TL; the amount added in six months is 3,552 TL. (Fotomaç)
  • Hunger line (August 2026, family of four, food only): 37,388 TL. (TÜRK-İŞ)
  • Cost of living for a single worker: 48,305 TL.
  • Poverty line: 121,786 TL.
  • Net minimum wage (2026): 28,075.50 TL. (bianet)

When we set these figures side by side, a map of a life appears. The lowest pension is 63 percent of the hunger line; there is a gulf of 13,836 TL between them. It is 49 percent of the living cost of a person living alone; that is, a retiree living alone runs out of money before the middle of the month. It is only 19 percent of the poverty line. Food inflation is 37.90 percent a year. Because the weight of a retiree's budget is in the kitchen and at the pharmacy, the announced general inflation figure is always more optimistic than it is for the retiree.

This too must be known: this figure is not an exceptional lower bound. The pensions of millions of retirees are gathered just on or just next to this floor. The floor has in practice become the average.

A Right of Seventy-Five Years

Now let us walk back in time. Because the only way to understand today is to remember where this right came from. And the first thing to remember is this: nobody gave us this right as a gift.

Foundation (1945–1960)

Modern social insurance in Turkey was born from the ashes of the Second World War. In 1945 Law No. 4772 established insurance for workplace accidents, occupational disease and maternity; Law No. 4792 established the Workers' Insurance Institution. In 1949 Law No. 5434, the Republic of Turkey Pension Fund Law, came out for civil servants. In 1950 came Law No. 5417 on Old-Age Insurance, in 1957 Law No. 6900 on invalidity, old age and death insurance. (SGK History)

It is necessary to understand that these dates are not chance. After the war a social state was being built everywhere in Europe, because the Soviet Union stood on the horizon and the European working class was strong. The bourgeoisie had to tell the worker "I will protect you in old age too"; if it did not, the worker could demand another world. In Turkey too insurance became, in the last years of the single-party regime and in the passage to multi-party life, a means of binding to the order the new worker flowing from village to city.

Keep one detail from those first years in mind, because years later it will come before you under the name "black hole." The system was young; those paying contributions were many, those drawing pensions few. Funds accumulated. As the social-security literature has long discussed, these funds were transferred at low returns to public institutions, banks and investments. The money saved for the worker's old age was turned into a cheap source of early capital accumulation.

Expansion (1961–1980)

The 1961 Constitution wrote the principle of the "social state" into the text. In 1963 the right to strike and to collective agreement became law. In 1964 the scattered workers' insurances were united under Social Insurance Law No. 506, and in 1965 the Workers' Insurance Institution took the name SSK. In 1971 Bağ-Kur, Law No. 1479, was founded for tradespeople and the self-employed. In 1976, with Law No. 2022, the age-65 pension came for the destitute elderly. (SGK History)

These are the years in which the retirement right expanded. The reason is written not on paper but in the streets: DİSK was founded in 1967; on 15–16 June 1970 the working class filled Istanbul's roads. Rights grew together with the organised strength of the class. If the whole history of this piece had to be summarised in a single sentence I would say this: social security is the mark of the balance of force among classes as it falls onto the payslip.

I will not tell these years as a "golden age." The queues at SSK hospitals were long, the peasant was uninsured, the great majority of women were outside the system. But the direction of history was right: coverage was widening, and the pension aimed to sustain in old age the life that had been lived while working.

The break (12 September and the 1980s)

We told it at length in 12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup: the coup's economic programme was the 24 January Decisions, and that programme's first target was wages. DİSK was closed, strikes were banned, real wages collapsed. Pensions, being tied to wages, melted with them. Capital accumulation was restarted by cutting from the worker's today and from their tomorrow.

In the second half of the 1980s an age condition was brought into retirement. With the Spring Actions of 1989 the working class came back onto the stage. In the 1991 elections the lifting of the age condition became an election pledge, and in 1992 it was lifted. That was the first rehearsal of today's debate: the retirement right was now the material of a political bargain.

The siege (1990–2008)

In the 1990s a phrase was invented: the social-security black hole. The deficits were growing because unemployment, informal work and successive contribution amnesties were lowering revenue, because the state was not paying its own employer's share regularly, because those old funds had long since been eroded. But the narrative arrived every time at the same place: the problem was that the retiree retired too early and lived too long.

In 1995 the DYP–SHP government, in line with the demands of the IMF and the World Bank, prepared to bring the age condition back: 60 for men, 55 for women. In those years the average life expectancy for a man in this country was 64. Türk-İş went into the squares. On 30 April 1995 in İzmir, on 21 May 1995 in Rize, "No to Retirement in the Grave" rallies were held. The law could not pass that year. (Tekgıda-İş)

It passed four years later. Look carefully at how it passed. Only three weeks had gone by since the earthquake of 17 August 1999. The country was lifting rubble, counting its dead. On 8 September 1999 Law No. 4447 came out: 58 for women, 60 for men, in stages. In a country in mourning, it was cut from the future of a working class in no condition to raise its voice. (Tekgıda-İş; Official Gazette) This is the textbook example in this land of what Naomi Klein called the "shock doctrine."

Then the AKP period came and finished the job. In 2006, with Law No. 5502, SSK, Bağ-Kur and the Pension Fund were united under a single roof, SGK. Law No. 5510 on Social Insurance and General Health Insurance entered into force on 1 October 2008. The retirement age was tied in stages to 65, replacement rates were lowered, and the calculation formula pulled the pension a little further from past earnings. (SGK History) The name of this change was "reform." Its content was a single sentence: work longer, pay more, take less.

The melt (2003–2026)

Now we come to the most striking figure of this history. In January 2003 the lowest pension was 47 percent above the minimum wage. In 2016 the minimum wage overtook the lowest pension for the first time. In January 2023 the lowest pension had fallen to roughly two-thirds of the minimum wage. (Euronews) Today the lowest pension is 84 percent of the net minimum wage.

Read this table carefully. The minimum wage is already below the hunger line. The pension has been pushed below even the wage that is below the hunger line. The worker who twenty years ago retired taking more than they had earned while working is today poorer than the minimum-wage earner.

The mechanism of the melt is as instructive as its result. The pension is no longer determined by its own inner logic, that is, by contributions paid. A "lowest pension" floor, redrawn every six months by a political decision of the Treasury, determines it. The worker who has paid contributions for thirty years and the one who has paid for fifteen are piled onto the same floor. The bond between contribution and pension — that is, the right itself — is silently erased. What remains is a handout bargained over every six months as "how much shall be given."

Retiree Life Today

The rest that retirement is not

In February 2026 the number of retirees paying the social-security support contribution to SGK — that is, working on the books — was 2,130,020. Six years earlier this number was 746,766; the rise is 185 percent. (Cumhuriyet) These are only those on the books. Retirees who open a stall in the market, who wait at a building door, who share their child's rent by looking after a grandchild, are outside this number.

According to TÜİK the employment rate among those over 65 was 10 percent in 2020 and rose to 13.1 percent in 2024; more than half of them are in the field. (TÜİK, Elderly in Statistics 2025)

This work has a price. According to the records of the İSİG Assembly, in the first eight months of 2026 alone at least 108 workers aged 65 and over lost their lives in workplace murders. Under overturned tractors, on fallen scaffolding, in heart attacks at the end of unending shifts. (soL, İSİG figures) Retirement had been founded as the rest-right of a person who had worked a lifetime. Today it has been turned into the name of the old dying in workplace murders.

The geography of loneliness

Turkey is ageing fast. The population over 65 was 7.95 million in 2020; in 2025 it became 9.58 million, 11.1 percent of the population. In almost one household in four there lives at least one elderly person. 1.84 million elderly people live alone, and 73.5 percent of them are women. (TÜİK, Elderly in Statistics 2025)

The elderly woman living alone is this order's most invisible poor person. Most of them have no retirement right of their own, because throughout their lives they have given unpaid care labour. They live on the survivor's pension left by a spouse. In Whose Family Is Safe? we showed how, when the state says "family," it leaves the burden of care on the woman's shoulder. The last act of that burden comes down here: the woman who has looked after others for a lifetime is left without anyone in old age.

The body's bill

For the retiree, health has ceased to be a right and become a line on a bill. Under the general health-insurance regime set up by 5510, examination and medicine co-payments are cut directly from the retiree's pension. An appointment at a state hospital is given for weeks later; at a private hospital the difference is paid out of pocket. For a retiree living with a chronic illness, medicine, glasses, teeth, a hearing aid, physiotherapy — each means a separate account. To tell a person whose pension is below the hunger line that "your health is your responsibility" is a polite form of saying "give up on your health."

The bill of the spirit is paid separately as well. The collapse created by not being able to make ends meet, by going into debt, by becoming a burden on one's child, by being made to feel useless, is not an individual psychological problem. It is produced socially. The Association of Social Security Specialists also records the effect of poverty on the retiree's mental health as a separate heading. (SGMD)

Two generations at the same table

Let us recall Ali Şekeroğlu's sentence again: "My daughter-in-law is unemployed, my son-in-law is unemployed." Today's retiree is not carrying only their own poverty. They are sharing the rent of a child who is unemployed or working without security, the school expense of a grandchild, the care of the sick person in the house. As we showed in TÜİK: Two Figures, One Country: 8.1% and 30.6%, broad unemployment is above 30 percent. Youth unemployment and retiree poverty meet under the roof of the same household.

Once the retiree was the person who could help their child. Then they became the person waiting for help from their child. Today both are poor, and they sit at the same table, around the same lack. The pension is part of the household's living; to erode it is to erode the living of a whole family, of a whole generation.

Between Right and Favour

Now we come to the heart of the matter.

The difference between a right and a help is simple but deep: a right can be sued for; a help can be taken back. A right comes with a rule and makes you a subject. A help comes with a decision and makes you a waiter. If you have a right, you demand; if you are receiving help, you are expected to give thanks.

Over the last twenty years in this country, retirement has been turned step by step from a right into a help. The pieces of the mechanism are in the open:

  • The festival bonus. It began in April 2018, just before the June 2018 elections, at 1,000 TL. In 2026 it is 4,000 TL; its real value has eroded by more than 60 percent against 2018. (Doğruluk Payı) Today it is only 17 percent of the lowest pension. The name itself gives away the nature of the relation: bonus, that is, a treat. Not a right, a treat.
  • The lowest-pension floor. It is raised before elections and left to inflation to erode after them. Before the 2023 general election the floor was raised, the festival bonus was increased, EYT became law. Two months after the election civil servants were given an across-the-board increase; retirees were not. That that decision is today before the Constitutional Court is not chance.
  • The line drawn in the across-the-board increase. The distinction between the civil servant and the retired civil servant drawing a salary from the same state is the legal form of defining the retiree as a section that "no longer produces, and therefore has no bargaining power left."
  • Municipal aids. Not only the government but opposition municipalities too distribute cards, coupons, bread to retirees. Whatever their intentions, these practices also reproduce the same relation: gratitude for a service is put in the place of a demand for a right.

The name of this relation is patronage. Resources are distributed not as a right but as the counterpart of loyalty. The person who receives is not a rights-holder but a client. And the client hesitates to change their patron, because they know that this month's help may be cut next month.

In Why Do Workers Vote for the Right? we wrote that one of the basic mechanisms of AKP hegemony is exactly this: the turning of social rights into a relation of political dependence. Retirees are the most crowded, the most fragile, and the most sensitive-to-the-election-calendar link of this relation. There are some 17 million retirees in this country (soL); together with their families they make up a large part of the electorate.

The cycle always works in the same form. First the right is eroded. Then a piece of the eroded right is given back as "good news." Thanks are expected of the one who gives the good news. The one who does not give thanks is called ungrateful. And on the one who wants the whole of the right falls the heavy silence Ali Şekeroğlu met.

The banner "not for money, for our honour" was aimed at the very heart of this cycle. What it said was this: Do not give me good news; give me my right. Honour is refusing to be a client.

A Country's Mirror

It is easy to speak of retirees as a separate category: "our elderly," "our retirees." Yet retiree poverty is the mirror of the country's whole poverty. The pension is the last payslip of a working life, and it carries inside it everything lived in that life.

If wages are low, contributions are low, and the pension is low too. If informal work is widespread, contribution days fall short; retirement is postponed or the pension is piled onto the floor. If unemployment is high, the retiree looks after their child. If inflation is high, the fixed-income earner loses most, and the most fixed-income earner is the retiree. If public services are charged for, the elderly person who needs the services most pays most.

So what impoverishes the retiree is not a separate "retiree policy" but a whole model of accumulation. Cheap labour, flexible work, low tax on capital, high indirect tax on the poor. Capital uses the worker cheaply while they work; when they retire it turns their old age into a "savings item" of the budget.

In the same years nobody said "there is no resource" for the profit records of banks and holdings, for the resources transferred to deposit-holders through the currency-protected deposit, for the treasury guarantees given to contractors. There is always a resource. The question is to whom that resource is allocated. A budget is the accounts book in which a society records whose life it counts as more valuable. In that book the retiree stands in the "expenditure" column, capital in the "investment" column.

Two Generations, Two Retirements

A worker who retired before 1999A young person starting work in 2026
No age condition, or a low one; retirement after twenty to twenty-five years of contributionsAge 65 in stages; 7,200 days, often incomplete contributions
The pension aimed at the life lived while workingReplacement rates lowered; the pension detached from the wage
Lowest pension above the minimum wage (2003: 47 percent more)Lowest pension below the minimum wage (2026: 84 percent of it)
SSK, Bağ-Kur, Pension Fund separate; severance pay secureA single roof, a single formula; severance pay constantly in debate
Unionised workplaces and collective agreements relatively commonSubcontracting, platforms, tradesperson-couriers, project-based work
Retirement meant restRetirement means starting a second job
The state's language: "it is your right"The state's language: "good news," "bonus," "support"
An organised class was defending its gainsA scattered generation does not even know how the gains were lost

The last row of this table tells why this piece is written to you.

Young Comrades: The Old Age That Awaits You

For most of those reading this piece, retirement is a distant horizon, a place thirty or forty years off. But I want you to know this: your retirement is being designed today, while you are not there.

The draft of the future prepared for you is as follows:

A shattered working life. As we showed in the Gig Economy Dossier, by making the courier a "tradesperson" they load the employer's contribution onto their shoulder. A Bağ-Kur courier, as contribution debt accumulates, moves further from retirement. Internships, apprenticeships, MESEM, project-based contracts, "freelance": each means years cut from contribution days. Artificial intelligence and the platform economy are speeding this shattering. There is work, but insured work is growing steadily scarcer.

A rising age, a falling rate. With 5510 the retirement age was tied in stages to 65, and on today's course it is being said that even this limit will not be enough. As replacement rates fall, the pension you will take at 65 will become a steadily smaller fraction of what you earned while working.

The hand reaching for severance pay. The aim of the debate that has for years been put before us as "let it be transferred to a fund" is to remove the last great security in the worker's hand, the cost to the employer of dismissal. The "complementary retirement" models kept on the agenda also point in the same direction.

Individualised old age. The private pension system tells you "save for your own old age." This is the turning of a collective right into an individual investment product. Your risk is transferred to the stock market, to interest, to the fund manager. In The Factory Closed, the Share Multiplied Twenty-Fivefold we told what fictitious capital does to the small saver. To entrust your old age to that market is to leave it on a gambling table.

The new version of the "black hole" narrative. The population is ageing; the number of workers per retiree is falling. They will tell you this as an unchangeable demographic fate: "The system has collapsed, there is no retirement left for your generation." When you hear this sentence, remember two things. First, where the funds of the 1950s went. Second, that cutting from the retiree is not the only way to close a social-security deficit. Fighting informal work, collecting employers' contributions in full, stopping contribution amnesties, taxing capital income and reflecting productivity gains into wages are also possible. Demography is a datum, not a fate. Who pays the bill is not a demographic question but a class question.

I am obliged to speak plainly to you. If nothing changes, your generation should not expect a good old age. It is not hard to calculate how much of a right trimmed a little more each year will still be standing in twenty or thirty years. The banner in Ali Şekeroğlu's hand today may be in your hands tomorrow. With the same words, in older and more tired hands.

But this is not a dark prophecy; it is a warning. Because the whole history we have told shows a single truth: the retirement right was never given; it was always taken. If it expanded in the 1960s, it expanded because the class was organised. If "retirement in the grave" could not pass in 1995, it could not pass because Türk-İş was in the square. If it passed in 1999, it passed because the country was under rubble and the class was scattered. The fate of rights is determined not by demography but by organisation.

The Official Narrative and the Class Reading

Official narrativeClass reading
There is no resourceThere is a resource; to whom it is allocated is a political decision
Social security is a black holeThe funds were eroded early; contribution amnesties and informal work grew the deficit
Good news for our retireesA piece of the eroded right is being given back
Festival bonusNot a right but a treat; its real value has eroded by more than 60 percent since 2018
Across-the-board increase for civil servants, none for retireesThe share of the one with no bargaining power left is cut
The population is ageing, the system is unsustainableWho pays the bill is not a demographic question but a class question
Secure your future with a private pensionA collective right is being turned into market risk
A singular, tragic eventThe nakedest expression of millions forced to live on 63 percent of the hunger line

Concrete Tasks

If anger is not turned into organisation, it dies in a week. That is why I suggest you turn your anger into these tasks:

  • Listen to your retiree. This evening speak with your mother, your father, your grandfather, or the retiree next door. Ask their pension, their medicine bill, their rent, to whom they are in debt. To know poverty from figures is one thing; to see it in a face is another. Tell them that what they are ashamed of is not their own crime.
  • Leave no one alone. Know the elderly who live alone in your neighbourhood, in your building. A telephone call, a visit, a shopping trip. Solidarity is an organised relation built where the state has withdrawn; it is not alms.
  • Join the calls, join the calls together. If you are in Ankara, go today to Ahi Mesud Söğüt Mosque for the noon prayer; the funeral will be taken to Elvanköy Cemetery. Sign the one-million-signature campaign and spread it. The Union of All Retirees has announced that it will continue its press statements; follow the next action of the union and of the provincial retirees' platforms, and take your family and the retirees in your neighbourhood with you. Announce the new date of the postponed joint statement, and raise your voice so that separate calls made for the same demand meet in a single calendar and on a single platform.
  • Build a bond with retirees' organisations. Give them social-media, design, legal and data support. The organisation of generations separately is the division capital loves most.
  • Follow the Constitutional Court process. The across-the-board-increase application will be examined on the merits. Follow the calendar and announce it. Law alone does not win, but a file with a crowd behind it is read differently.
  • Read your own payslip. Download your SGK service record from e-Devlet. How many days of contributions have been paid, has the employer declared your real wage, or shown the minimum wage? An underpaid contribution is a share stolen today from your future pension.
  • Stand against informal work. It is not easy to object alone to uninsured or half-insured work. But three people in a workplace asking the same question together produces a very different result from one person asking it.
  • Join a union. The root of today's retiree poverty is in yesterday's worker's lack of organisation. Tomorrow's retirement is determined in today's union membership. If you do not know where to start, start with texts such as The Computing Worker's Handbook.
  • Answer the "black hole" narrative with figures. When someone says "the system is bankrupt," ask: Whose were the contribution amnesties for? How much is employers' contribution debt? How much was paid on the currency-protected deposit? To ask where the resource went is to refute the claim that there is no resource.
  • Do not give thanks in the language of good news. Speak of the pension rise, the bonus, the floor adjustment in the language of rights. Not "they gave," but "we took" or "they did not give." Consciousness does not change until the language changes.
  • Do not fall for generation-hatred. The duality "because of the retirees nothing is left for us" or "the young do not work" is an effort to set two generations of the same class against one another. The retiree's pension and the young person's wage are cut from the same place.
  • Tell this history. From 1945 to 1999, from "No to Retirement in the Grave" to today. A generation that does not know how rights were won will not notice how they were lost either.
  • Keep Ali Şekeroğlu's name alive, but do not multiply his path. Make a slogan of his sentence, not of his death. A person's honour is preserved only in the organised voice of the living.

Dear Young Comrades,

Today in front of the Constitutional Court a man said he could not pin gold on his grandchild, and a short time later he lost his life. It will be spoken of for a few days, then a new agenda will come, and this sentence too will mix among the other sentences and go. Our work is to stand in front of this forgetting.

The sentence on Ali Şekeroğlu's banner carries inside it the whole history of a class: not for money, for honour. Because for the working person money is the material form of honour. To receive the return of one's labour, not to be dependent on anyone in old age, to be able to give something to a grandchild, is not a luxury; it is the least return of a lifetime of work. This order is not paying that return. What is more, it holds out a small piece of what it has not paid as "good news" and waits for thanks.

Retirement was nobody's gift. It was founded in 1945 because the working class was strong. It expanded in the 1960s because it was organised. It was pruned in 1999 and after because it was scattered. Today it is being trimmed a little more every day, because the hands that would stop this trimming have not yet come together.

Those hands are your hands. Hands that will stand today beside your grandfather, your mother. Hands that will tomorrow defend your own old age.

Honour is not an individual virtue; it is a collective gain. No one can protect their honour alone; honour is defended only together.

We remember Ali Şekeroğlu with respect. We offer our condolences to his family, to those who loved him, and to all the retired comrades who stood beside him in that square.

Comradely.

Knowledge belongs to everyone.

Update

25 September 2026, 18.40: At the hour this piece was published, no official statement had been made on the incident. This piece will be updated according to the development of the organisations that arranged the action, of the Constitutional Court process, and of official statements.

26 September 2026, 11.20: There is still no official statement. The joint press statement of the twenty-five organisations in front of the Constitutional Court has been postponed to a later date; a new hour and place have not been announced. The second gathering after the death with a date and a place is today, after the noon prayer, at Ahi Mesud Söğüt Mosque and Elvanköy Cemetery. The Union of All Retirees has announced that it will continue the struggle and its press statements. The detail and the sources are at the end of The Calls to Action That Were Announced.

You Are Not Alone

If while reading this piece you feel helpless, or if you are thinking of ending your life, please do not stay alone. Reach someone you trust at once; in an emergency call 112. If there is an elderly person, a retiree, a friend around you who says "I cannot bear it any more," take that sentence seriously, stand beside them, and help them reach a health institution. Poverty, debt and loneliness are problems whose solution is social. No one has to carry this burden alone.

Related pieces

Poverty and figures

Labour and organisation

History and hegemony

Sources

The incident

Calls to action and the Constitutional Court process

Pension, wage and subsistence

Retiree life

History and legislation

Tags:#pensioner#protest#ankara#poverty#turkey#labour#socialsecurity#humanrights

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