Who Took Away the Chair?
The Class Design of Leaving One Person at the Till, and the Real Address of What We Call "Rudeness"
Who Took Away the Chair?
The Class Design of Leaving One Person at the Till — and the Real Address of What We Call "Rudeness"
The video that occasioned this piece: Fault or design: the strategy of leaving one person at the till / Deşifre with İzel Sezer (in Turkish) — alan channel, 10 September 2026, 17 minutes. Watch it before or after reading. This piece does not replace the video; it tries to carry the case it opened one step further from a class perspective.
Dear Young Comrades,
You have all seen a video like this. A woman at the till, a customer facing her. Voices rise. A phone comes out. The recording is watched hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of times. Beneath it, comments: "She isn't doing her job." "What kind of employee is that?" "She deserved it."
The episode of Deşifre prepared by İzel Sezer on the alan channel begins by refusing to show that video. Instead it puts two numbers on the screen: everyone saw how many people watched the video, but no one asked how many people work in that shop.
That is exactly the right question. And this piece was written to pursue that question with class analysis.
Because there is an easy, comforting and completely wrong way of explaining this picture: "Society has become coarse." "Social media has turned people into monsters." "It wasn't like this before." One of the video's sharpest sentences demolishes this explanation in a single move: in 2015 too there were irritable people, rude customers, people having a bad day. In 2015 there was one more thing — a few more people behind the worker at the till.
Rudeness (nobranlık, as Turkish puts it) is not a character problem. It is a structural effect. And that structure has a name.
"Hard discount" is not a type of shop but a method of calculation
The technical name for those narrow, windowless shops piled with boxes that you see on the street is hard discount. The video describes it very clearly, and the description matches Marxist economics exactly:
- You narrow the range of products.
- You give weight to your own brand.
- You spend no money on decoration.
- You sell the product not from the shelf but from inside the box.
- You keep the profit margin as low as possible.
So where does the profit come from? From turnover speed and from operations. That is, you earn almost nothing on the product itself; you earn by turning over the same revenue with fewer people, fewer square metres and fewer hours.
Let us say it in Marx's language: the hard discount model builds its rate of profit not by raising the rate of surplus value per unit but by extraordinarily increasing the turnover of capital and pushing the intensity of living labour to its maximum. In this model the largest variable cost item is bigger than rent, bigger than electricity, bigger than refrigeration: it is staff.
And whatever is the biggest item in a business model is the place where the squeeze comes.
In the company's own words
We do not need our own interpretation to prove this sentence. BİM, Turkey's largest discount chain, set out point by point in its 2025 integrated annual report the principles by which it manages costs:
- We generally open our stores by leasing.
- Instead of opening high-cost stores on main streets, we save on rent by serving from side streets in the same area.
- We employ staff in stores in numbers sufficient not to disrupt service.
- We decorate stores as plainly as possible and use a minimum shelving system.
Read the third point again. And look at where it sits: between rent savings and plain decoration.
So in the company's own classification, how many people will work in a store is not a human resources matter. It is a savings item. On the same list as rent, the shelving system and paint.
One of the places where the capitalist class is rarely honest is its own promotional literature. We need no other document for this piece's thesis — but let us look at the figures anyway.
The division: how many people per store?
BİM's year-end 2025 figures (from the company's own reports and public compilations):
| Indicator | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Total number of stores | 14,473 |
| A year earlier | 13,583 |
| New stores opened during the year | ~890 |
| Total number of employees | 101,663 |
| Logistics centres | 83 |
| Stores in Morocco | 933 |
| Stores in Egypt | 445 |
| Average daily customer visits | 6.5 million |
| Net sales revenue | ~TRY 721 billion |
| Net profit (attributable to the parent company) | ~TRY 18.6 billion |
| Employee turnover rate in the Turkey operation | 54% |
Let us do the division: 101,663 ÷ 14,473 = 7 people per store.
But wait. Those 7 people include the head office. They include 83 logistics centres. They include regional offices. They include the operations of 933 stores in Morocco and 445 in Egypt. When you take those out, the number of workers left in the store falls even further.
Now take that remaining number and:
- Divide it across 7 days a week.
- Divide it across the shifts of a store that is open 13–14 hours a day.
- Divide it across annual leave, sick days, maternity leave and the empty posts of people who resigned and were never replaced.
One person is left at the till. And that one person is at the till, in the aisle, in the stockroom and at the end of the mop.
Set them side by side: 6.5 million people a day come face to face with these teams. Every day, about 7% of Turkey's population. It would be a miracle if nothing went wrong. And when something does go wrong, the address to send the bill to is ready: the person at the till.
54%: a system's confession about itself
There is one more line in the same report that is easy to miss: employee turnover of 54%.
More than half of a workforce of a hundred thousand changes within a year. The chance that the person you see at the till today will be there this time next year is lower than a coin toss.
Now put this next to the "staff in numbers sufficient not to disrupt service" principle. Sufficiency is achieved — but people cannot bear it. If half the workforce burns out every year, this is not a performance problem; it is the normal functioning of the system.
This is exactly where Marx's concept of the industrial reserve army comes in. A turnover rate of 54% is a sustainable model only if a huge army of the unemployed is waiting at the door. The more replaceable the worker is, the less capital is obliged to sit down at the bargaining table with them. We discussed Turkey's broadly defined unemployment figures in our piece on TÜİK labour force data: what keeps the single person at the till on their feet is the millions outside.
The list of prohibitions: a business's most honest document
If you want to understand how a workplace is designed, look not at what the employee can do but at what they cannot do.
1. Sitting is forbidden
In Turkey, sitting at the till in chain supermarkets is in practice impossible in most places. And note: there is no sign on the wall saying "sitting is forbidden". The prohibition works more elegantly:
- No chair is provided.
- If one is, the checkout counter is not designed at a height suitable for working seated.
- Or the rule "if there are no customers, you go to the aisles" is introduced and the very slot of time in which one could sit is abolished.
The medical consequence is clear: prolonged standing work is directly associated with back pain, varicose veins, oedema, joint problems and circulatory disorders.
The economic logic is clear too: chairs are cheap. The cost of the chair does not matter. What matters is that the pace does not drop.
Here we need a concept Marx uses in the first volume of Capital: the porosity of the working day (Porosität des Arbeitstages). When capital runs into the legal limit on lengthening the working day, it turns to increasing surplus value by closing up the gaps within the working day. The seconds in which one breathes, the thirty seconds between two customers, the moment between carrying one box and the next — all of these are "pores".
The chair is a pore. Removing the chair is the cheapest way to raise the intensity of labour without lengthening the working day. The most primitive and purest form of the production of relative surplus value, one that requires no technological investment at all.
2. Breaks can be split
In Turkey the right to a break is written down (Labour Law No. 4857, Article 68): at least 15 minutes for up to 4 hours of work, half an hour for 4 to 7.5 hours, 1 hour for more than 7.5 hours.
Clear on paper. But the same provision allows this break to be given in parts "depending on the nature of the work and the workplace". That is, a one-hour lunch break can be split into four separate 15-minute breaks.
It is not hard to guess what a 15-minute break means in practice in a store with one person at the till: if there is no one to cover for you, the right exists but its use does not. This is precisely the formalism of bourgeois law — it recognises the right, but not the conditions for exercising it.
3. The job description stays on paper
The contract says "cashier". The work actually done is not cashiering: bringing goods from the stockroom, carrying boxes, arranging shelves, changing labels, mopping the floor, cleaning windows, taking out the rubbish.
This has a legal consequence. The scope of the work described when the employment contract was made is being changed in practice; a worker employed outside their job description acquires rights to compensation, including termination for just cause.
But to take this to court the worker needs two things: another job and a lawyer. For an unorganised worker, a cost that is close to impossible to meet. The right exists; access to the right does not.
4. Answering back is forbidden
This is the most invisible prohibition. The worker at the till has no right to answer a customer who shouts at them. They cannot raise their voice, cannot argue. They cannot say, "You're right, but this isn't in my hands." They can, of course — and lose their job that day.
And this too is written in the company's own document. In the annual report of a publicly listed company, under the subheading of its service philosophy: BİM customers can return products they are not satisfied with without argument.
Note the key word in the sentence: without argument.
This is a fine customer right. But through whom is this right exercised? Who is it that will not argue? Not the general manager. Not the chairman of the board. The obligation not to argue rests on the person at the till.
In the very sentence in which the company grants its customer a right, it imposes a prohibition on its worker. And it writes this not in a secret circular but, as a principle, in the annual report of a publicly listed company.
5. Looking tired is forbidden
The worker is forbidden to look tired. Forbidden to look irritated. Forbidden to frown.
In this sector a smiling face is not a courtesy; it is a performance criterion. It goes into the performance review, is recorded in the mystery shopper report, is reflected in the bonus.
Its name is emotional labour (Arlie Hochschild). What the worker sells is no longer only physical strength: their patience, tone of voice and facial expression have also become the company's property. The commodification of labour power has deepened to the point of encompassing the worker's mood. This is the low-tech, high-intensity sibling of the "mental Taylorism" we discussed in our debates on labour in the age of AI.
Now read the list all together: You will stand for 8 hours. Your break will be split into four. You will do five more jobs that are not in your contract. When someone shouts at you, you will not answer. And while doing all this, you will smile.
If you can look at this list and still say "she isn't doing her job", read the list again.
The history of supervision is a history of cost-cutting
This is the most crucial section of the piece — and here lies the real mechanics of what we call "rudeness".
Look at the history of supervising a store:
| Stage | Supervision tool | Cost to capital | Severity of supervision |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Manager | Salary + social security + severance | The report goes to head office |
| 2 | Camera | One-off hardware | A recording is kept and watched later |
| 3 | Mystery shopper | Cost of a purchased service | The report turns into a score |
| 4 | Satisfaction survey (QR code on the receipt) | ≈ Zero | The manager of a low-scoring store gets a call |
| 5 | The customer's phone | Zero | The recording goes to millions |
Today every customer carries in their pocket a supervisor whom the company did not hire, does not pay and does not insure. And this supervisor is far more effective than the manager: the manager's report goes to head office, the customer's to millions.
The most cold-blooded part is this: the company did nothing to build this system. It simply left one person in the store and waited.
The cost of supervision fell to zero. The severity of supervision hit the ceiling. And caught in between was a human being whose character is put up for debate in front of millions.
This is the massification of the digital panopticon
On this blog we have always discussed the concept of the digital panopticon as if it were built from the top down: the eye of the company, the state, the platform. The till videos show us a second and more insidious layer of the concept: the outsourcing of the labour of surveillance to the masses.
We discussed in our gig economy dossier how platform capitalism turns the user into an unpaid producer of data. Here it goes one step further: the user no longer only produces data, they exercise discipline over another worker. The guard in Bentham's tower is no longer an official; it is the next customer in the queue. And this guard works for free.
Foucault's panopticon relied on the watcher being invisible. The arrangement here is even more efficient: the watcher is visible, even announces that they are watching, because the act of watching itself has been turned into a source of satisfaction. Into the sense of righteousness an exploited person feels towards another exploited person.
What is "rudeness", and whose character is it?
Now let us turn to the user, the viewer, the commenter themselves. Because the issue is not only the company's design; it is the feeling that design produces in us.
The common explanation is: "People have become rude." This explanation is moral, and that is precisely why it is useful — because the moral explanation takes the place of the class explanation. The moment you say "society has decayed", you have dumped the responsibility onto an abstraction without a perpetrator. No one is held to account.
The class explanation is this:
The woman at the till does not set the price. The worker arranging the shelves does not set wages. The worker in the warehouse does not set monetary policy. Neither does the customer. Both are trying to get by within the same order. But one sees the other, and neither sees the real address.
According to Türk-İş data for August 2026, the hunger line for a family of four is TRY 37,388 and the poverty line TRY 121,786. The monthly cost of living for a single worker is TRY 48,305. The net minimum wage for 2026, meanwhile, is TRY 28,075. So the worker at the till and the customer shouting at her are both caught in two different places of the same pair of scissors.
The anger is real. What is wrong is not the anger but the address of the anger. And the address is not wrong by accident; the wrong address is an output of the system.
Careful with "savage capitalism"
Here we need to correct a concept, because the expression most often reached for when describing this picture is "savage capitalism".
The concept of "savage capitalism" sounds radical but is a social democratic concept. It implicitly assumes this: a tame capitalism is possible. That is, the savagery is a deviation of the system, an excess, a defect that can be trained away.
Marxist analysis does not accept this. Removing the chair is not an excess; it is a mathematical necessity of the hard discount model. If the margin is low, profit comes from intensity. If you want intensity, you close the pores. If you want to close the pores, you remove the chair. The savagery is not the system's fever but the system's health.
So what brings the chair back? A single detail in the video ends the whole debate:
In Germany, Aldi lets its employees sit at the till. In the US, the same company removes the chair. The same company. The same management. The same till. A different country.
So the issue is not "the nature of the sector". The issue is how much workers in that country are able to resist. What brings the chair is not the courtesy of capital but the pressure of organised labour. Wherever capitalism looks tame, someone has paid a price to put it on a leash — and the moment the leash loosens, the animal is the same animal.
A century-long class fight: the chair
The question of the chair at the till is not a new debate that fell onto social media this summer. It is a class fight of more than a century — and it has always been started by the same group: women workers.
| Year | Place | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 1912 | Spain | 27 February: the "Chair Law" (Ley de la silla). An obligation to provide a seat for every woman employee in shops, offices and non-factory workplaces; fines of 25–250 pesetas for violations. It took years for male workers to win the same right. |
| 1914 | Chile | 7 December: Law No. 2951. "A sufficient number of seats or chairs" in shops, cafés and bars + a lunch break of at least 90 minutes. One of the early gains of the Latin American labour movement. In 1931 it was carried into the Labour Code, and from there into today's Article 193. |
| 1964 | Geneva | ILO Hygiene (Commerce and Offices) Convention, No. 120. Article 14 is a single sentence: "Sufficient and suitable seats shall be supplied for workers and workers shall be given reasonable opportunities of using them." |
| 2014 | Kerala (India) | Women textile and sales workers began a sitting strike. Standing from 9 in the morning until 7.30 in the evening, no rest apart from half an hour for lunch and 10 minutes for tea; anyone who sat was punished, in full view of the customers to boot. At the end of the struggle the state government guaranteed the right to sit. |
| 2018 | California (US) | In the PAGA lawsuit brought because it gave its cashiers no opportunity to sit, Walmart settled by agreeing to pay 65 million dollars to around 100,000 cashiers. |
| 2024–2025 | Mexico | The "Ley Silla", published in the Official Gazette on 19 December 2024, entered into force on 17 June 2025. It covers employees of supermarkets, shops, fast-food chains, shopping centres and customer service; chairs with backrests are mandatory, and making employees stand all day is forbidden. |
The Walmart sum: the price of a chair
Let us put that 65 million dollars in context. Divided among 100,000 people, it comes to about 650 dollars per person.
So a company settled the price of making a hundred thousand people work on their feet for years at roughly the price of a chair per person. This is what the deterrence claim of bourgeois law amounts to: the violation is cheaper than the penalty. The moment the penalty becomes a cost item, the law becomes a price list.
Where does Turkey stand?
In Turkey there is no specific provision directly regulating the right to sit while working.
This does not mean "the employer can do whatever they like". In labour law the employer has a duty of protection and care; this duty covers the worker's bodily integrity, personal rights and health, and is defined as an obligation to be interpreted broadly. The employer is obliged to take measures that safeguard workers' health and human dignity. So there is a legal footing.
But note this too: ILO Convention No. 120 is not among the conventions ratified by Turkey. Turkey has ratified 59 ILO conventions to date; No. 120 is not among them.
A 62-year-old, one-sentence text that says "give the worker a place to sit". And we have not signed it.
Meanwhile the issue has also reached parliament: on 11 September 2026, Deniz Demir of the CHP submitted a parliamentary question to the Ministry of Labour and Social Security on cashiers being made to work for long periods without sitting, on workloads outside their job descriptions and on overtime practices. This is a good thing — but we will shortly see that on its own it is not enough.
The woman worker: where two relations intersect
It is no coincidence that the person at the till in these videos is usually a woman. Retail is one of the sectors where women's employment is concentrated. But the issue is not only numbers.
The woman worker in this store works within two separate relations:
- The class relation: wages, shifts, precarity, workload.
- The patriarchal relation: the assumption that a woman can be silenced more easily, will not object, cannot answer back.
The second assumption determines the choice of target. The manager's pressure, the customer's insults, mobbing, threats and physical violence are not disconnected incidents; they are all different faces of the same power relation.
And the work does not end when the shift ends. The woman who stands all day in the store goes home and carries on with care work. The boss does not see the work at home, and the home does not see the exploitation at the supermarket. This closed circuit between waged labour and unpaid reproductive labour turns the woman worker's working day into a day that in practice never ends.
That is exactly how Gülbin Demirel, who works in the sector and is organised in the Store and Supermarket Workers' Commission of Sosyal-İş, affiliated to DİSK, describes it: "When a product is seen to be overpriced or wrongly labelled, when someone comes across an expired product, or when the till is busy, the cameras come out at once… While the exploitation created by capital is made invisible, the customer and the worker are set against each other."
The real prohibition is outside the store: the threshold
The prohibitions we have listed so far were inside the store: the chair, the break, the job description, the right to answer back. Now let us step outside the store — because the real prohibition is there.
The Ministry of Labour and Social Security published the July 2026 branch-of-activity statistics in the Official Gazette of 28 July 2026:
| Indicator | July 2026 |
|---|---|
| Total number of workers | 17,630,475 |
| Unionised workers | 2,432,789 |
| Non-unionised workers | 15,197,686 |
| Unionisation rate | 13.79% (January 2026: 14.45%) |
| Most populous branch of activity (No. 10, Commerce, Office, Education and Fine Arts) | 4,508,122 workers |
Of every 100 workers, about 14 are unionised and 86 unorganised. What is more, the rate is falling: having stayed above 14% since January 2021, as of July 2026 it has fallen back to its 2020 level.
And even this 13.79% is misleading. As Prof. Aziz Çelik reminds us, when you strip out public employment, the unionisation rate in the private sector is 6.7%. The supermarket worker stands right here, inside this 6.7%.
And the most populous branch of activity is No. 10, where supermarket workers, shop workers and cashiers are found. Turkey's largest army of workers is here, and this is precisely where organisation is weakest.
The 1% threshold: a mathematical prohibition
In Turkey, for a union to gain the authority to conclude a collective agreement, it must have signed up at least 1% of the workers in its branch of activity. This is called the branch threshold.
Do the sum: there are more than 4.5 million workers in branch No. 10. 1% means more than 45,000 members.
45,000 members in a sector of supermarkets, shops and shopping centres, of three-person branches, of constant staff turnover (remember: 54%), where people are fired when the word union is mentioned.
The result is plain: in the July 2026 statistics, 190 of the 246 unions registered with the ministry fell below the 1% threshold — that is, about 77% of unions. The total membership of these unions that could not pass the threshold is close to 95,000. Although these people are union members, they will not be able to exercise the right to collective bargaining for at least six months.
Now build the picture once more:
- Sitting at the till is impossible because there is no chair.
- Taking a break is impossible because there is no one to cover.
- Answering back is impossible because you would lose your job.
- Changing any of this through a collective agreement is impossible because of the threshold.
The chain of prohibitions does not end at the store's door; it reaches all the way to the Official Gazette.
And when a system closes off every layer of objection one by one, that is not called a fault.
That is called design.
Two explanations, side by side
| The "society has become rude" explanation | The class explanation |
|---|---|
| The problem lies in individual morality | The problem lies in the mathematics of the business model |
| The worker at the till "isn't doing her job" | The worker at the till is doing five people's work alone |
| The customer "has become a monster" | The customer's anger is real, its address is wrong |
| Social media produced the anger | Social media has been turned into a zero-cost apparatus of supervision |
| The chair is "a trivial detail" | The chair is a pore of the working day; removing it is the production of relative surplus value |
| Solution: a politeness campaign, "empathy" | Solution: staffing, contracts, abolishing the threshold, organising |
| Perpetrator: a vague "society" | Perpetrator: companies with names, titles, annual reports and profit figures |
| Result: no one is held to account | Result: the table at which to demand an account is clear |
Memorise this table. You can take apart almost any "social collapse" narrative you come across with this template. The method is the same one we used in our answer to Evrim Ağacı's video on the opposition: finding the perpetrator of the narrative without a perpetrator.
Cracks: what happened, what could happen?
The picture is grim. But there are cracks in it too.
In August 2026, after those videos hit the agenda, the Store and Supermarket Workers' Commission of the Sosyal-İş Union, affiliated to DİSK, held a press statement in Kadıköy. The commission member who read the statement, Gülbin Demirel, is herself a worker in the sector. The picture she described confirms, one by one, every point listed in this piece: working from 8 in the morning to 10 at night and living below the poverty line, taking sick leave being treated as a luxury, being blacklisted when you mention the union.
What happened next is more interesting. According to the same statement, messages started arriving through WhatsApp groups from workers wanting to join the union. Many store employees asked how to become members.
The companies' response on the ground was this: in some small stores, chairs were put at the tills. In some places chairs were ordered.
So the companies were able to loosen a century-old prohibition under the pressure of public opinion within a few weeks.
So it could be done after all.
But the note added to that statement matters: this is not enough. Because the issue was never a single chair.
The threshold is still in place. Job security is not. Mostly, there is still one person at the till. But one thing has changed: this summer millions of people looked behind that till for the first time.
Concrete tasks
Dear young comrades, we do not want this piece to remain an "awareness text". The following points are things that can be done.
As customers — that is, as workers at the other end of this order
- Do not take out the camera. The person who shares a worker's image and makes her a target may the next day stand at the other end of the same order in their own workplace. This order is designed to set worker against worker; do not become a tool of that design.
- Change the question. Instead of "Why is this person so slow?", ask "How many people work in this store?" The direction of the question changes the direction of the anger.
- Send your complaint to its address. If the label is wrong, the shelf empty or the queue long, none of these is the decision of the person at the till. The worker does not set the price, the staffing, the shifts or the chair. The complaint goes to the company, the ministry, the member of parliament.
- Instead of writing a comment under a video, sign a union's campaign. One is zero-cost anger, the other organised pressure — and it was the second that got companies to order chairs within a few weeks.
For comrades working in the sector
- Ask for your job description in writing. Keep a copy of your employment contract, your job description and your shift schedule. Keep date-and-time notes of the work you actually do; this is a basis for both legal and organisational action later.
- Keep a record of your breaks. Note the days when your break was split or not given. On its own it is not evidence, but as a collective record it is powerful.
- Union membership is meaningful regardless of the threshold. The threshold blocks the authority to bargain collectively; it does not block legal protection against dismissal, solidarity or organised representation. The 95,000-strong "below threshold" mass is also the base for the campaign against the threshold itself.
- Join the branch commissions. The DİSK/Sosyal-İş Store and Supermarket Workers' Commission is today the most concrete address in this sector. Tez-Koop-İş's organising in stores is also ongoing.
For the organised movement
- A "Right to a Chair" campaign is a demand that can be reduced to a single article of law, and that is exactly why it is powerful. The single sentence of ILO No. 120, Article 14 can be added to the Labour Law or to occupational health and safety legislation: "Workers shall be supplied with sufficient and suitable seats and given the opportunity to use them."
- Ratification of ILO Convention No. 120 is a concrete, measurable demand for which public support is easy to gather. The parliamentary questions submitted should be tied to this demand.
- Abolishing the branch threshold is the key to organising supermarket and shop workers. The threshold has for years been a subject of discussion in the ILO's supervisory bodies on the grounds that it violates freedom of association. The chair campaign should be built as the doorway to the threshold campaign.
- Organise the store–warehouse–courier line together. Those working in the stores, warehouses and distribution chain of the same capital group are divided into separate branches of activity. As we discussed in our gig economy dossier, this division is not a legal reality but a tool for fragmenting organisation.
Dear young comrades,
The starting point of this piece was a chair. But you have seen: the chair was never just a chair.
The chair is the seconds in which one breathes within the working day. The chair is a person's last say over their own body. The chair is the living human being that capital, with the sentence "staff in numbers sufficient not to disrupt service", has squeezed in between rent and paint.
And there is only one way found so far to win the chair back. Not a lawsuit. Not a petition. Certainly not a viral video.
Organising.
In Spain in 1912, in Chile in 1914, in Kerala in 2014, in California in 2018, in Mexico in 2025, the same thing always happened: first the women workers stood up, then the chair came.
You can keep a worker on her feet. But the workers who stand up are usually the ones who have the last word.
And remember: when you watch the next video, the question to ask is not "why isn't this person doing her job?"
The question to ask is this: how many people work in that store?
Sources
The video itself
- Arıza mı tasarım mı: Kasada tek kişi bırakma stratejisi / İzel Sezer ile Deşifre — alan, 10 September 2026 (in Turkish)
Company documents and sector data (in Turkish)
- BİM Birleşik Mağazalar — Annual Reports
- BİM 2025 Q3 Activity Report (PDF)
- BİM Birleşik Mağazalar (BIMAS) — Company Review Notes, Ekonomudi, 19 March 2026
- Supermarket Chains in Turkey 2026 — Dr İlhami Pektaş
- ŞOK Marketler 2025 results — Yıldız Holding
Workers' accounts and union sources (in Turkish)
- Store and supermarket workers complain of psychological, digital and physical violence: the anger at price rises goes to the wrong address — Cumhuriyet, 17 August 2026
- Gülbin Demirel, "The Wrong Address of Anger: Violence against Women Workers in Supermarkets and the Culture of Lynching" — El Yazmaları, 12 August 2026
- DİSK/Sosyal-İş Union
- Supermarket workers speak: A101's exploitation never ends — soL Haber
- A report also covering A101, ŞOK and BİM — Cumhuriyet
Legislation, conventions, statistics
- ILO Hygiene (Commerce and Offices) Convention, No. 120 (1964), Article 14
- ILO conventions ratified by Turkey — Ministry of Labour and Social Security (PDF, in Turkish)
- July 2026 union statistics: 15.2 million of 17.6 million workers have no union membership — bianet (in Turkish)
- July 2026 union statistics: a working class that is broader, less organised and besieged by "thresholds" — sendika.org (in Turkish)
- Prof. Aziz Çelik: "13.8% unionisation is misleading; what matters is the rate in the private sector" — Tez-Koop-İş (in Turkish)
- Branch-of-Activity Statistics for July 2026 — Ministry of Labour and Social Security, 28 July 2026 (in Turkish)
- TÜRK-İŞ August 2026 Hunger and Poverty Lines (in Turkish)
- The 2026 minimum wage — EY Turkey (in Turkish)
- The "standing work" debate in chain supermarkets reaches parliament (CHP MP Deniz Demir's parliamentary question, 11 September 2026) (in Turkish)
The history of chair laws
- Eduardo Montagut, "La Ley de la Silla de 1912" (Spain)
- Ley de la silla — Wikipedia (Chile, 1914)
- Chair law — Wikipedia
- Ley Silla (reform of the Federal Labour Law) — Mexico, DOF 19 December 2024 / in force 17 June 2025, KPMG summary
- Walmart pays 65 million dollars in cashier seating lawsuit — Fortune, 14 October 2018
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