Tekel

» see tekel.com.tr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In Turkey the word tekel still means a shop. You say tekel bayi and everyone knows you mean the place on the corner that sells beer and cigarettes late into the night, and the connection to the state company the license originally came from has mostly worn off the word. That company was Tekel, and for most of the twentieth century it was one of the largest employers in the country.

The state bought out the Ottoman Régie in 1925 and reorganized the business under the name Tekel in 1932. The remit covered tobacco and salt as well as rakı and the other spirits, which looks like an odd product mix until you notice those were exactly the taxed monopolies the Ottoman state had run before it. Tekel made the cigarettes people actually smoked, including a brand called Asker issued to soldiers, and it made the rakı that sat on the table with the fish.

Privatization took a decade to finish. The alcohol division went to a Turkish consortium in 2004 and was renamed Mey İçki, which TPG bought in 2006 and Diageo bought in 2011. The cigarette business went last, in a live televised auction on 22 February 2008, to British American Tobacco for $1.72 billion. That gave BAT about 36 percent of the Turkish market. Six factories came with the deal and the workforce did not.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the reji before it ~

The Régie explains why a republic wanted a tobacco monopoly in the first place. After the Ottoman default of 1875 the empire's European creditors set up the Public Debt Administration, and in 1883 it handed the tobacco monopoly to a French-controlled company with a name long enough to be a paragraph on its own. Turkish growers called it the Reji and left it at that.

The Reji set the price it paid for the crop and kept its own armed guards to suppress smuggling, and there were people shot in the tobacco districts over it. Taking it back in 1925 was one of the early economic acts of the republic, and the guaranteed purchase price Tekel paid growers for the next seventy years was a direct answer to what the Reji had done. That is the thing privatization actually ended, rather more than the cigarette brands.

~ the winter in ankara ~

In December 2009 the government announced the last Tekel factories would shut and the roughly 10,000 remaining workers would be moved onto a temporary public-sector contract called 4/C, at about half their previous wages and with no job security. The workers traveled to Ankara from all over the country and gathered outside the AKP headquarters on 15 December. Police pushed them into Abdi İpekçi Park the next morning and encircled them, and they stayed there.

It ran seventy eight days through one of the colder winters, and it was the largest labor action Turkey had seen in years, with a one-day general strike on 4 February 2010 that put tens of thousands into the streets in Ankara and İzmir. The workers went home in March on a promise of review and the courts eventually trimmed parts of the 4/C terms. The factories stayed shut. If you were living in Ankara that winter the tents were simply part of the city, on a stretch of road you drove past on the way to somewhere else.

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