JINHA

NEWS CENTER - Women across Turkey protested the deaths of 15 mainly female agricultural workers yesterday.

Early yesterday morning, a group of seasonal agricultural workers were crowded into the back of a flatbed truck headed for the grapevines in the Gölmarmara area of Manisa province, Turkey. The truck collided with a tanker, killing 15 workers, 13 of them women. Many seasonal agricultural workers in Turkey are women and children. The workers who died in the accident would have received around 9-10 TL (no more than $4) for picking grape leaves until 10 or 11 p.m. that day.

In just the first five months of 2015, at least 646 workers have died in Turkey in so-called "workplace accidents" because of insufficient safety precautions. 227 of those died in traffic accidents. Activists say these are not accidents, but workplace massacres.

Women denounced the inadequate protections for workers in Turkey with protests yesterday. In Izmir, women marched behind a banner reading: "We work seasonally, we die daily. We women want to live." The women demanded an urgent meeting of Turkey's Parliament to address the skyrocketing deaths of women and workers in Turkey.

"Those in power measure their own careers in Mercedes cars. Meanwhile, women workers are dying after being packed into a flatbed truck like sardines," said Arzu Çerkezoğlu, the general secretary of the union confederation DİSK, commenting on the massacre. "This can't be called a workplace accident. We're looking, quite obviously, at a massacre."

(ck-mh/dc/gc/mg/cm)