The Search for New Union Strategies: Turkish Cypriot Trade Unions

Trade unions can be defined as institutions who act to protect the rights of their members at work through collective understanding of organization and action. Unions are known to fight for justice to workers, justice in the organization and empowerment of their members. Unions have to develop strategies like any other organization. These strategies can be grouped according to the parties which they are in a relation with. Most common classifications of these strategies are Classic (Traditional) Strategy and Partnership Strategy (Boxall and Haynes, 1997; Haynes and Allen, 2001). Partnership strategy is important for the contemporary unionist approach. In this strategy the aim is to prioritize the individual while producing strategies unlike the collectivist approach. Additionally, it is important for unions to generate strategies that can offer solutions to problems of the society and cooperate with NGOs. The study has been carried out in 2008 within a project aimed to find out the policies used by the Turkish trade unions in Cyprus. The data was collected by questionnaire method from a sample of 123 people including the union managers, members of board, union representatives and union members. Research findings showed that Turkish unions in Cyprus are inadequate about adopting new strategies other than industrial strategies.