Fotoğraf: Wikimedia Commons

The gang is so powerful that they threatened prosecutors in their offices and flaunted political connections. The indictment, completed in October 2024 after an investigation that began in May 2024, spans 30 folders and covers 197 criminal acts. There are 47 suspects, 22 of whom are under arrest. The issue came to light after workers filed complaints through CİMER (the official communication channel for citizens), prompting an investigation into the matter. Despite earlier complaints by patients and employees, a healthcare system incapable of proper oversight has allowed these hospitals to escape scrutiny.

Behind the crimes lies a large and organized network involving hospital owners and managers at the top and doctors, nurses, paramedics, and administrative staff at lower levels. The conservative perspective that claims “capitalism eroded morality” won’t solve the problem. Those who make this argument often end up forgetting the system and instead focusing on discussing individual immorality. The Turkish Medical Association provides a broader perspective in their press release: “The Health Transformation Program, which turned hospitals into corporations and patients into customers, corroded the healthcare system by subjecting it to market rules.”

This is a systemic problem. However, we must connect daily practice to structural problems as well to understand how a crime was committed collectively while other employees were there witnessing. Therefore, it is essential to examine this issue at the workplace level, which I aim to do in this piece. One cannot help but ask: What were the other employees thinking while these crimes were being committed? How much were they aware of the murders and public resource theft? What could they have done, and what did they actually do? We need to ask these questions not to reduce the issue to “Why are some people so bad?” but to find solutions. The issue is not just identifying criminals but understanding how the system makes ordinary people complicit in crimes, or at the very least, silent witnesses to unethical or criminal actions.

Many behaviours we would disapprove of in others are normalized as part of the job in workplaces. Resisting the crimes we’re made complicit in at work is difficult without organizing employees. Working is harmful to our bodies in the long term, physically, but what does working in such an environment do to our behaviour? For example, what happens to someone who has to manipulate customers into making purchases for years? No one introduces themselves as “a bank employee  who manipulates elderly people into signing up for credit cards.” People in situations or roles that aren’t criminal but aren’t ethical either are left to face this alone. When we think of morality, we often think of actions with legal consequences, like embezzlement. However, workplaces are spaces where crimes are distributed top-down, ensuring that everyone gets just enough responsibility to say, “I’m not guilty.” Diane Vaughan calls it the normalization of deviance.

Corporations create a closed system of moral erosion by drawing employees into complicity. This system makes everything appear normal from the outside, and no one speaks out because they are either complicit or witnesses. According to Christophe Dejours, employees often numb themselves to the suffering of others, which ultimately leads to becoming numb to themselves. This moral erosion manifests in what Dejours describes as “ethical suffering,” evident in letters left behind by employees who committed suicide in Türkiye caused by workplace moral crises. A criminal act becomes a moral crisis when everyone does a bit. Survivors of such moral erosion find themselves in a space where no one is accountable to anyone else, battling psychological and physical problems. As little crimes become widespread, it becomes harder to discern what is unethical in workplaces. Unethical or even illegal activities become normalized. In the Turkish context, journalist Bahadır Özgür calls it the massification of criminal acts.

In 2018, a social worker who exposed a scandal involving pregnant children in a hospital struggled with the challenges of exposing the scandal and admitted in an interview that she had fallen into depression. A comment on the interview read, “What’s there to be depressed about? You’re a hero.” However, the responsibility to not be complicit in corporate crime does not call for heroism but for organizing. In an environment where professional associations are coerced into submission, and organized workers face intimidation, this responsibility comes at a cost, but it is worth it.

So, let’s answer these questions in Turkish context to take health back from corporations:

• What additional options do employees have besides filing official complaints online?
• Are there protocols when employees approach unions or professional associations for whistleblowing?
• What should a labour organization do to protect and support a whistleblower and prevent their isolation afterwards?
• What challenges do whistleblowers face, and what do they expect in return?
• If such mechanisms existed, would committing crimes have been as easy?

This is the updated English version of the previous piece in Turkish published on 19.10.2024.
Image on the cover: Marcelo Leal on Unsplash