In many countries, irrespective of their regimes or stages of development, the policies of governments in the 1980s dramatically shifted in favour of market-based solutions as opposed to the previous dominant “Keynesian” approach to economic management. Their policies focused on improving public sector performance by several forms of “commercialization”, such as deregulation and privatization (Femer 1988). Thus, the privatization of public enterprises has become a key strategy in governments’ market- oriented approaches. Basically, the privatization programmes have been designed to reduce the size and scope of the public sector and strengthen the market. Turkey, like most other countries followed the privatisation (ozellestirme) trend. The sell-off philosophy has been a central pillar of governments economic policy since 1984, even if the results so far have been sometimes less than convincing. Here, the Turkish experience with privatization, and more importantly, its impact on trade unions will be examined.