Abstract
By combining flexibility and employment protection, the 2003 Labor Act of Turkey has become a key element in promoting fundamental employment rights in Turkey, safeguarding workers’ employment conditions under flexible arrangements, and improving equality at the workplace. This paper aims to explain the unique process used in drafting this legislation as well as the Act’s main dimensions and the problems encountered in practice. The chapter is composed of mainly two parts. Following some background information, the first part deals with the process of drafting the proposal for a new Labor Act. The second part explains the main dimensions of the draft bill and the final text enacted by the Parliament. The paper concludes with a final section on the general evaluation and future prospects for flexicurity in Turkey.
In this chapter, for reasons of space economy, only the pronoun “he”, without prejeduce to the pronoun “she”, has been used to denote the third person pronoun which should be construed to mean a person of unspecified sex. For labor law concepts, terminology of the International Labor Organisation has been adopted.
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Notes
- 1.
“What we had expected from you was the flexibilization of our labor legislation; on the contrary, you have overregulated it.” TİSK representative Erdoğan Karakoyunlu’s statement to the “academic committee” in a meeting of the committee with the social partners, held at Abant, Bolu in December 2002. See also ILO and OECD, “Short-term employment and labor market outlook and key challenges in G20 countries. A statistical update for the G20 Meeting of Labor and Employment Ministers”, Paris, 26–27 September 2011. For the evaluations of the OECD claiming that Turkish labor legislation is still rigid, see the various issues of Economic Survey published by that organization.
- 2.
Responses to interview questions indicate the extent of violations in working time regulations, ranging from rest breaks to overtime rules. “In contrast to the previous Labor Act no. 1475, Act no. 4857 loosened the regulation of overtime work, thus paving the way for making workers do overtime in excessive hours more easily. In firms where there is a labor union which oversees the application of legal rules and collective bargaining terms, this is more difficult for the employer. Obviously this makes it possible for nonunion firms to reach higher production levels. In the so-called balancing period no overtime premium is required, provided that the daily working time does not exceed 11 hours.”
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Dereli, T. (2014). Flexicurity and Turkey’s New Labor Act: Problems and Prospects. In: Dereli, T., Soykut-Sarica, Y., Şen-Taşbaşi, A. (eds) Labor and Employment Relations in a Globalized World. Contributions to Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04349-4_6
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