Turkey – agediscrimination.info

Bener Law Office

www.bener.av.tr

Overview

It is not general to observe any treatments regarding direct age discrimination against employees as well in the employment history of Turkey as present employment practice and laws relating such issue. Contrarily, there were some regulations, which were supporting and encouraging employees.

Due to having a young population, Turkey had no need to make direct age discrimination against old employees. Nevertheless, there is some indirect discrimination towards employees, who reaches retirement ages, which are stabled by related laws and regulations, due to over employment. There is a regulation about the minimum ages in acceptance to Employment and it states the minimum ages of employees that the employers may employ in different categories of work. Other than this, some laws define retirement ages different for both men and women. Today, the retirement ages for men and women are 58 and 60 respectively but reaching the given ages is not enough for retirement. Government officers are not allowed to be employed in government by the age of 65, due to the Association of Pension Fund’s laws. However, they might be employed in private sectors.

In Turkey people are covered from the age discrimination regulations, who belongs to one of the three institutions, which are the Social Security Institution for the employees, Social Security Organization for Artisans and Self-Employed and also there is Association of Pension Fund for the government officers. These institutions’ laws and regulations specify some retirement ages for some different professions. These three institutions will be merged under one institution, thereby the difference of the obligations and rights between the employees will be eliminated.

In Turkey retirement can not be the only reason for the termination of the Labour Agreement; however, in addition to this reason the agreement can be terminated based on behavior or productivity of an employee. The retirement can only be a supplementary reason for the termination. If an employer terminates the agreement based on retirement of the employee, it will be a termination without a valid reason, which has certain consequences. However, some companies have their own regulations for the employees, which may rule the retirement age for the certain company. Contrarily, in one of its decisions, the Supreme Court ruled that, termination of the employment agreement based on the age limitation may not be considered as a justifiable ground. In the mentioned case the Supreme Court ruled against the employer, who had terminated the agreement based on the fact that, the employee passed the age of 60, which was the age of retirement determined in the intern regulations regarding the working conditions of employees of the mentioned company and the company was ordered to pay the lieu of notice to the employee. The existence of the regulations does not affect the view of the Supreme Court. In practice the Supreme Court always protects the rights of the employees.

There are only a few claims about the age discrimination in Turkey. However with the new social security system, which will be in force as of 2007, we hope the employees will be protected in a more effective way.