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Collective Dismissal of Employees under Turkish Law
*
Att. Fatih Isik
Introduction
The collective dismissal of employees is regulated under Art. 29 of
the Labor Act numbered 4857 (“Act”). There are certain criteria to be
met in order for a given lay-off to be identified as collective dismissal
under Turkish Law.
The subject matter of this article will be the definition of collective
dismissal, the employer’s obligations, and the sanctions applicable
concerning breaches of collective dismissal rules.
Definition
Art. 29 of the Act defines collective dismissals in quantitative and
qualitative terms that must be collectively present for a given lay-off to
be deemed as a collective dismissal. Art. 29 (1) describes the qualita-
tive measure as “
…collective terminations for reasons of an economic,
technological, structural or similar nature necessitated by the require-
ments of the enterprise, the establishment or activity…
”
In a quantitative dismissal, an employer shall dismiss a certain
number of employees specified in the said provision in order to be sub-
ject to collective dismissal rules: (i) a minimum of 10 employees for
workplaces where 20 and 100 employees are employed, (ii) at least
10% of the employees for workplaces where 101 and 300 employees
are employed, (iii) a minimum of 30 employees for the workplaces
where 301 or more employees are employed.
It must be noted that even though the employees may be dismissed
on the same date or on different dates, all dismissals must be affected
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Article of September 2015