The trade unions of workers are being arranged with the Act No. 6356 on Trade Unions and Collective Labour Agreements in Turkey.
According to the Act No. 6356 each year the Ministry of Labour and Social Security publishes the number of unionised workers and number of employees of each worker and employer unions. This annoucement is being commenced twice a year, in January and in July, and being published at the Turkish Official Gazette. In this regard, each parties can know the current situation of employees in Turkey in terms of collective bargaining power and trade unionisation.
Recently, unionized worker statistics for the July 2022 period are being published in the Turkish Official Gazette dated 22th of July 2022 by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security. Accordingly, 2 million 280 thousand out of the 15 million 987 thousand workers in the country are unionized and the unionization rate with this ratio has reached 14.26 percent according to national statistics.
The number and rate of unionized workers in Turkey have been increasing steadily for the last decade.
When we look at OECD statistics, we see a similar situation. The number of non-union workers, which reached the bottom in 2012-2013, started to decrease after this year. While the unionization rate, which shows the number of unionized workers in the Turkish working class, was 12.5% in 2000, this figure bottomed to 6.3 in 2012. After 2013, there is seen a steady increase, reaching to the 10% limit as of the end of 2019. Although it has not been published yet, I expect see the increase in OECD statistics between 2020-2022 with a figure approaching 12 percent.
