27 March 2020
Provisional Article 23 has been added to the Law No. 4447 with the Law No. 7226 published on 26 March 2020. According to such provision, in short-time work applications to be made on the grounds of force majeure relating to Covid-19, the periods that are taken into account while determining whether an employee is entitled to receive short-time work wage have been decreased. Accordingly, the employees who have worked as insured under an employment agreement for the last 60 days before the starting date of the short-time work and whose unemployment insurance premium for 450 days in the last three years have been paid will be entitled to receive short-time work wage. Therefore, the periods which were previously set as 120 and 600 days have been reduced to enable more employees to benefit from short-time work wage.
The employees who are not eligible to receive short-time work wage, will also be able to benefit from the short-time work wage for the period remaining from their last unemployment benefit entitlement, to the extent that such period does not exceed the short-time work period.
In order to benefit from the short-time work within the scope of this article, the employer must not dismiss any of the employees during the term of short-time work at the workplace; except for dismissals due to the reasons stated under subparagraph (II) of paragraph one of Article 25 of the law No. 4857 (ethics and good faith rules).
The President is authorized to extend the application date until 31 December 2020 and to change the number of days set out in the article.
If you have any questions regarding our above note, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Kind regards,
Güner Law Office