Women Criticize The New Employment Law
The Initiative for Women’s Labor and Employment (KEİG) evaluated the employment law for its implications for women’s employment.
The KEİG report asserts that there are two main obstacles facing the task of increasing women’s employment in jobs for wages and income:
- The women are held responsible for domestic work and taking care of the children, the elderly and the physically challenged,
- They encounter sexual discrimination in every area of life.
The report shows that as long as these obstacles exist, the showpiece-changes to increase women’s employment will not prove useful:
“Even though the Justice and Development Party (AKP) may be working towards increasing women’s employment, this is not the kind of employment women want. In fact, we say that increasing women’s employment numerically in an environment where women’s work load in their houses and their dependence on men increase to even greater proportions will only mean more exploitation for women.”Women’s employment is low because they work at home for free
Moreover, the report states that the law was not discussed publicly during its preparation and coming to the Parliament, the knowledge and experience of people and institutions who work in this area were not taken into consideration in the new arrangement.
The report states that the most important reason behind the low employment is that the care of the children, the elderly, the sick and the physically challenged is solved through the unpaid labor of women at homes.The arrangements that will have the men, the employer and the government share the load of care taking that the women alone are managing at the moment must be enacted urgently. The parental leave needs to be implemented urgently as well.
They are taking the responsibility of providing day-care centers away from the employer
Making use of the results of the Time Usage Poll published in 2008 by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK), the report reminds that the women in Turkey spend on average five hours of their day to these type of care taking services and housework, they receive nothing in return for 35 hours of work and 12 million of more than 20 million women define themselves as full-time housewives. It emphasizes that the only solution the new law proposes is that the workplace should fulfill its obligation to provide day-care services by giving the employees the chance to make the necessary arrangements with the outside day-care services.
According to the law, to increase the employment levels of young people and women, the employer’s obligation to make social security payments will be gradually handed over to the treasury and the obligation to provide day-care services will be removed completely.The Social Security contribution reduction
According to the report, the social security contribution reduction of the temporary article 3 as a measure to support the employment of women and young people is a positive step as far as its goal is concerned, but when approached from different angles, it has problems. It is highly possible that the employer will choose the young male workers over women workers. Therefore, the cost advantages need to be rearranged to make the contribution reductions for women employment higher than the ones for the young people. (NZ/GG/TB)