Requirements of Benefiting from Short-time Working Benefit Facilitated

Requirements of benefiting from Short-time Working Benefit have been facilitated to reduce the possible impacts of Covid-19 outbreak on labour market.

Requirements of benefiting from Short-time Working Benefit have been facilitated with the provisional Article 23 added to the Unemployment Insurance Law No. 4447 in accordance with the regulation adopted by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Before this regulation, those who were subject to the labour contract for the last 120 days before start date of Short-time Working Benefit and paid minimum 600 days of premiums in the last 3 years could benefit from Short-time Working Benefit. With this regulation, for the application to be made until June 30, 2020, requirement of the number of premium payment has been reduced from 600 days to 450 days and requirement of being subject to a labour contract for the last 120 days has been reduced to 60 days.

With the regulation, which will be valid for applications to be made until June 30, 2020, it is aimed to mitigate the negative impacts of new-coronavirus on our economy and employment markets, and to eliminate the uncertainties that businesses and employees may encounter in this process.

These provisions are also valid for employers who have applied within this scope before, and they do not need to apply again.

What is Short-time Working Benefit?

Short-time working is an application that provides income support to insured employees for the period that they cannot work – this period does not exceed 3 months - on the condition that due to general economic, sectoral, regional crisis or force majeure, weekly working period at the workplace is temporarily reduced by minimum one-third or the operation at the workplace is completely or partially suspended for minimum four weeks without a continuity condition.