Erdoğan to businesspeople: Hire one extra person to cut unemployment

“If each member here hires one more person, we can create 1.5 million new jobs for unemployed people,” Erdoğan said in a speech on May 8, addressing the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey (TOBB) at the Labor Health and Safety Conference in Istanbul. 

“Will you go bankrupt if you hire one more person? No, you will have a bumper business when you do this. Money stays in the world behind us when we die. People should use their money to open employment opportunities to others,” he added. 

Turkey’s unemployment rate increased to an eleven-month high of 11.1 percent in January from 10.8 percent in December, the Turkish Statistics Institute (TÜİK) stated on April 15. The number of unemployed people aged 15 years and over rose to 3.29 million in January, an increase of 31,000 from the previous year, largely due to the rising labor force participation rate. 

Erdoğan noted that there are 3 billion workers in the world, around 1.2 billion of whom are women, according to data from the International Labor Organization (ILO). 

“Unfortunately, one person dies from work accidents or occupational diseases every six seconds. As the ILO mentioned, almost 98 percent of these losses occur due to preventable accidents. We have also observed with sorrow that at least 160 million workers get occupational disease every year … The only reason for these tragedies is not any deficiency in technologies or opportunities, but a corrupted point of view about humanity.

It is an ill-gotten gain for anyone to put people’s lives into danger just for the sake of more money,” he said. 
Erdoğan stressed that companies “should not increase their profits by cutting their workers’ wages and social rights.”

“Worker and labor unions must also be extremely careful in protecting their rights and use all opportunities. If there is not enough, they should put pressure on their employers,” he said, adding that in order to ensure workers’ rights and labor safety, workers “should take required measures as well as the government and the employer.”