Number of registered employees rising: Official

Hacer Boyacıoğlu - ANKARA

The total number of registered employees has been increasing despite the end of a layoff ban, the head of Turkey’s Social Security Institution (SGK) has said.

“The number of social security beneficiaries increased by 200,000 compared to the figures in May. New recruitments are on the rise and it seems that they will continue increasing,” SGK head İsmail Yılmaz told a group of journalists.

More than 21.925 million people were registered under the national social security system in May, according to SGK figures.

Turkey introduced a layoff ban in April last year in a bid to protect workers from the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. The layoff ban ended at the end of June.

Under a short-term employment allowance scheme, the Unemployment Insurance Fund was paying 60 percent of the staff salaries of the employees when a business cut work hours.

The registration rate of new hires of June and July is slightly better than the levels in the same two months of 2019 and 2020, Yılmaz said.

Every employee working at least 10 days a month is included in these numbers, he added.

The latest figures from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) show that Turkey’s unemployment rate was 13.2 percent in May, decreasing 0.6 percentage points from the previous month.

The number of unemployed people aged 15 and over decreased by 265,000 month on month to 4.24 million in May.

On the other hand, the employment rate slipped 0.4 percentage points to 43.8 percent, or 27.84 million people, during the same period.

The labor force participation rate stood at 50.5 percent this May - down 0.8 percentage points from April.

Some 32.08 million people made up the labor force, with a 481,000-person decrease in May 2021 compared to the previous month, TÜİK said.

Meanwhile, the rate of unregistered employment – people working without social security related to their principal occupation – was 28.1 percent in the January-March period, down 2 percentage points from the previous quarter.

The rate of women participating in the workforce was 31.2 percent, while this figure was 69.2 percent for men.

The Turkish economy expanded by 1.8 percent in 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic. The economy expanded 7 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2021.

The manufacturing industry, which grew by 12.2 percent, was the sector that contributed the most to the increase in GDP.

Many economists expect Turkey’s economy to grow above 6 percent overall this year.