Where foreign employers lose
A termination that would be routine in the parent's home country becomes expensive in Türkiye for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits. The reason is usually sound. The sequence is not.
The pattern repeats: a decision is taken, a conversation happens, and only afterwards does anyone document the reason, calculate the entitlements or think about the exit declaration. By then the employee has taken advice, the file contains nothing written down, and the burden of proving a valid reason sits with the employer.
We are asked to help after that conversation more often than before it. Before is cheaper by a wide margin.
What we do
Before the conversation. We work through whether the ground you have will hold, what has to be documented and in what order, what the total cost will be — severance, notice, accrued leave, bonus entitlement — and how the exit should be coded. Then you have the conversation.
The calculation. Severance accrues at thirty days' gross wage per year of service and is capped at a ceiling re-set every six months. Notice runs on a statutory scale by length of service. Accrued leave has to be paid out. Getting any of these wrong is a straightforward claim against you.
The exit declaration. The code entered on the social security exit determines the employee's unemployment benefit, and an incorrect one is a common trigger for a subsequent dispute. It is a small field that causes disproportionate trouble.
Mediation. Applying to a mediator is a procedural precondition to an employment claim in Türkiye — a claim filed without it is dismissed on procedure. Expect an application and prepare the file for it immediately. A party that fails to attend the first session without a valid excuse bears all trial costs even if it later wins.
Redundancy and restructuring
Where the numbers reach the collective redundancy thresholds, prior notice must be given to the workplace union, the employment agency and the social security institution — a step with its own timing that groups planning a closure or a headcount reduction frequently discover late.
Where a workplace employs thirty or more people, the job security regime applies and a dismissal requires a valid, written, provable reason. The thirty-employee test counts across the employer's workplaces in the same line of business, not per site. Foreign employers misread this one more than any other provision.
The detail behind all of the above — notice scale, entitlement conditions, the current severance ceiling, reinstatement compensation — is set out in our termination guide.