Termination of the employment contract in Turkey with notice
Article 17 of the Labour Law No. 4857 is related to the termination of employment contract in Turkey of indefinite duration with notice. According to the article, in this case, the decision to terminate the employment contract must be notified to the other party. Based on the notification of the termination to the other party, it should be stated that the employer or the employee who performs the termination should grant the notice period to the other party in the terminations to be made according to this article.
For the termination of the employment contract in Turkey to be made according to this article, the notice period must be given according to the seniority of the employee as stated below.
| Seniority of the employee | Notşce Period |
| Less than six months | 2 weeks |
| Six months to one and a half years | 4 weeks |
| One and a half to three years | 6 weeks |
| More than three years | 8 weeks |
The employment contracts of workers with the above-mentioned seniority shall be deemed to be terminated upon the expiry of the prescribed periods. The periods specified in the law are minimum and can be increased by agreements.
If the said notice requirement is not complied with, the non-complying party is required to pay compensation to the other party in the amount of the wage for the notice period, which is called notice pay in practice. The issues regarding the payment of notice pay are explained below. However, a privilege is granted to the employer at this point, and it is ruled that the employer may terminate the contract immediately by paying the wage for the notice period in advance.
In the event that the employment contract of an employee, who is outside the scope of the articles of the Law that stipulate job security, is terminated by abusing the right of termination of the employment contract in Turkey, the employee shall be paid a compensation of three times the wage for the notice period. This type of compensation is called bad faith compensation in practice. Again, according to the provision of the law, even if bad faith compensation is paid, the employee must also be paid notice compensation.
According to Article 18 of the Labour Law, in a workplace employing thirty or more employees, the termination of the employment contract of an employee whose seniority in the workplace has exceeded six months must be based on a reason arising from the employee’s competence or behavior or the requirements of the enterprise, the workplace and the work, and according to Article 19, the termination notice must be made in writing and the reason for termination must be clearly and precisely stated. As per the same article, an employee’s indefinite-term employment contract may not be terminated for reasons related to the employee’s behavior or productivity without obtaining his/her defense against the allegations against him/her. However, in this case, the termination for just cause to be used by the employer according to Article 25 shall be reserved.
Special cases of termination of the employment contract in Turkey with notice
By fulfilling the procedures and procedures specified in Article 17 of the Labour Law, many reasons for termination may be considered, without prejudice to the provisions of job security. However, based on the practice and taking into account the consequences, it is useful to examine the termination of change, termination of suspicion and termination of pressure in particular due to the importance given by judicial decisions.
