The bill, designed to give special employment bureaus the right to hire workers out to employers for temporary terms, was recently vetoed by Gül. The president sent the bill back to Parliament with a request to revise the articles on “hired workers,” noting that it failed to cover necessary aspects of workers' rights. Following the president's veto, the government removed the controversial article from the bill and sent it back to Çankaya. The revised bill focuses on incentives for employment and changes in the Unemployment Fund and the social security system. The government expects to encourage employers to hire more people. The latter portion of the plan mainly targets decreasing the number of people who are unemployed by introducing new incentives for employers as part of efforts to compensate for the drop in money available from the Unemployment Fund resulting from the reallocation of accrued income from the fund to the Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP). The government will pay social security premiums for newly hired workers for the amount of time they would have received unemployment support.
According to the law, the state will extend financial support for certain time periods to workers who have lost their jobs. The Unemployment Fund works by collecting a small portion of workers' wages, employers' contributions and government funding and investing this money. In order to be eligible to receive unemployment benefits, one has to have been employed and contributed to the fund for at least 600 days and has to have worked for at least the previous 120 days.
Another prominent change in the bill Gül recently approved is a government plan to allocate accrued income from the unemployment fund to GAP. With the allocated money, the government expects to encourage and support investments in various fields from education to construction. This money reallocation covers 2009 and the next three years.
