The latest Household Labor Survey released by the Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat) showed that the number of unregistered female employees, whose social security contributions are not paid by employers, reached 3.6 million in October 2009. This number represents 59.8 percent of the total number of employed females.
The TurkStat survey found that the share of unregistered employees in Turkey’s total labor force reached 44.5 percent in October, a 0.2 percent increase over the same month of 2008. The number of unregistered male workers reached 6.1 million in the same period.
The largest unregistered worker group was those individual workers who were engaged either in agriculture or a trade other than standard employment in a public or private workplace. Referred to as “unpaid family workers,” mostly youngsters who help their family businesses, this group represents 3.02 million people in Turkey. The survey found that 91.3 percent of these people are not registered in the social security system.
The highest number of unregistered workers was in Turkey’s agriculture sector, at 86.3 percent. This number is 30.4 percent for workers in non-agricultural industries. An interesting find by TurkStat was that some 28 percent of the employers, a total of 1.22 million, are also unregistered. The figures suggest that the government still has a long way to go in efforts to combat unregistered employment.
