Collective Dismissal in Türkiye: Headcount Thresholds and the 30-Day Notification (Labour Act Art. 29)

The notification is only half of it: the consultation duty and the reinstatement regime carry the same weight, and neither is discharged by filing a form.

A collective dismissal in Türkiye is triggered by a headcount threshold, not by the employer’s label for the exercise: under Article 29 of Labour Act No. 4857, terminations made under Article 17 within a one-month window amount to a collective dismissal where they reach 10 employees in a workplace of 20 to 100, ten per cent in a workplace of 101 to 300, or 30 employees in a workplace of 301 or more. Once the threshold is crossed, the employer must give written notification at least thirty days in advance to the workplace union representatives, the relevant regional directorate and the Turkish Employment Agency, and the termination notices take effect thirty days after the regional directorate is notified.

That is the frame. What follows from it is less often understood, and it is where the exposure sits. Article 29 is not a filing exercise that converts a redundancy plan into a lawful one. What English-speaking employers call a mass redundancy is, in Turkish law, simply a set of Article 17 terminations that has crossed a threshold: the Article layers a procedure on top of the ordinary law of termination without displacing any of it — the individual notice periods still run, each termination still needs a reason that survives scrutiny, and the employees affected keep every route to the labour court that they would have had if they had been dismissed one at a time. An employer that reads Article 29 as a clearance process is reading it backwards.

What Counts as a Collective Dismissal

The threshold is a function of two variables — how many employees the workplace has, and how many are dismissed within one month. The Act sets them out in three bands.

Two features of the counting rule do most of the work. The first is that the terminations are aggregated across a one-month period whether they fall on the same date or on different dates — the Act says so in terms, which forecloses the familiar idea of staging a reduction in weekly tranches to stay below the line. The second is that the count is of terminations made pursuant to Article 17, that is, ordinary terminations on notice. Resignations, mutual-termination agreements and summary dismissals for just cause are a different legal animal, though an employer that recharacterises a redundancy as something else to duck the threshold is inviting the court to look at what actually happened rather than at the paperwork; the underlying mechanics are set out in our guide to terminating an employee in Türkiye.

The reason for the exercise is not optional either. Article 29 opens by permitting collective dismissal where the employer wishes to do so as a result of economic, technological, structural and comparable requirements of the undertaking, the workplace or the work. A collective dismissal for some other reason is not a collective dismissal within the Article at all — it is a set of individual dismissals that will be assessed one by one.

The Thirty-Day Notification, and What It Must Contain

The notification is a single written act addressed to three recipients, and the Act specifies its contents rather than leaving them to the employer’s discretion.

The last row is the one most often misread. The thirty days is a suspension attached to the notification of the regional directorate, not to the notification of the union representatives or the Agency, and it is not the employee’s notice period. Article 17 notice runs on its own footing and is graduated by seniority — two weeks, four weeks, six weeks or eight weeks, rising with service — and Article 29 presupposes it by defining the collective dismissal in terms of terminations made under Article 17. An employer that treats the thirty-day wait as the notice period ends up owing notice indemnity on top; the interaction with severance is worked through in our note on severance and notice pay in Türkiye.

Form matters at the individual level too. Article 19 requires the employer to give the termination notice in writing and to state the reason clearly and precisely. Article 109, as amended in July 2025, now permits notifications under the Act to be made against signature or, with the employee’s written consent, through a registered electronic mail (KEP) account — but it goes on to provide that notices producing the effect of terminating an employment contract are in all cases made in writing, with the cost of the KEP system borne by the employer.

The Consultation Duty Is Not a Formality

After the notification, Article 29 requires consultations between the workplace union representatives and the employer, and it prescribes their agenda: preventing the collective dismissal, reducing the number of employees to be dismissed, or minimising its adverse effects on the employees. At the end, a document evidencing that the meeting took place is drawn up.

This is the limb employers most often treat as decorative, and it is the limb that most often surfaces later. The consultation record is contemporaneous evidence of what alternatives the employer considered — short-time working, redeployment, voluntary departures, a smaller reduction — and Article 29 requires the consultation to address avoiding the collective dismissal or reducing the number of employees affected; for an employer that must prove the valid reason under Article 20, that record is direct evidence. An employer that arrives at the meeting with a finalised list and no alternatives to discuss has created a document that works against it.

There is a structural gap here worth naming. Under Article 27 of Law No. 6356, workplace union representatives are appointed by a union whose competence to conclude a collective agreement has become final, in numbers scaled to the workforce. In a workplace with no such union there are no workplace union representatives, and the consultation limb has no counterparty. That does not dissolve the employer’s substantive obligations — it removes the forum in which they would otherwise be tested, which makes the internal record of what alternatives were weighed more important, not less.

Where a union is present, a further rule applies. Article 25 of Law No. 6356 prohibits the employer from discriminating between union members and non-members in relation to termination, and provides for union compensation of not less than one year’s wages where it does. Article 25 also states that where a dismissal is found to be union-related, union compensation is awarded irrespective of whether the employer reinstates the employee — but adds, in the next sentence, that where the employee is not reinstated the Article 21 compensation is not additionally awarded. Selection criteria that correlate with union membership are therefore a reliable way to convert a redundancy exercise into a substantially more expensive claim.

A Collective Dismissal Still Needs a Valid Reason

The Act closes Article 29 with a prohibition that governs everything above it: the employer may not use the collective-dismissal provisions in order to prevent the application of Articles 18, 19, 20 and 21, and if it does, the employee may sue under those articles.

Those articles are the job-security regime. Under Article 18, an employer at a workplace with 30 or more employees dismissing an employee with at least six months’ seniority must rely on a valid reason connected with the employee’s capacity or conduct, or with the requirements of the undertaking, the workplace or the work. The Article adds that for employees working underground the seniority condition is not required, and that where the employer has more than one workplace in the same branch of activity, the headcount is determined by the total across those workplaces — so the thirty-employee threshold is not escaped by splitting a business into small sites.

Under Article 20, the burden of proving that the termination rests on a valid reason lies on the employer; if the employee alleges that it rests on some other reason, the employee must prove that allegation. The employee must apply to a mediator within one month of service of the termination notice, mediation being a condition of suit under Article 3 of Law No. 7036, and may file in the labour court within two weeks of the final mediation record. Under Article 21, where the termination is held invalid the employer must reinstate the employee within one month of the employee’s application, failing which it owes compensation of not less than four and not more than eight months’ wages, plus up to four months’ wages and other entitlements for the period not worked. Those provisions cannot be varied by agreement.

The Act puts the two halves of this together in a way that neither side finds wholly comfortable. On one hand, Article 29 does not expressly attach invalidity to a failure to comply with its notification requirements. On the other, the same article provides that the collective-dismissal rules may not be used to defeat Articles 18 to 21, so each termination in a collective dismissal must still rest on a valid reason. What the court examines is whether the termination genuinely rests on a valid reason arising from the requirements of the enterprise, the workplace or the work, as Article 18 puts it. Under Article 20 the burden of proving the valid reason lies on the employer, while an employee who alleges that the termination rests on some other reason must prove that allegation.

For an employer, the practical reading is that the Article 29 procedure and the Article 18 reason are two independent tests, and passing one says nothing about the other. For an employee, it is that the collective character of the dismissal neither strengthens nor weakens the individual claim; the questions the court asks are the same ones it would ask about a single termination, applied to a larger set of facts. Both readings sit within the broader framework covered on our termination and severance and labour law pages. Where the reduction is part of a sale or a post-closing integration rather than a standalone decision, the thresholds have to be recalculated for the group that exists after completion, which is one of the points covered on our employment in M&A and restructuring page.

Closure, Recall Rights, the Seasonal Exception and the Fine

Three qualifications complete the picture, and each cuts in a different direction.

Where the workplace is closed entirely and its activity ends definitively and permanently, the employer’s obligation shrinks: it must notify the relevant regional directorate and the Turkish Employment Agency at least thirty days beforehand and post an announcement at the workplace. There is no consultation limb, because there is no scale to negotiate over.

The recall preference is generally accepted to apply in both scenarios, although the sentence establishing it sits inside the paragraph of the Article dealing with the complete closure of the workplace. If, within six months of the collective dismissal becoming final, the employer wishes to recruit again for work of the same nature, it calls back in preference those former employees whose qualifications are suitable. This is a real constraint on a business that reduces headcount and then rebuilds it, and it is one of the few provisions in Article 29 that continues to operate after the exercise has ended.

The seasonal and campaign work exception removes the whole of Article 29 where employees engaged in such work are dismissed by reason of the nature of that work. The qualifier is doing the work: it is the reason for the dismissal, not the sector, that decides the point.

Finally, Article 100 provides for an administrative fine for each employee dismissed in breach of Article 29, imposed with reasons by the provincial Labour and Employment Agency director under Article 108. The figure in the statute is the nominal amount fixed when the provision was last amended and is revalued annually, so the amount payable in any given year is the revalued figure published in the annual communiqué rather than the number printed in the Act. Because the fine is per employee, it scales with exactly the variable that made the exercise a collective dismissal in the first place.

Alongside the fine sit the ordinary termination costs. Severance pay remains governed by Article 14 of the repealed Labour Act No. 1475, kept in force by Article 120 of Law No. 4857, at thirty days’ wages for each full year of service, subject to a ceiling reset every six months by circular. Notice indemnity, accrued leave and — where the statutory conditions in Article 51 of Law No. 4447 are met, including the premium-payment conditions and a timely personal application to the Agency — the employees’ unemployment benefit entitlement all follow the ordinary rules. Article 29 changes the procedure around a reduction in force. It does not change what a lawful reduction in force costs.