Trade Union Authorisation in Türkiye: The Determination, the Objection Window and the Employer's Duties (Law 6356)

The first document the employer sees is the Ministry's determination, and from service it has six working days to object.

A trade union becomes entitled to bargain at a workplace in Türkiye only when it clears two thresholds at the same time under Article 41 of Law No. 6356 on Trade Unions and Collective Labour Agreements: it must have as members at least one per cent of the workers employed in the branch of activity in which it is established, and, on the date of its application, more than half of the workers at the workplace to be covered — forty per cent where the agreement is at enterprise level. The Ministry of Labour and Social Security checks those figures against its own membership records and the notifications made to the Social Security Institution, and, where they are met, serves a written determination on the union, on the other unions in that branch of activity and on the employer within six working days. From service, the employer has six working days to object under Article 43.

That sequence is the whole of it, and it explains why the process so often takes employers by surprise. There is no petition, no ballot at the workplace and no notice of intention to organise. Membership is acquired privately, through the e-Government portal, between the worker and the union; the first document the employer sees is a determination that the arithmetic has already been done. Everything that matters afterwards is governed by short statutory periods that run whether or not anyone inside the business has read them.

The Two Thresholds, and How the Numbers Are Built

The branch-of-activity threshold and the workplace threshold measure different things and are proved from different sources.

Three features of the counting rule do most of the work in practice. The first is that the one per cent is measured against a published statistic, not against a live headcount: the statistics remain valid until the next set is published, and Article 41(5) provides that later statistics do not affect the authorisation of a union that has applied for or obtained a certificate. The second is that the workplace figure is fixed as at the application date, which is the date the application enters the Ministry’s records under the implementing regulation — so a change in headcount after that date does not move the denominator. The third bears directly on payroll administration: Article 42(4) provides that notifications of the commencement and termination of insurance coverage that were not made to the Social Security Institution within their statutory period are disregarded in determining the authorised union. Late social security filings are not a neutral administrative failing here; they remove workers from the count that decides whether the majority is met.

Where a collective agreement is already in force, Article 35(4) allows an application for a new one within the one hundred and twenty days before it expires, though the new agreement cannot come into effect until the existing one ends. An agreement itself runs for a minimum of one and a maximum of three years and, once signed, cannot be extended, shortened or brought to an end early.

The Determination Letter and What It Discloses

Under Article 42 the employer’s own position depends on which way the determination goes. A positive determination is notified within six working days to the union that holds the conditions, to the other unions established in that branch of activity, and to the employers’ organisation or the non-member employer that will be the counterparty. The implementing regulation requires the letter to state the union’s name, the workplace or workplaces covered, the numbers of workers and members, the level of the agreement and which authority is competent — though no letter is sent to a union whose membership in that branch of activity is below one per cent. A negative determination — no union holds the conditions, or the applicant does not — is notified only to the party that applied. An employer who has not applied therefore learns nothing when the answer is negative.

It is worth noting that Article 42(1) allows the employers’ organisation, or an employer who is not a member of one, to apply to the Ministry in its own right for a determination of which union is authorised. That route exists precisely because an employer facing competing claims about representation has no way of verifying membership itself. The implementing regulation also settles competition between unions: where several established in the branch apply for the same workplace or enterprise on different dates, the Ministry concludes the earliest application first, and where two unions that both meet the enterprise conditions have an equal number of members on the application date, the determination is negative. The order in which applications reach the Ministry’s records can therefore decide the outcome.

The competent authority for all of this is defined in Article 2: the Provincial Directorate of Labour and Employment Agency for the place of the workplace, or of the enterprise’s head office for an enterprise-level agreement, and the Ministry itself for a group agreement spanning more than one province. Article 79 then makes the court at the place of that authority the competent one for disputes arising from this part of the Act — which is not always the court an employer expects, and matters when the deadline is six working days. The wider allocation of employment claims between mediation and the courts is set out in our note on workplace mediation and labour litigation in Türkiye.

The Six-Working-Day Objection Window

Article 43 permits the employer, the employers’ organisation and the unions served with the determination to object on the ground that one or both sides do not hold the conditions of authorisation, or that the objector itself does. The window is six working days from service, and three requirements sit inside it.

The objection must state its reasons. It must be registered with the competent authority before it is filed in court. And, under Article 43(3), where the petition or its annexes contain no concrete evidence, the objection is dismissed without examination — a filter that makes the remedy useless to anyone who has not first checked the figures against their own records. That subsection also splits the procedure: objections concerning arithmetical error in the worker and member numbers, and objections concerning time limits, are decided within six working days without a hearing and that decision is final; other objections are decided after a hearing, with one month for the regional court of appeal and one month for the Court of Cassation, each deciding finally.

Article 43(5) provides that an objection suspends the authorisation procedure until the decision becomes final. That is a consequence of the statutory scheme, not a purpose for using it: an objection filed where the payroll and the register agree will be dismissed for want of concrete evidence, and the employer will have spent the window it might have used to prepare for bargaining. The realistic question in the six days is narrow and factual — does the Ministry’s headcount for the application date match ours, and were all social security notifications made in time? Where it does and they were, the answer is to move on to Article 44. Where a union has been told it does not hold the conditions, Article 43(4) gives it six working days to sue for a determination that it does, and the court decides within two months.

What the Employer May Not Do While This Runs

The guarantees in Article 25 apply throughout, and they are not suspended because a determination is contested. Recruitment may not be conditioned on joining, not joining, remaining in or resigning from a union. The employer may not discriminate between unionised and non-unionised workers, or between members of different unions, in working conditions or in termination — though the Article expressly preserves collective agreement provisions on wages, bonuses, premiums and monetary social benefits, which is the exception that keeps differential pay under a collective agreement lawful. Workers may not be dismissed or subjected to different treatment for joining or not joining a union, or for taking part in union activities outside working hours or, with the employer’s permission, within them.

Breach carries union compensation of not less than one year’s pay. The Constitutional Court annulled the words that had confined that compensation to conduct other than dismissal, so dismissal is squarely within it; and it annulled the reference to Article 18 of Labour Act No. 4857 in Article 25(5), with the result that a worker alleging a union-motivated dismissal is not required to satisfy the thirty-employee workplace and six-month seniority conditions that gate an ordinary reinstatement claim. The procedural route is still the one in Article 20 of the Labour Act — compulsory mediation within one month of service of the termination notice, then two weeks from the final mediation record to file — and the burden of proving the reason for the dismissal rests on the employer. Where the allegation concerns conduct short of dismissal the worker bears the burden, but Article 25(7) shifts it back once the worker establishes a state of affairs strongly indicating union discrimination.

Membership itself stays out of the employer’s hands. Under Article 17 a worker joins through the e-Government portal, subject to acceptance by the union’s competent organ, and an application not rejected within thirty days is deemed accepted. Under Article 19 a member withdraws the same way, and that Article opens by providing that no worker or employer may be compelled to remain in a union or to leave one; withdrawal takes effect one month after notification to the union, so the register the Ministry works from is not something either side can move at short notice. Article 26(6) prohibits an employers’ organisation from interfering in the establishment, administration or activity of a workers’ organisation, directly or through representatives, members or intermediaries, and Article 78 attaches an administrative fine to breach, imposed with reasons stated by the Provincial Director of the Labour and Employment Agency. The figure printed in Law No. 6356 is the nominal amount at the date of enactment: Article 17 of Misdemeanours Act No. 5326 increases administrative fines at the start of each calendar year by the official revaluation rate, so the amount actually payable is the revalued one for the year in question. These are the boundaries any foreign employer should have in view before its first Turkish hire; the wider framework is set out in our guide to employing staff in Türkiye and on our labour law page.

From Certificate to Bargaining Table

Once the objection period passes without challenge, or a final judgment resolves one, Article 44 requires the Ministry to issue the certificate of authorisation within six working days. The certificate is a condition of validity rather than a formality: under Article 45 an agreement concluded without one may be attacked as void, by those concerned or by the Ministry, within forty-five days of the Ministry establishing the position, and on request the court may suspend the agreement’s application until the case ends. The timetable from there is fixed and unforgiving on both sides.

The party issuing the call must deliver the whole of its proposals within the call period, though both sides keep the right to modify proposals as bargaining requires. If mediation produces no settlement, the mediator draws up a record within three working days and the competent authority serves it within three more; a strike decision, if taken, must be taken within sixty days of that service and implemented on a date notified six working days in advance, failing which the authority to conclude an agreement lapses. Parties and all concerned are obliged to give the mediator any information and documents requested.

The Duties That Survive the Process

Authorisation is not the end of a dispute; it is the start of a relationship with its own statutory content. Under Article 27 the union appoints workplace representatives from among its members working there — one where the workplace has up to fifty workers, at most two from fifty-one to a hundred, three from a hundred and one to five hundred, four from five hundred and one to a thousand, six from a thousand and one to two thousand, and at most eight above two thousand — and notifies their identities within fifteen days. Their term runs for as long as the union’s authorisation, they perform their functions without disrupting work or breaching workplace discipline, and the workplace must afford them facilities to do so promptly and effectively.

Under Article 24 a representative’s contract may be terminated only for just cause stated in writing, clearly and precisely, and the representative or the union may sue within one month of service; the employer may not change the representative’s workplace or make a material change to the work without written consent, and a change made without it is invalid. Under Article 18 membership and solidarity dues are deducted from wages on the union’s written request, and an employer that fails to deduct, or deducts and fails to pay over within one month, owes the amount together with interest at the highest rate applied by banks to commercial loans, without notice being required. Under Article 39 a worker who is not a member may benefit from the agreement by paying a solidarity dues contribution — the union’s consent is not required, and the benefit runs from the date of the request — while employer representatives and those who attend bargaining on the employer’s behalf may not benefit at all. Once an agreement is signed, Article 48 obliges the employer to post it, and awards treated as having the force of a collective agreement, where workers can see them.

Where the relationship does produce contested claims — union compensation, representative reinstatement, a challenge to the application of an agreement — they are heard in the labour courts under the ordinary rules, a subject covered on our workplace disputes and litigation page. The point worth carrying away is a narrower one. Almost nothing in this process is discretionary. The thresholds are arithmetic, the periods are counted in working days, and the guarantees in Article 25 apply from before the first letter arrives to long after the agreement is signed.