Short time work allowance to be reintroduced in Turkey for 3 months

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President and ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) Chair Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made a statement about the short time work allowance yesterday (April 21) and has announced that short time work allowance payments will continue for another three months.

Introduced amid the COVID-19 pandemic to curb its negative impact in March 2020, the payments were ended on March 31, 2021.

Addressing the representatives of tourism sector at the Presidential complex in Ankara on the occasion of Tourism Week, Erdoğan said, "Upon the requests of the sector representatives during our meeting, it has been decided to resume the short time work allowance payments in such a way to cover all sectors and the months of April, May and June."

Erdoğan also noted that the Value Added Tax (VAT) reductions that end in the tourism sector in May will resume by the end of June.

About short time work allowance

Introduced in March 2020 to curb the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the short time work allowance ended as of March 31.

The short-time work allowance can be broadly defined as the payment made to employees for periods of time that they do not work in cases where the working hours are reduced or work is completely stopped.

While employees would receive the allowance for the last time on April 5, after the end of the short time work allowance, employers would either switch their employees to full-time work or put them on unpaid leave and will be paid an unpaid leave allowance of 1,324 lira (164 USD).

Since the start of the pandemic, more than 3.7 million employees have been paid a total of 27.7 billion lira (~3.44 billion USD) of short-time work allowance from the Unemployment Insurance Fund, according to Turkish Employment Agency (İŞKUR) figures.

In February, 1.3 million people were paid short-time work allowance and 751,000 were paid unpaid leave allowance, according to the İŞKUR. (HA/SD)