Over 580 Women Workers Lose Their Lives in Last 5 Years

Click to read the article in Turkish / Kurdish

The Association for Labor Health and Occupational Safety (İSİG) has announced that in the last five years, more than 580 women workers lost their lives through occupational murders.

Women lost their lives in car accidents where they were packed in the body of a truck and were on their way to the fields where they would work; while cleaning the windows of the houses where they worked as domestic workers; by being runned over by a car or by being shot by men who raided their workplaces.

The line of business where women workers have lost their lives in the highest rates has been the agricultural sector by 55 percent.

More than 90 percent of the women workers who have lost their lives in the last five years were without the protection of a labor union and 75 percent of them were informally and precariously employed.

Discrimination, Mobbing and Violence at Workplace

Among the leading risks which directly affect the health conditions of women workers and are chiefly faced by women are discrimination, sexual harassment, mobbing and violence at workplace.

Therefore, more women workers are diagnosed with such common illnesses as depression and stress. However, these disorders are not taken within the scope of occupational illnesses and there are also some cases where women workers are not diagnosed with occupational illnesses on the alleged ground that these health problems might occur due to reasons unrelated to the work in question.

In 2017, seven women were killed by men at their workplaces

116 of the 2006 workers who lost their lives in 2017 were women. More than half of the workplace murders involving women were caused by car accidents. A majority of the women workers who died in car accidents were in the bodies of trucks and were on their way to the fields where they would work.

Seven of the women workers who lost their lives in 2017 were murdered by men. (TP/SD)