An employee at the Şok Market grocery chain has told bianet about their working conditions during the coronavirus pandemic.

In a recent report, the Confederation of Public Workers’ Unions (KESK) has noted that especially the personnel of Family Health Centers are at high risk and urged the authorities to halt work except for the fields that are absolutely necessary.

The Türk-İş union confederation has released its "Monthly Starvation and Poverty Line Survey."

Intensive care worker Mehtap tells bianet, “We work as a team. Physicians and nurses treat the patients, we care for them. We clean their bottoms and bodies, comb their hair and shave them. But, Health Minister doesn’t even see us as health workers.”

"Our boss, who has nine hotels, has a hotel in London, doesn't pay our salaries on the excuse of coronavirus," says a hotel worker in Taksim, a tourist district in İstanbul.

İstanbul Labor Union Branches’ Platform has announced that 2,902 workers suspected to have contracted coronavirus are in quarantine in İstanbul while 34 workers have so far died of the disease in the city.

Pharmacist Turgay Korkmaz, a worker from the warehouse of an e-commerce website E.E. and Evrensel Newspaper Editor-in-Chief Fatih Polat have spoken to bianet about their work life in Turkey in the days of Covid-19 pandemic.

Central Bank has reduced the policy rate (one-week repo auction rate) from 9.75 to 8.75 percent. Referring to the spread of the coronavirus, the bank has indicated that it continues to take expansionary measures in this context.

Despite the pandemic, thousands of workers continue to work at the shipyards in Tuzla, İstanbul.

Highway construction worker: “We are told that if we want to leave, we are free to do so. We can, of course, leave. We would rather starve to death than endure so many insults. But we have families, we are not responsible only for ourselves.”

Yusuf and Emre have spoken to bianet: “They gave us a black mask. One of those that you can wash… As gloves, we wear our construction gloves. They put liquid soap at the washbasin, nothing else… If we catch the disease, we will die away from our families.”

In its second weekly report on the effects of the pandemic on its members, the DİSK has noted that “as its data only cover unionized workplaces, it is possible to say that the rate of Covid-19 cases is much higher in non-unionized or unregistered ones.”