Toplu İş Sözleşmelerinde Ehliyet ve Yetki

Abstract

In Turkey, employees have granted the right to bargain collectively with the Constitution 1961 and Act No. 275. Right to collective agreement and the right to strike have first set out together in the Constitution 1961. Only the trade unions and the federations which represent majority of the employees in the bargaining unit had enjoyed the right to bargain collectively under the Act No. 275. In this period, the uncertainty of the determination of the trade union or federation which represent the majority of the employees and forgery of documents had been the issues that hampered and frustrated the workers enjoying the right to collective bargaining. With the 1980 coup d’etat and the Acts No. 2821 and 2822 which entered into force in 1983, the right of workers to bargain collectively had been limited in comparison with the previous period. With the Acts No. 2821 and 2822, the capacity of the federations to collective agreements have been abolished and the bargaining level has been restricted to the workplace level. With introduction of legal obligation for the employees to associate at the industry level, the right to form and join craft unions and company unions has been forbidden. And the double threshold system has entered into force as the procedure for determination of the trade union which will be granted the authorisation to the collective agreement. The double threshold system, requires on the one hand a certain level of representation at the branch level and on the other hand majority representation at the workplace. The collective agreement system which set out by the Acts No. 2821 and 2822 has maintained with amendments on limited issues by the Act No. 6356 which entered into force in 18.10.2012. This collective agreement system which is said to aim establish powerfull trade union, has on the contrary weakened the trade unions, and is in conflict with the constitutional provisions and the standards of international law about the right to bargain collectively. In our work, it has been attempted to set forth the nature and the characteristics of the right to bargain collectively which is admitted in the scope of the human rights by the Constitution and the international law, and to discuss the rules about the capacity and the authorisation to collective agreements by comparison with the right to bargain collectively. Even though the right to collective bargaining is granted all the workers with limited exeptions, in our work the content is limited with the purview of the Act No. 6356.