Turkey is a dangerous workplace. Last month alone, at least 157 people died in work-related accidents. Since the beginning of the year, there have been at least 1,450 workers who lost their lives at work.
The Occupational Safety and Health (İşçi Sağlığı ve İş Güvenliği, İSİG) Assembly counted 157 fatal occupational accidents in Turkey during September. A recent balance sheet shows that the total figure of workplace deaths so far this year is 1,450.
At least 2006 people were killed in occupational accidents in Turkey in 2017. By comparison, according to the German Social Accident Insurance (DGUV), 454 fatal occupational accidents were registered in Germany in 2017 among 42 million workers compared to officially 26 million workers in Turkey. There are now 21,894 people killed in workplace accidents in Turkey since President Erdoğan ruled the country. However, the figures published by the Turkish Ministry of Labor are significantly lower.
Ten of the 157 workers killed in September were women, and another eight were children between the ages of four and fourteen. A total of nine workers killed were refugees or migrants from Afghanistan (6), Iran (1), Russia (1) and Syria (1).
The city with the most frequent "work-killings" last month is Antep (Dîlok) on the border with Syria. There have been eleven fatal accidents at work. According to official data, almost 326,000 refugees live in the province, most of them from Syria. More than half of them are underage. In total, more than 3.5 million Syrian war refugees live in Turkey. Most have no residence permit and therefore no work permit. Although about 80,000 Syrians have a residence permit, only 6,000 of them have a work permit. As a result, many refugees work illegally and are not recorded, so there are hardly any figures on accidents at work that are fatal to the war refugees.
The children of many refugee families work under precarious conditions to support their families. In the textile workshops of the megacity Antep, which traditionally lives from the textile industry, usually five to ten-year-old children work for a daily salary of 5 TL, the equivalent of about 71 cents.
Of the fatally injured workers in Turkey, the fewest are unionized. So in September, there were only four victims of a work-killing, who were members of a union.
