The constitutional rules, institutions, organisations and values regulating the coverage
of labour contracts in Turkey in the 2000s have many things in common with the rules
and values regulating the coverage of labour contracts throughout the world (cf. Hartog
et al., 1993). The demise of the social democratic discourse in labour law jurisprudence
and the emergence of new principles in juridical decrees, such as the principle
of the protection of the enterprise, a principle which is considered by the new jurisprudence
as a means to protect, in a rather peculiar way, the individual worker, whose
existence is, now, considered to be dependent on the existence and the well-being of
the employer’s enterprise, and the fetishisation of the market as the sole mode of coordination,
are among the developments that are, to a certain extent, common to the
capitalist economies. In previous decades, the provisions of labour codes throughout
the world have begun to re-regulate the length of the working day and the working
week, the number of holidays, procedures for contract termination, procedures for
promotion, grievance procedures, pension plans and retirement schemes, working
conditions, training facilities and the reimbursement of training costs, unemployment
compensation, health and disability programmes, and maternity leave and child care
facilities in conformity with the dominant discourse of production: neo-liberalism.