"WE MAINTAIN THAT IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, NOT EVEN A SINGLE EMPLOYEE'S SWEAT AND LABOUR BE WASTED"

MÜSİAD President Mahmut Asmalı made a written statement regarding the new minimum wage announced by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

MÜSİAD President Asmalı made the following statements in his statement:

As MÜSİAD, Türkiye's most widespread and closest civil society organization at the grassroots, we maintain that it is essential that not even a single employee's sweat and labour be wasted, not only during the processes of determining the minimum wage or in periods of high inflation, but under any circumstances. In this context, we hope that the new minimum wage for 2023 will bring benefit to all the actors of the economy, above all our employees and our employers.

We foresee that inflation, which entered a process of easing in November with the base effect in addition to the tight measures taken by the economic administration, will fall to much more reasonable levels as of 2023. Thus 2023 will not be a period in which the purchasing power of our employees weakens against inflation; it will be a year in which, under the leadership of our President Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, we are freed from the burden of high interest in the short term and in which we approach our inflation target step by step in the medium and long term.

Along with this, of course, we hope for an increase in supports and incentives in order to alleviate the additional burdens that wage increases will bring to the employer. For the incentives and supports to be provided to the employer are of critical importance for our employers, who will take on a serious burden along with the wage increases.

In addition, we reiterate that providing an additional positive privilege for minimum wage employees within the scope of the industrial sector would be an important step towards increasing our employment oriented to manufacturing and our production capacity, and that the idea of a regional minimum wage implementation must certainly be evaluated as an alternative to the current national minimum wage implementation, which falls short in reflecting regional differences.