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Syrian refugees working in low-paid jobs in Turkey: ILO

Thursday, 17 December 2015 7:07 PM [ Last Update: Thursday, 17 December 2015 7:07 PM ]

The photo shows Syrian refugees in the Aksaray neighborhood of Istanbul, Turkey, October 7, 2015. ©AP

Syrian refugees in Turkey are mostly employed on an informal basis in jobs earning only a small amount of money, the United Nations labor agency says.

“We can say almost all Syrians in Turkey are working informally in low-quality, low-paid jobs,” Numan Ozcan, director of the Geneva-based International Labor Organization (ILO) office in Turkey, said on Thursday as he presented a report on the impact of the Syrian refugee influx on the Turkish labor market.

Ozcan also warned that working for low wages has a negative effect on both the economy and the local labor market.

“It is leading to unfair competition between enterprises and workers themselves are deprived of any protection,” he said, adding that the ILO was cooperating with the Turkish government to introduce new rules on the issue.

Under the temporary protection status granted to Syrian refugees in Turkey, they cannot apply for a work permit to work legally, the official said, noting that a small number of the Syrians in Turkey - 6,800 - had work permits.

In the southern Turkish city of Sanliurfa, where Syrians currently make up a quarter of the population, 27 percent of the businesses surveyed employ Syrians while one third of the refugees are earning below the minimum wage, according to the ILO report.

In November, the Turkish Confederation of Employer Associations also published a report, showing that at least 300,000 Syrians in Turkey were employed, with many of them child laborers.

Turkey reportedly hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees with a figure as high as 2.2 million refugees.

The crisis in Syria, which flared in March 2011, has so far claimed the lives of over 250,000 people and displaced nearly half of the Arab country’s population within or out of its borders.

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