"Turkey garment sector adopts living wage initiative", 12 April 2018

Turkey’s textile, garment and leather sector has become the latest to adopt a global initiative aimed at achieving a living wage.

Unions in Turkey this week pledged their support to the ACT (Action, Collaboration, Transformation) initiative led by IndustriAll Global Union alongside brands and retailers.

At the meeting in Istanbul, participants debated how minimum wage mechanisms have proven to be insufficient in raising wages to a living wage and how ACT will work to establish industry-wide collective bargaining agreements that build upon the minimum wage mechanism, enabling living wages to be achieved through negotiation between unions and manufacturers together...

Unions say that in most garment and textile producing countries, including Turkey, workers’ wages are currently set well below a living wage.