Turkey will raise its monthly minimum wage to 22,104 Turkish lira ($628.53) in 2025.
The move arrived as the central bank lowered key interest rates by 250 basis points to 47.5 percent—its first rate cut in nearly two years—marking an easing of tightening monetary policy as Turkey experiences its sixth consecutive month of disinflation. Inflation hovered at 47 percent in November, down from a peak of 85 percent in late 2022.
The central bank, which expects inflation to fall to 21 percent by the end of 2025, estimates that the wage increase could boost the economic temperature by 1.8 to 6 points.
In a press conference on Wednesday, Turkey’s Labour and Social Security Minister Vedat Işıkhan said that the government’s “most important” goal is to protect and increase its citizens’ purchasing power.
But the Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions, better known as Türk-İş, pushed back the same day, saying that the minimum wage determination commission convened on Tuesday without its participation because there was “no place at the table” for an offer below 29,583 lira ($839.42) that didn’t take workers’ conditions into account.
“The minimum wage should be ‘a wage sufficient to meet the essential needs of the worker such as food, housing (rent, natural gas, electricity, water), clothing, health, transportation and culture at current prices,’” it wrote on X. “The workers serving on the commission have stated their living conditions and stated that the minimum wage should be determined within this framework.”
Opposition leader Özgür Özel, who had called for a new minimum wage of 30,000 lira ($851.82), also criticized the wage increase as insufficient and a sign that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is “out of touch with the realities of this country.”
“Those who have been saying for days that they have achieved victory in Syria have made the workers experience defeat and imposed poverty wages,” he wrote on X. “I congratulate the Türk-İş management for not attending the fait accompli meeting and invite the working class to use the power that comes from production.”
Turkey employs some 1.5 million garment workers, most of whom faced a 14 percent gap between the minimum wage and the average living wage in 2023, according to the WageIndicator Foundation, a research institute in the Netherlands.
