Fundamental change in working conditions and legal consequences

With an employment contract, unlike debt relationships with immediate performance, a continuous debt relationship is established in which the parties continuously perform their mutual obligations. Due to the continuity of the employment relationship, the emergence of new economic, social, technological, operational or employee-originated situations that did not exist at the time of contract establishment is inevitable. These new situations that arise may lead to a need to make certain changes at the working conditions that the parties initially agreed upon when concluding the employment contract. Labor law, which has the primary goal of protecting the employee, must respond to the emerging need for change in order to ensure the continuity of the enterprises and within this scope, it must establish a balance between the principle of pactasuntservanda and the need for change. In order to establish this balance, a new regulation has been introduced to our legislation in Article 22 of the Labor Law No. 4857 titled "Changes in working conditions and termination of the employment contract" and the fundamental changes that the employer wants to make in the working conditions during the continuance of the employment relationship have been bound to a procedure, and should the employee choses not to accept the change, the employer has been granted the right to terminate the employment contract within certain conditions. The purpose of our study is to explain the concept of working conditions and what should be understood from the term "fundamental change" in the law, to examine the situations that constitute fundamental changes in working conditions in practice and the procedures and methods of making changes, and to evaluate the legal consequences of fundamental changes in the employment relationship together with doctrinal opinions and judicial precedents.