Effects of global crisis (2008-09) on employment and wages in Turkey

This study investigates the effects of the financial crisis of 2008 on structure and components of laborforce-employment as well as real wages. Starting in the US financial market and becoming global wide in 2009, the crisis generally affected the real sector in Turkey. It is unthinkable that a country like Turkey, which is dependent on capital as foreign currency and which is sensitive to current deficit and foreign debt indicators, was not affected by the 2008-09 crises which have global effects on economic structure-relations. Due to these characteristics, the real effect of the crises in Turkey was on production sector; the effect on the labor market was much more severe. In this study, the effects of the global crises which affected large segments of society on i) all employment ii) wage labor iii) real wages are investigated, along with the loss of employment which became more with the decline in production, unemployment which became wider and declining real wages. This study will present how these effects differ between segments of society that makes up employment-labor and sectors. In the conclusion of this study, it is observed that the crises bring important changes in employment-labor structure and composition along with it or it intensify the tendencies before crises. We can articulate that with the crises, increase in unemployment made it possible to reconstruct the wage labor composition which was exposed to the real effects of the crises and Turkey?s labor market is very flexible in this sense. Investigating effects of the crises on real wages shows that the crises has had a negative effect on all sectors and changes in real wages of wage-laborer and these effects are more meaningful in statistical form.