Syrians Working 'Informally for Low Pay' in Turkey

Syrian refugees who have taken jobs in Turkey are employed almost exclusively on an informal basis in "low-quality, low-paid" work, the U.N. labor agency warned on Thursday.

Hundreds of thousands of the 2.2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey who fled the civil war are in some kind of employment but the International Labor Organization (ILO) warned that their status had to be improved.

"We can say almost all Syrians in Turkey are working informally in low-quality, low-paid jobs," Numan Ozcan, the director of ILO's office in Turkey told AFP as it presented a new report on the impact of Syrians on the Turkish labor market.

He said the temporary protection status granted to Syrian refugees in Turkey is not the same as a residency permit, meaning they cannot apply for a work permit to work legally.

He said only a tiny number of the Syrians in Turkey -- 6,800 -- had work permits as they had entered the country legally on their passports.

The ILO found that in the southern city of Sanliurfa -- where a quarter of the population is now Syrian -- 27 percent of the businesses surveyed employ Syrians and one third of the Syrians are earning below the minimum wage.

Ozcan said that the fact Syrians were working informally and for low wages was negative both for 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 the ILO was working with the Turkish government to produce new regulations on this issue.

A November report by the Turkish Confederation of Employer Associations (TISK) found that at least 300,000 out of the 2.2 million Syrians in Turkey are working. 

The number of "child laborers" among them is quite high, it warned. The report said Syrian children below the age of 18 are more likely to find a job compared to Syrian adults especially at the border regions.

"The state is still lacking a strategy for Syrians," Murat Erdogan, author of the TISK report and director of the Migration and Politics Research Center at Ankara's Hacettepe University, told AFP.

He said Syrians should be seen as permanent residents instead of guests. 

"We are far from tent-and-blanket issues. Syrians need to be employed formally in the labor market."