 leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has an annual salary which is 31 times higher than that of a minimum wage worker, according to a report in the Birgün daily on Monday.){kind=link}
Turkish President and Justice and Development Party (AKP) leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has an annual salary 31 times higher than that of a minimum wage worker, according to a report in the Birgün daily on Monday.
Last month Turkey’s labor minister announced the net minimum wage for 2021 at TL 2,826 ($377), the lowest such figure in in US dollars in the last 11 years. Erdoğan’s monthly salary for the year 2021 is TL 88,000.
The disparity between Erdoğan’s salary and the minimum wage was examined in a Ph.D. thesis by Kadriye Gül Yücel, a student at Ankara University. In her thesis, titled “The determination of the minimum wage and its taxation: A comparative analysis of fairness,” Yücel found that that Erdoğan’s annual salary was 25 times higher than that of a minimum wage earner in 2017, which represented the highest disparity between the salaries of a head of the state and a minimum wage worker in 22 countries in Europe.
At the time, Erdoğan’s annual salary was TL 133,763 while a minimum wage worker earned TL 5,314.
While the minimum wage was 59.55 percent of the national income per capita in 2010, it was 39.93 percent in 2018.
Nearly half of all workers in Turkey, a country of 83 million, earn a monthly salary at or near minimum wage, a study by Turkish labor confederation DİSK says.