Labor Piracy And Its Legal Consequences

LABOR and business-based digital platforms have grown, diversified and became prevalent in the recent years. The evident consequence of this is that employees change jobs more frequently due to being exposed to various opportunities online. In general, employees' main motivation for changing jobs is to maximize employee benefits. Once an employee receives a job offer that he/she considers more appealing, he/she is quick to quit the existing job and move to another one, which may give rise to a "labor piracy" related dispute. Turkish law does not exhaustively list the situations that can be considered as labor piracy. Thus, each incident must be evaluated separately.

Labor law scholars define labor piracy as an act of solicitation intended to convince an employee to terminate their employment contract and to enter into a new one. The concept of labor piracy is provided under Turkish Labor Law ("TLL"). The relevant provisions of TLL not only impose on the employee a