Les emplois du bas de l'échelle salariale en Turquie : une description des salariés des secteurs formels et informels, hors agriculture

This paper aims to identify the characteristics of low-wage workers in Turkey. In this country, the labor market is segmented between formal and informal employment. Therefore, the authors distinguish two categories of workers: workers earning the minimum wage in formal employment and workers earning the minimum wage and less than the minimum wage in informal employment. They use simple descriptive statistical methods and implement logit models on original data from the Budget survey of the Turkish Statistical Institute over the period 2003-2006. Their analysis points out a number of common features for low-wage workers in formal and informal employment: they are more often women, young people, individuals living in the countryside, employees with less firm specific seniority and people receiving a financial aid from the State. But low-wage workers can be divided in two categories. On the one hand, workers in formal employment earning the minimum wage work either in small firms in the tertiary sector or in bigger firms (25 to 49 employees) in the manufacture. On the other hand, low-wage workers in informal employment are more often women with a secondary education, working in the tertiary sector and earning a salary which might represent a supplementary income. The socio-economic characteristics of minimum wage workers in formal employment are more similar to the characteristics of workers paid below the minimum wage level working in an informal employment.