Turkish Labor Law
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Although breastfeeding break is one of the labor right provided to female employees, it should never be forgotten that direct aim of this break is to provide the babies with their most precious and natural nutrition daily in appropriate periods up to a certain age. Therefore the subject here is not the employee but the newborn infant at first hand.
As a rule and in order to achieve the expected benefits for the infants it should be used daily, however in a big metropolis applying this leave as stated in law is clearly not possible. The big distances between workplace and residence of mother, traffic and so on, make it too difficult for the nursing woman to go home every day for 1,5 hour to feed her baby and come back to work again. In practice this problem is tried to be solved by combining the daily hours and using it weekly, monthly or as a whole (block using).
COMBINED BREASTFEEDING LEAVE
We witness that it is a common practice for the mother to combine the daily hours of break (1,5 hours) and use the nursing periods collectively. In this exercise, the workdays period between end date of maternity leave and the date child reaches one year of age, which is the period mother should take her 1,5 hours daily leave to feed her baby is calculated and the 1,5 hours of leave corresponding this duration are combined and used in total as will be seen example below.
Example Calculation of Combined Use of Breastfeeding Leave
Date of childbirth: 29.06.2015
The date child reaches one year of age: 29.06.2016
Maternity leave end date 27.09.2015 (end day of report).
Between 27.09.2015 and 29.06.2016 there are 194 workdays (Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays excluded).
194 / 7,5 (daily work hours)= 25,86 days.
25,86 X 1,5 (daily breastfeeding break)= 39 workdays.
Mother will be using 39 workdays of break starting from the date of 27.09.2015
And when we add the 39 workdays to the 27.09.2015 by taken into consideration of the Saturday-Sunday-Public holidays) the work starting date of mother will be 24.11.2015. As the child reaches one year of age at 29.06.2016, there are still 155 days in which the mother will not be attending for child’s nursing.
As it seen in example above, when mother comes back to work after her maternity leave period finished, normally baby still has 194 workdays to go to reach his/her one year of age. If the break is used as 39 days paid leave, child will be devoid of some (about 155 days) of his/her daily breast milk and be unjustly treated, and that is in contradiction with the purpose of the provision.
RESULT OF NOT COMPLYING WITH LAW
Article 74 of Labor Law No. 4857 clearly stipulates that nursing leave should be used daily, therefore combined usage of this leave means violation of the law, but no penal sanctioning is set forth for that kind of misusage.
Employer is under the obligation of letting nursing mother to use her paid leave and let her do it in her own way within the framework of said law, otherwise mother may break the employment contract and request severance pay be paid to her in line with Article 25 of Labor Law No. 4857. In other words, preventing mother to use her breastfeeding leave constitutes a just cause for mother to break the employment contract.
SUGGESTIONS
Taken into consideration both the imperative provision of abovementioned Law and the difficulties of commuting to work twice in a day in a metropolis, the best solution for the nursing women would be either coming to work 1,5 hours late or leaving 1,5 hours early.
Another solution for nursing women could be expressing their breast milk and store it in safe containers so that someone else at home may feed the baby. Mother care institutions may train nursing women on expression and storage of breast milk.
