Extended Summary

1. The employer’s right to manage is not an unlimited right. On the one hand, the employer’s oversight debt, on the other hand, the employee’s personality rights limited the employer’s right to manage. Personality is the whole of the features that distinguish people from other people, that are specific to a concrete person only and unique to that person.

2. The protection of the employee’s personality rights at the workplace requires the supervision of the employer’s authority and its limitation when necessary. The employment relationship means for the worker to endure a significant part of his life under the authority of the employer. When the limits of the employer’s authority are left to the mercy of the employer, it may become impossible to talk about the employee’s personality rights, at least in the workplace.

3. Many of the behaviours that are taken for granted and become normalized in the workplaces are actually behaviours that violate the employee’s personality rights unlawfully.

First of all, by devaluing another person, developing a language to feel valuable is an unjust and unlawful attack on the personality rights of the person who is made to feel worthless.

The behaviours of the employer or employer’s representatives such as the rude speech, shouting at the workers, producing gossip about the workers, favouring some workers, lying about the workers and physical attacks of the workers, are expressed in terms like psychological terror, bullying, and harassment in the workplace.

One of the practices that attack the employee’s personality rights in the workplace is mobbing. Mobbing is all kinds of words and behaviours that are systematically carried out by a person or group to make the person targeted feel worthless, humiliated, and obey the power of the group.

Mobbing is not an action that is directly defined and sanctioned within our legal system. As a result, it is subject to the same legal legislation that protects the personality rights of the worker. In other words, whether an event is called mobbing, an unjust attack on personal rights, or psychological harassment, the applicable laws do not change. It is a crime within the meaning of the penal code.

Another violation of personality rights is sexual harassment. The Law on the Human Rights and Equality Institution of Turkey, numbered 6701, collects acts of aggression against personality rights, including sexual harassment, under the title of harassment. In the aforementioned law article 2/j harassment is defined as “any kind of intimidating, humiliating, degrading or embarrassing behaviour”.

Sexual harassment is a serious and unlawful attack on the victim’s personality rights and the right to work. Its effects are not limited to the victim’s employment relationships. Victim’s family life, social environment, children are directly affected by the event, and hence the family is often the victim.

Another issue that needs to be addressed within the scope of attacking the employee’s personality rights is the prohibition of discrimination and employer behaviours against the principle of equality. The Prohibition of Discrimination and the principle of equality are regulated in the Constitution, the Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098 (TBK), the Law on the Human Rights and Equality Institution of Turkey No. 6701, and the Labour Law No. 4857 in the Turkish legal system.

The Constitutional Court has accepted the principle of non-discrimination and equality both as a fundamental right and as a fundamental principle that governs the enjoyment of other human rights and freedoms. Describing the principle of equality as “an integral part of international conventions on human rights”, the Constitutional Court accepted the principle of equality and the prohibition of discrimination as “the basic legal norm that is at the top of international law”.

Discrimination in working life is a multidimensional issue. The prohibition of discrimination is a regulation that aims to eliminate these multiple effects. With the 5th article of the labour law, a basic constitutional principle becomes concrete in the employment relationship.

As a result, the protection of the employee’s personality rights in the workplace has not been handled with the importance required by the subject. It is also not possible to say that a sufficient awareness has developed among the workers, who had to postpone protecting their fundamental rights due to the concern of protecting their jobs, about their personality rights and its protection. If the cases of sexual harassment or sexual assault are excluded, it is possible to say that the workers see the violations of the employer’s personality rights as a problem arising from the work environment and that must be tolerated until their employment contracts are terminated. Ignoring personality rights is a common attitude not only among workers but also among labour law practitioners. Difficulties in proof, cultural limitations, deficiencies in legal regulations have led to an attitude of avoiding and ignoring even the existence of a problem such as the protection of personality rights.