Human rights issues in Tofaş is being handled through the Tofaş Ethics Committee reporting to the Board of Directors. We adhere to the principles of the UN Global Contact, which has been signed by Koç Holding, our majority shareholder, and it is our objective to ensure 100% compliance with the principles. We also support to encourage our distributors and suppliers to observe the same principles.

Diversity is one of the major components of our approach to human rights. We believe that diversity is a criterion of richness for our corporate culture. As part of this approach, we assess our employees based on their knowledge, talents, and skills in the process of recruitment or other human resources processes.  There is no discrimination on the grounds of age, sex, faith, ethnic origin, or a similar reason in any process. We adhere to the principle of “equal pay for equal work” in fixing the wages of our employees. We are offering equal benefits to all employees performing the same work. 

We never tolerate any breach of labor rights, child labor, forced labor, discrimination, and similar practices.  It is our aim to roll out our approach to human rights to our value chain in its entirety. For that purpose, we expect our suppliers and business partners to adhere to the same human rights principles observed by Tofaş.

Safeguarding employees’ union rights is one of the issues that we meticulously try to ensure. We attach importance to ensuring that the employees are represented by a trustworthy organization in their dealings with the company management and allow our employees to freely exercise their rights to conclude collective agreements and to join trade unions. We expect our suppliers and business partners to follow our policy regarding the safeguarding of labor rights.

“In 2019, 70% of our employees were governed by a collective bargaining agreement.”

As we are a member of the Koç Group, all newly recruited office employees join the Pension and Benefits Fund Foundation of Koç Holding. Field employees hired by Tofaş can also join the Pension and Benefits Fund Foundation of Koç Holding.

Our employees and their families are eligible for a group special health insurance and KoçFamily Program offered to the companies within the Koç Group. All Tofaş employees paid per hour are covered by the Complementary Health Insurance (TSS) with 100% percent contribution from the company. Employees are free to include their spouses and children in the insurance policy. In 2019, a total of 5,635 employees and 5,660 members of their families were included in the TSS.

The number of children eligible for scholarship under a program titled “Tofaş Offers One More Support for Education,” which we launched in 2011 in order to support the education of our employees’ children, rose to 2,171 in 2019.