The Workers’ Health and Occupational Safety Council (İSİG Meclisi) reported on 7 October that at least 226 workers were killed at work in Türkiye in September, bringing the total for the first nine months of 2026 to at least 1,736.

The monthly figures are 155 in January, 129 in February, 151 in March, 190 in April, 214 in May, 228 in June, 216 in July, 227 in August and 226 in September. İSİG states that this is the first time since it began keeping records in 2013 that more than 200 deaths have been recorded in five consecutive months.

The figures are floors rather than totals. İSİG’s own earlier monthly reports gave lower numbers for the same months — January was first published as at least 146 and now stands at 155 — because deaths are added as they are confirmed. The nine-month figure will rise.

In September 79 of the dead worked in industry, 54 in construction, 48 in services and 45 in agriculture. The leading recorded causes were traffic and service-vehicle accidents (49), falls from height (41), and crushing and collapse (40). Deaths occurred in 62 of Türkiye’s 81 provinces and in six countries abroad. İstanbul accounted for 39.

Eight of those killed in September were children. Five were fourteen or younger. At least 66 child workers have died at work in Türkiye this year. İSİG attributes part of this to MESEM, the state vocational training centre programme, which it describes as a legal channel for the exploitation of child labour, and argues that the problem lies in the model itself rather than in weak inspection alone.

Twenty-one of September’s dead were women. İSİG notes that official Social Security Institution figures put women at around 2 per cent of workplace deaths, while its own count puts the true share three to four times higher, the difference lying largely in unregistered agricultural work. Fourteen were migrant workers: five Syrian, three Azerbaijani, two Turkmen, and one each from Bulgaria, Iraq, Russia and Ukraine.

Seven of the 226 were members of a trade union. Two hundred and nineteen were not.

Five more workers died in the collapse at the İmbat Madencilik mine in Soma on 2 October. They will appear in next month’s count. Of the young people who marched in İstanbul for them, fifteen were detained.

A workplace death rate that has held above 200 a month since May is not a sequence of accidents. It is the operating condition of a labour market.