Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

LYUDMYLA REFERENCES LITERATUR VOLYNETS
There is no need to stress that living conditions
of the Ukrainian population have deteriorated
enormously since Ukraine gained
independence. The transformation towards
capitalism in its Ukrainian version has led to a
deterioration in working conditions and workers’
earnings, facilitating an erosion of social
security. According to the People’s Security
Survey conducted by the International Labour
Organization and the State Statistics Committee
of Ukraine in 2003, a monthly income
per capita amounted to less than $100, 40% of
wage earners suffered from wage arrears, over
two-thirds were dissatisfied with their wages,
and about 85% of adults could not even cover
their healthcare needs.
INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK OF IR IN
UKRAINE
In spite of pressures, the institutional framework
in Ukraine is generously supportive of workers
and unions. It allocates a broad scope of rights
to trade unions to regulate employment, working
conditions and workers’ pay. Surprisingly,
unions have failed to derive maximum benefits
from this. The inability to assert workers’ interest
and interest antagonism and give effects to
the collective bargaining represent their major
failures. But the regulation of workers’ rights
has been under attack and the processes of deregulation
already begun. As the labour market
is changing, so are the forms of employment. In
contrast to full-time employment of indefinite
duration, civil-law, self-employment, employment
by small entrepreneurs and informal employment
were introduced. All these emerging
forms of work have hardly found any relevance
with trade unions.
LABOUR CODE
The central piece of the codification of labour
rights has been the Soviet Labour Code
adopted in 1971. As in socialism, current
labour legislation remains pre-conditioned on
the employment contract and implicitly on
trade union membership, thus leaving workers
without the written labour contract and
unions outside. Such conditionality goes back
to the socialist regulatory traditions. The most
detailed legal and administrative regulation of
IR ever, the Soviet labour law, was designed
in part to strengthen labour discipline and
increase productivity (as opposed to defend
workers). State paternalism implicitly excluded
the voluntary regulation of work by workers
and employers. Workers felt responsible for
regulating everyday small issues but delegated
all other responsibilities to the state. This is
the case even today, as only less than ten per
cent of workers would go to unions in cases
of violations of their labour rights (Razumkov
Centre 2001).
With the background of influx economic
developments and enterprise-specific changes,
labour rights have remained heavily regulated
through the Labour Code of 1971. The initial
amendments of the Labour Code did not
go beyond formal and superficial changes.
A more intensive revision process that has
been on-going since 2003 prompted
a degree of the de-regulation. Summarized
in the new draft and adopted Seite page 225
in the first reading in 2008, the new
Labour Code aimed to adjust labour
legislation to market conditions, according to
its initiators – surprisingly – from trade union
leaders 17 . The adoption of this draft was post-