Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
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LYUDMYLA REFERENCES LITERATUR VOLYNETS<br />
There is no need to stress that living conditions<br />
of the Ukrainian population have deteriorated<br />
enormously since Ukraine gained<br />
independence. The transformation towards<br />
capitalism in its Ukrainian version has led to a<br />
deterioration in working conditions and workers’<br />
earnings, facilitating an erosion of social<br />
security. According to the People’s Security<br />
Survey conducted by the International Labour<br />
Organization and the State Statistics Committee<br />
of Ukraine in 2003, a monthly income<br />
per capita amounted to less than $100, 40% of<br />
wage earners suffered from wage arrears, over<br />
two-thirds were dissatisfied with their wages,<br />
and about 85% of adults could not even cover<br />
their healthcare needs.<br />
INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK OF IR IN<br />
UKRAINE<br />
In spite of pressures, the institutional framework<br />
in Ukraine is generously supportive of workers<br />
and unions. It allocates a broad scope of rights<br />
to trade unions to regulate employment, working<br />
conditions and workers’ pay. Surprisingly,<br />
unions have failed to derive maximum benefits<br />
from this. The inability to assert workers’ interest<br />
and interest antagonism and give effects to<br />
the collective bargaining represent their major<br />
failures. But the regulation of workers’ rights<br />
has been under attack and the processes of deregulation<br />
already begun. As the labour market<br />
is changing, so are the forms of employment. In<br />
contrast to full-time employment of indefinite<br />
duration, civil-law, self-employment, employment<br />
by small entrepreneurs and informal employment<br />
were introduced. All these emerging<br />
forms of work have hardly found any relevance<br />
with trade unions.<br />
LABOUR CODE<br />
The central piece of the codification of labour<br />
rights has been the Soviet Labour Code<br />
adopted in 1971. As in socialism, current<br />
labour legislation remains pre-conditioned on<br />
the employment contract and implicitly on<br />
trade union membership, thus leaving workers<br />
without the written labour contract and<br />
unions outside. Such conditionality goes back<br />
to the socialist regulatory traditions. The most<br />
detailed legal and administrative regulation of<br />
IR ever, the Soviet labour law, was designed<br />
in part to strengthen labour discipline and<br />
increase productivity (as opposed to defend<br />
workers). State paternalism implicitly excluded<br />
the voluntary regulation of work by workers<br />
and employers. Workers felt responsible for<br />
regulating everyday small issues but delegated<br />
all other responsibilities to the state. This is<br />
the case even today, as only less than ten per<br />
cent of workers would go to unions in cases<br />
of violations of their labour rights (Razumkov<br />
Centre 2001).<br />
With the background of influx economic<br />
developments and enterprise-specific changes,<br />
labour rights have remained heavily regulated<br />
through the Labour Code of 1971. The initial<br />
amendments of the Labour Code did not<br />
go beyond formal and superficial changes.<br />
A more intensive revision process that has<br />
been on-going since 2003 prompted<br />
a degree of the de-regulation. Summarized<br />
in the new draft and adopted Seite page 225<br />
in the first reading in 2008, the new<br />
Labour Code aimed to adjust labour<br />
legislation to market conditions, according to<br />
its initiators – surprisingly – from trade union<br />
leaders 17 . The adoption of this draft was post-