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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INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS REFERENCES LITERATUR IN THE UKRAINE<br />
And instead of receiving increases in wages,<br />
workers received discounted holiday vouchers<br />
and holiday presents. Here trade unions<br />
appeared as an entity external to workers and<br />
in which workers’ involvement and participation<br />
was restricted to the obedience to labour<br />
discipline and productivity targets. Workers<br />
find points of contact with the unions only in<br />
relation to their social and welfare interests.<br />
Hence, beyond atomizing workers (Ashwin<br />
1996, 1999), system legacies find its expression<br />
in structuring union-workers’ relationships not<br />
along representation but rather consumerism.<br />
This nature of the linkages between unions<br />
and workers also continues, to a large extent,<br />
to structure union-workers relationships post-<br />
1991 25 .<br />
Shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union,<br />
there appeared the signs of the activization<br />
of the union movement outside the existing<br />
union structures. These predictions of union<br />
change were initially inspired miners’ strikes<br />
of late 80-s in Russia and Ukraine. Notably,<br />
workers’ militancy resulted in the emergence<br />
of alternative union-like structures, giving the<br />
first split to the monolithic unionism model<br />
existing so far. Initially identified as striking<br />
committees, workers’ self-organizations are<br />
developed later on into trade union organizations<br />
(interviews).<br />
As unions’ militancy over time has<br />
decline and current wage levels signalled<br />
unions’ inability in these areas,<br />
Seite page 228<br />
it became clear that neither ex-official<br />
nor alternative trade unions were<br />
ready to fully overtake the function of workers’<br />
protection. In the literature, alternative unions<br />
were perceived as playing no significant role<br />
in IR, facing marginalization or slipping back<br />
into a traditional mould (Clarke und Fairbrother<br />
1994). Meanwhile, the Ukrainian cases<br />
deserves attention, as the share of trade unions<br />
affiliated with the ex-official Federation of<br />
Trade Unions of Ukraine (FPU) shrank from<br />
100 per cent in 1993 to claimed 55.8 per cent<br />
in 2004. In contrast, trade union organizations<br />
belonging to other trade union federations<br />
increased threefold during 2000-2004 (Chernyshev<br />
2006).<br />
Upon closer examination, it becomes clear<br />
that in case of Ukraine one speaks not about<br />
pure fragmentation of union movements along<br />
old-style ex-official and newly established<br />
alternative unions, but indeed, along different<br />
visions of unionisms. In particular, on the way<br />
towards finding their role and niche in the patterns<br />
of organized interest representation, one<br />
finds unionisms in Ukraine differentiating in<br />
terms of their ideologies and identities, organizational<br />
structures, prioritized resources, and<br />
a set of relationships with members, employers<br />
and the state. Sometimes (e.g. in case of conflict<br />
articulation as Kozina (2005) shows) they<br />
even oppose each other. As the processes of the<br />
searches on such dimensions are still on-going<br />
(and the framework of IR is still in making),<br />
such formative processes of different unionisms<br />
provide useful insights into the prospects of<br />
the transformation of IR in Ukraine. Notably,<br />
both unionisms are placed into a set of different<br />
immediate external conditions (defined by<br />
relationships with employers and authorities);<br />
and managers are more likely to deal with exofficial<br />
than independent unions.<br />
The current union density in Ukraine still constitutes<br />
approximately 50% of the workforce