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

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