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

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS REFERENCES LITERATUR IN THE UKRAINE
Trade Unions of Ukraine (hereafter KVPU).
At this starting point, the KVPU united only
two sectoral and one regional union and was
basically founded on the initiative and base of
the Independent Trade Union of Miners of
Ukraine (NPGU). In total, the then 90 000
members within the KVPU were certainly
non-comparable to the declared 14-million
in the FPU (that had already almost halved at
that point in time). However, it placed in the
centre of unions’ activities the need for expansive
strategy and spured the solidarity over the
frontiers of the enterprise and sectors. Now,
ten years later, the KVPU has slowly, but in a
sustainable manner, expanded to unite 275,000
members through the establishment of the
further all-Ukrainian unions. Even though
this number still appears non-comparable to
the now around 10 million members left in
the FPU, the dynamic of extending unionisms
across the branches, professions and enterprises
speaks for a more sustainable formative strategy.
Notably, the model of unionism to which
the KVPU commits is closer to the class-based
union ideology in the classical understanding
of unions.
As the legalization procedure for unions was
simplified, the certificate from authorities was
not enough to gain recognition from workers,
employers, and authorities. Moreover, the very
notion of unionism was already discredited.
Neither was the social partnership
able to ensure a degree of recognition
Seite page 230
of these organizations. In particular,
newly emerging bottom up structures
had to frequently turn to the collective
action as a means of recognition and
subsequent consolidation of the specific workers’
interest (also mentioned by Kabalina and
Komarovsky 1997) and so recommended itself
as more militant organizations.
EX-OFFICIAL UNIONS
The structuration process of ex-official trade
unions includes the reforms of then-existing
Council of Trade Unions of the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic into the Federation
of the Independent Trade Unions of Ukraine
(in 1990). In the course of the further developments,
the latter was renamed the Federation
of Trade Unions of Ukraine (hereafter FPU), as
it is still known today. In spite of reforms, the
FPU was characterized as “a largely conservative
organization that did little more than issue
hollow proclamations while millions of workers
were pushed into poverty” (Kubicek 2004:
29). The reforms undertaken by the FPU were
criticized in public as cosmetic, as they did not
go beyond the organizational restructuring on
the principles of confederation or federation
(interviews). The decentralization of the organizational
and membership-dues structures
(as opposite to previously practiced democratic
centralism) resulted in a disconnection between
different levels of union activities. For example,
enterprise-based unions find themselves in isolation
in the face of employers (interviews) 27 ;
and regional and national unions can no longer
impose their decisions, also concerning the
transfer of membership dues to the top.
Structural reform did not go beyond the statements
of the re-establishment of the FPU as
workers’ organization. Whereas the principles
of democratic centralism were abolished and
the organizational structure decentralized, it
still has not reflected the clear demarcation