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