Serhiy Rudnitsky, a line manager at a Coca-Cola Ukraine bottling plant, said he could no longer stomach his working conditions.
According to him, the pay was low, vacation days were sharply curtailed and individual workers were often asked to cover the duties of multiple employees. At the same time, managers were ready to pounce on the slightest mistake, Rudnitsky told the Kyiv Post.
A Coca Cola spokeswoman told the Kyiv Post that the company conducts its business fairly and honestly, follows the highest ethical standards in the country and complies with all the norms of Ukraine. She added that the company provides a fair salary and a variety of incentives to employees.
Rudnitsky and his comrades would beg to differ. Towards the end of 2016, Rudnitsky gave himself a crash course in labor rights and formed a union. Less than two years later, it went on to win several important victories.
Now, he worries that all his gains could be taken away. Rudnitsky is not alone. Labor unions across Ukraine and their international allies are indignant about draft law 2681, which would introduce several important changes into laws governing unions.
These include a limit of two unions per enterprise, a minimum of 10 members per union, a cut in union representatives’ legal protection and a restructuring of unions’ asset ownership.
“They simply want to destroy us,” said Rudnitsky.
The legislation’s proponents, including Galina Tretyakova, the parliamentary committee head on social policy, say that the new bills will make unions more effective and competitive and reduce their burden on employers. Instead of simply being created for the sake of receiving payroll funds, unions will be forced to take a more active role in defending labor rights.
Union representatives slammed this description as a red herring, saying that the bill will simply destroy unions’ effectiveness in the country. They called it a violation of international conventions and the European Union association agreement with Ukraine.
Bill 2681 was introduced simultaneously with another draft law, 2708, which would modify the labor code and give employers more flexibility to sign a wider range of contracts with employees and make it easier to fire them. This new labor code was also wildly unpopular with workers and unions around the world. Organized labor protested outside Ukrainian embassies in several other countries, and an international labor delegation came to Ukraine to speak with the government.
However, with President Volodymyr Zelensky’s dismissal of Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk’s cabinet, the bill was procedurally withdrawn. While organized labor welcomed the news, many believe that a similar draft law is not out of the question.
Unions’ changing roles
Over 40,000 unions exist in Ukraine. Former economy minister Timofey Mylovanov enumerated the unions’ powers in a Facebook statement in January.
“Today, they manage state property, have mandatory payroll deductions (in essence, union tax on labor), have the right to be present at the Cabinet, and, for example, have the right to block dismissal of employees,” Mylovanov wrote.
Despite all this, legal experts told the Kyiv Post that most Ukrainian unions are relatively toothless compared to their counterparts in other European countries and even the U.S.
Valeria Savchuk, a labor lawyer with Vasil Kisil & Partners, said that the readiness of those countries’ unions to strike has a strong impact on labor relations. Ukrainian unions, on the other hand, serve more to collect a percent of the payroll funds and redistribute it, often spending it on employee perks like travel vouchers or sporting events.
“One very rarely sees a situation where the labor unions take a strong stand in defense of the labor collective, when the union actively defends their rights,” she said.
“That is also one of the reasons why the developers of this bill want to increase competition among unions, so that unions aren’t growing geometrically… just to receive money from payroll but to defend the workers’ rights,” she added.
“Old” unions, largely holdovers from the Soviet period, are said to be the biggest culprits and stereotyped to be inert and unwieldy. However, this is not always the case and depends largely on the sector, said NGO labor lawyers.
Still, according to Savchuk, many unions make life difficult for employers by always saying “no” to every proposal.
New and independent
Over the course of Ukraine’s independence — and especially since the EuroMaidan Revolution that ended President Viktor Yanukovych’s rule in 2014 — smaller, more agile and active unions have been growing in number and influence, especially in certain sectors like mining and aviation, said George Sandul, a lawyer with the NGO Labor Initiatives.
“There is this image that unions are only about travel vouchers and so on, but this is not correct,” said Sandul. “Many unions have reformed greatly.”
Rudnitsky echoed him, saying: “Unions haven’t been this active in 25 years.” However, he added that many Ukrainians still don’t know their rights.
Multiple members of other unions agreed.
Vitaliy Kontsevalov, a member of the aviation workers’ union, said that it helps his colleagues fight to increase minimum wages.
Maria Buyalo, who worked at the Pinchuk Art Center, said that her colleagues’ union forced the center to halt a practice of constantly demanding new agreements every several months.
Vassily Andreev, the chairman of the construction workers’ union, said that collective bargaining helped reduce employers’ ability to hire construction workers informally.
‘Yellow’ unions
Rudnitsky worries that his company may have helped introduce rival labor unions, which might make it harder to work toward collective bargaining.
Union representatives told the Kyiv Post that so-called “yellow” unions represent a major concern. These are organizations loyal to the employer. They must be part of any collective bargaining negotiations, which allows them to obstruct more representative unions.
Luca Visentini, the General Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, who came to Ukraine as part of a mission to examine both draft laws, said that Ukrainian officials told him of an attack on the most representative trade unions in the country.
“There is an attempt to boost yellow trade unions who don’t represent workers properly to try to destroy the landscape of the trade union’s representative,” he said at a news conference following the mission.
Mykhailo Volynets, the head of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine, echoed these concerns.
“The old unions would survive,” he said. “They know how to find a common language with the government,” whereas the newer, more active unions have everything to lose from the pending legislation.
Still, several lawyers told the Kyiv Post that fear of yellow unions is overblown.
A limit on unions
A major concern is the bill’s proposed limit of two unions per enterprise. Many fear that this will let employers or entrenched interests destroy representative unions while leaving pro-employer or less active unions in place.
“It won’t take a lot of effort to subordinate a union to the employer,” said Vitaliy Dudin, head of the NGO Social Movement. “They will be puppets.”
Vasil Kisil’s Savchuk said that the bill may instead force unions out of complacency and make them become more representative.
Regardless, the draft law is vague on how it would determine which two unions would be allowed to remain standing. There is no clause under Ukrainian law that allows for a union’s forcible termination. Many have unanswered questions on how it would be implemented.
The international labor mission, along with Ukrainian NGOs, insisted that this bill violates the International Labor Organization convention on freedom of association: the right of labor unions to organize, to access the workplaces, to go on strike properly and to develop collective bargaining.
For example, the bill would create a mandatory minimum of 10 people before a union can be created, up from the present minimum of two. Volynets said that this would give the employer more power to prevent unions.
“If they convince just one person out of 10, that union can’t be formed,” he said.
Multiple labor representatives and NGO lawyers said that they are concerned about employers potentially breaking down their enterprises into multiple smaller legal entities, each with fewer than 10 employees, which would enable them to get around organized labor altogether.
Limiting unions’ power
Bill 2681 would also strip away certain guarantees from union leaders, making it easier for employers to fire them, while bill 2708 would have made it easier to fire rank and file, Dudin pointed out.
Currently, unions can prevent employers from firing workers, legal experts told the Kyiv Post.
This could be very good for an employer’s flexibility, which had previously been constrained. However, it could also lead to employers being able to pressure employees.
“People often uncover some kind of corruption, like in the mines for example,” said Sandul. “Large enterprises can begin squeezing them. Thanks to unions, [the whistleblowers] can fight against this.” The new laws would eliminate this protection, he said.
The bill would also cancel the automatic mandatory payment of dues from payroll. Employers and business associations welcomed the proposed change. Pro-labor experts countered that this might render it more difficult for unions to collect dues and thus reduce their financial resources.
Finally, the bill would nationalize assets built up by unions during the Soviet period. Mylovanov characterized it as government assets being returned to government control. Labor NGOs countered that the assets were built up from dues paid by employees during the Soviet period.
