Zero-hours contracts are set to be legalised and 70 per cent of the workforce exempted from workplace protections.
The Ukrainian parliament has passed two new radical measures on labour liberalisation, prompting fears of Ukrainians losing workplace rights permanently as Russia’s war puts huge pressure on the country’s economy. In two laws passed on Monday and Tuesday, MPs voted to legalise zero-hours contracts and made moves towards removing up to 70 per cent of the country’s workforce from protections guaranteed by national labour law.
The latter measure means the national labour code no longer applies to employees of small and medium enterprises; instead, it is proposed that each worker strikes an individual labour agreement with their employer. It also removes the legal authority of trade unions to veto workplace dismissals. Draft law 5371 had previously been criticised by the International Labor Organization, as well as Ukrainian and European trade unions, on the basis that it could ‘infringe international labour standards’.
Ukraine’s ruling Servant of the People party argued that the ‘extreme over-regulation of employment contradicts the principles of market self-regulation [and] modern personnel management’. Red tape in Ukraine’s human-resources laws, it suggested, ‘creates bureaucratic barriers both for the self-realisation of employees and for raising the competitiveness of employers’.
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