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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The situation with wage nonpayment in Ukraine is worsening – Oleh Vernyk
Actors and staff of the Kyiv Regional Academic Theater named after Panas Saksahanskyy in Bila Tserkva 15 ended the hunger strike in December that had been ongoing since 8 December.
Thus, the artists protested against months-long wage delays and the threat of dismissal of their artistic director. Some of their demands to the regional council were satisfied by officials, but not all. It is also currently unknown what the theater’s funding will be for the next year.
On Thursday, a rally of the theater’s artists and staff named Saksahanskyy took place outside the Kyiv region council during the session. Most wore armbands reading “I am starving.” According to the theater’s chief artist Iryna Rybak, about 170 representatives of the staff joined the hunger strike.
“The situation is such that we belong to the Kyiv Oblast Council,” she explains. “And since our owners think we earn too much, they cut half of the funding. As a result, we received salaries only up to August, and since September we have received no pay at all. Not at all. We wrote letters, appealed to deputies at the local level – no response. We decided to draw attention to ourselves in the same way: announce a hunger strike for the entire theater staff and come to the council during the session.”
In total, 9 million hryvnias were “taken from” the theater’s funding, notes actor Artsem Bocek, who was also at the rally.
“And secondly, they want to ‘move aside’ our artistic director and general director Vyacheslav Uskov because they think he is an unworthy candidate for this theater, and they want to appoint someone of their own to keep a ‘finger on the pulse’ in the theater, who would be aware of events, because substantial sums are allocated to the theater – 24 millions a year,” says the actor.
Meanwhile, in the Kyiv region council, they say they cut funding after checks by the State Audit Service. At the same time, the spokesperson for the institution, Iryna Andreeva, noted in a comment to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that at the December session 14 deputies partially satisfied the protesters’ demands.
“By their decision, deputies allocated funds for salaries — these were changes to the 2017 year’s budget. But after that, deputies also voted to dismiss this director,” she says.
According to Andreeva, the theater currently has something to pay its employees through December, and for next year, this issue will probably be decided starting in January.
The theater told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that Vyacheslav Uskov is currently on medical leave, but despite the end of the hunger strike by the artists, they plan to continue supporting him and urge the authorities to restore him to his position.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty asked Oleh Vernyk, head of the All-Ukrainian Independent Trade Union “Labor Protection,” about ways to protect workers’ rights and year-end trends:
– You know, Ukrainians have had a strange tendency lately: people are collectively and desperately ready to fight for sufficiently abstract, honestly, things for them — Misha, Yulia, Petya, anyone, but those demands are quite distant and abstract for them. And here we see in Bila Tserkva when people rose up precisely for their own labor rights and interests. Well done.
– How widespread is wage delay for several months, in your assessment?
– Unfortunately, this situation tends to worsen. The reform related to decentralization of power and Ukrainian budgets is beginning to take full effect. Almost all local cultural bodies will depend on, in fact, municipal budgets.
In Bila Tserkva we see that the regional council can manipulate theater funding from the regional budget. And we know that many libraries and theaters are connected not even to the regional budget, but to city and district budgets — that’s even less money. Consequently, on the one hand, the state has significantly reduced cultural expenditure from the national budget, shifting the burden to local budgets, and local budgets are too poor to sustain truly the volume of cultural events and institutions that exist in Ukraine. The trend is extremely negative, and next year will reveal very unpleasant things.
– If we speak about your experience as a union activist. How widespread were protests for labor rights this year in Ukraine, and how successful were people?
– You know, 2017 year became a model for many unionists, many people who managed to achieve a lot this year. A bright example is the campaign of workers at Kryvyi Rih’s enterprises, where mass workers, including miners and metallurgists, refused to leave their workplaces; miners stayed underground after their shift, and the demand was to restore their wage levels to about a thousand dollars, to the level they had around 2012 when the hryvnia fell so rapidly.
And although the wage level of a thousand dollars has not been reached, private business owners still made significant concessions to the organized trade union movement.
– Procedurally, Ukrainian law provides the right to strike. In the case of the Saksahanskyy Theater this is not exactly a strike, because the theater continued operating; in the case of the miners you mentioned, they, as I understand, stopped working during the protests. What does the right to strike include?
– It is interesting that our law on collective labor disputes, which basically regulates strike issues, is written in such a way that, from my personal experience and from that of colleagues in the independent union movement, it is practically impossible to conduct a fully legal official strike under the law. Because the terms of every procedural action are written in such a way, and these formulations are written, that in reality you would need several months to conduct negotiations between the union, administration, and the state conciliations and mediation council. And this raises the need to democratize labor legislation to resolve strike issues so that strikes in Ukraine are not “wild.”
– What other ways does a person have to defend their rights? Among successful examples, I know of collective lawsuits to court.
– Legislation on trade unions is very democratic in Ukraine, and this is a real achievement of our legal system. Because independent unions are direct representatives of workers.
At the same time, we know that at each enterprise there is a so-called “official” union. So the question arises for people to create their own unions that will defend their interests, not the employers’. To create a union, three people are enough.
Moreover, you cannot currently fire a person without the agreement of their trade union committee. Social dialogue begins at the enterprise, and through mutual concessions the sides reach understanding, at least temporarily.
– This year work on a new Labor Code intensified. The government’s draft of the code was approved in the first reading in 2015. But this document was heavily criticized by public activists. At the same time, according to Grigoriy Osovyi, head of the Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine, who was on our air in April, work on updating labor law has been ongoing for about 15 years, and for the second reading deputies have introduced more than a thousand amendments. The Code has not been adopted. Do you monitor these processes?
– I would not dare say that this project is ‘governmental.’ The authors of this project are listed on the Verkhovna Rada website. There are four people: the actual author is Mikhail Papiev, a deputy from the Opposition Bloc, but to gain momentum they added Lyudmyla Denysova, head of the relevant committee, and added Volodymyr Hroisman, who was then the speaker of the Verkhovna Rada, and the current deputy prime minister, Kubiv, to boost it.
I must point out that after the first reading I hoped that deputies would take the opportunity to propose a large number of amendments and significantly improve the variant submitted for the first reading. But it turned out quite differently: democratic, progressive, pro-European amendments were rejected, while those coming from oligarchic groups, in particular the Federation of Employers of Ukraine and the Confederation of Employers of Ukraine, were almost all taken into account by the relevant committee. Thus, the bill “improved significantly” by the second reading, and independent trade unions are categorically against this bill. It cannot be adopted.
– Regarding judgments about other civil society organizations and individuals not present here, I must say that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is ready to hear their position and give them a chance to speak. One of our listeners who called and told how he tried to return to work after being fired says he hopes for the updated Supreme Court to protect his rights. How do you assess this prospect?
– I also have certain hopes for the new Supreme Court. But I also have some statistics on labor dispute resolution. And, unfortunately, trade union lawsuits for the protection of workers’ rights have not received much robust support in the Supreme Court.
Oleh Vernyk
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