On July 14, 2023, the parliament of Ukraine passed a draft law, No.7629, “On Amendments to the Code of Ukraine on Administrative Offenses on Strengthening Liability in the Field of Collective Bargaining”.
This governmental draft was submitted to the parliament in 2022, together with draft law No.7628 (as of now, Law No.2937) on collective bargaining agreements. The draft aims to set additional administrative liability and increase fines for parties of collective agreements for ignoring/avoiding participation in collective negotiations. Amounts of fines will be increased not so drastically (from $5 to 23 per specific violation), but they could be a safeguard from labor violations.
However, draft law No.7629 stipulates that the fine is not imposed on social parties at enterprises with less than 25 workers. In the opinion of LI attorneys and union partners, this threshold is not accurate. In addition, it does not correspond to Law No.2937 on collective bargaining agreements. Thanks to union advocacy, that law contains a threshold of 10 workers to extend the sectoral (inter-sectoral) agreement to all employers whose employees do not exceed 10 people.
LI experts believe it is unreasonable to establish two different thresholds in the related laws. There are a lot of enterprises in the education sphere (kindergartens) or the housing and public utility sector with less than 25 employees. The introduction of such a high threshold could have led to the destruction of the system of collective agreement regulation at a significant number of enterprises and a decrease in the level of the social and legal protection of employees. Thus, LI hopes that this collision will be eliminated and the threshold will be dropped to 10 people, corresponding to the micro-enterprises definition.
