Forging New Partnerships: Navigating Draft Labor Code

On May 14, Labor Initiatives (LI) lawyers Inna Kudinska and George Sandul led an online training session for the Trade Union of Aircraft and Machine Building Workers (affiliated with the FPU) during their seminar in Lviv. Supported by the Swedish organization Union to Union, the event marked a milestone: the first official collaboration between LI and this union.

The union reached out to Labor Initiatives specifically to leverage LI’s ongoing advocacy and deep legal analysis regarding the draft Labor Code.

Over the 1.5-hour session, LI experts walked participants through the history of Ukrainian labor law reform and the timeline of the current draft Labor Code. Crucially, they addressed a troubling lack of transparency and genuine social dialogue in the current drafting process. The attorneys then highlighted specific clauses that could reshape the labor landscape, including overtime regulations, vacation time, local union authority, labor guarantees for women, dispute-resolution mechanisms, minimum wage establishment, and others.