from Jacobin
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky hesitated quite some time before signing his country’s new labor law on August 17, 2022. Already a month earlier, the national parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, had passed the bill known by the number 5371. In the sober, deceptive language of bureaucracy, it is supposed to simplify relations between employers and employees. In reality, it implies a complete flexibilization of the labor market, to the detriment of workers.
Zelensky’s hesitation may have owed to pressure from Ukrainian trade unions as well as from abroad. Even the International Trade Union Confederation, which unites more than 200 million workers worldwide, protested against the law. “It is grotesque that Ukrainian workers, who defend the country and care for the injured, sick and displaced are now being attacked by their own parliament,” General Secretary Sharan Burrow said in a statement.
Ukraine’s digital minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, for his part, did not hesitate for long, picking up the pen on July 4. At the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Lugano, Switzerland, he signed an agreement with the mobile and cable network companies Kyivstar, Vodafone, and Datagroup-Volia on the digitization of Ukraine. In the war, he said, there is an opportunity to digitally develop Ukraine into the most advanced state in the world. “It’s an experiment, a revolution. An opportunity for you, your companies, and the whole world!” Fedorov explained.
The new labor law and the Recovery Conference are both indicators of the direction Ukraine could take during and after Russia’s war. Ukraine risks becoming a neoliberal laboratory with as few labor regulations as possible — and with the best possible conditions for private companies that want to profit from reconstruction...
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