Every year, people die and receive injuries in accidents on Ukraine’s construction sites. Reporting for openDemocracy in June 2019, journalist Alexey Arunian documented the serious safety concerns associated with working in Ukraine’s construction industry, demonstrating the connection between informal employment and poor safety regulation on building sites in Kyiv. A weak State Labour Inspectorate makes the conditions for workers all the more dangerous, and the statistics show it: official numbers show that between January and May 2019, 25 workers died in Ukraine’s construction industry – twice more than the same period in 2018.
With plans afoot for a new Labour Code in Ukraine, Ukrainian journal Commons spoke to Vasyl Andreyev, head of the Union of Construction Workers and Building Materials Industry about the reality of defending workplace rights in the country. We translate and publish the interview with permission here.
Trade unions today are often associated with the Soviet era, when they performed an assistive function for the authorities, rather than defending the rights of workers. How important are union rights in Ukraine right now? Why is this issue still far from unpopular?
