Illegitimate, but Hegemonic: Trade Unions as Political Representatives of Ukrainian Labour

In my paper, I will present the results of a qualitative research on the political strategies of Ukrainian trade unions. The great political demand for union militancy in the public discourse, combined with widespread negative attitudes towards austerity measures, does not prompt the huge union federations existing in Ukraine to direct their considerable resources towards development of a social-democratic labour movement with reformist class agenda. And yet, the “successor” unions here have managed to maintain their vast membership throughout the course of the “transition” up until now, unlike their counterparts in many other CEE countries. Contempt towards the “official unions” among the workers is as widespread as membership in these very institutions, while the rhetorical calls to creating militant “real” unions usually stay at the level of the table-talk. Even the second-largest union federation, which was created in the early 1990s by militant labour leaders, rarely mobilises its members, preferring other mechanisms of political influence. To study mechanisms that ensure the preservation of representative monopoly of trade unions among Ukrainian labour, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the employees of Kyiv metro, as well as a privatised energy supplying company and a confectionery factory. I also interviewed informants from the peak-level union organisations. I put my data into dialogue with historical institutionalist analysis of the unions’ dynamic path dependencies, as well as with the Gramscian notion of hegemony. This allowed me to see different mechanisms preserving the hegemonic landscape on three different levels: (1) the micro-level of the immediate workers’ collective, where the union commands no trust and the foreman is the real nodal figure; (2) the factory-wide level, where the union, acting as the administration’s “left hand”, performs important functions in upholding the real illusion of a “labour collective”; and (3) the national level, where the union federation has a say in the governmental decision-making process, can use the threat of mass protests but lacks resources to ever deliver on these threats. These three domains are not isolated or static: they interact between each other and possess internal dynamism. In the last section of my paper, I present the findings which indicate at the fading efficiency of the post-Soviet hegemonic mechanisms on all levels. Bureaucratic legitimacy of the upper-level union officials has to be supplemented with elements of populist politics and patronage networks to a growing degree; on the enterprise-wide level, the new owners increasingly find ways of doing without the union; and on the shopfloor, austerity and bureaucratic control undermine traditional hegemonic mechanisms governing industrial relations, “taylorising” them.