During a working trip to Aktobe region, the Chairman of the Federation of Trade Unions of Kazakhstan, Satybaldy Dauletalin, visited Kazakhstan-China Great Wall Drilling Company LLP, where he had an open discussion with the workforce.
The Great Wall Oilfield Services Company is part of the structure of the Kazakh-Chinese company, SNPS-AMG JSC. The company employs a total of 562 people, 377 of whom are members of the Kazakhstan Oil and Gas Sectoral Trade Union of the Federation of Trade Unions of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
Speaking about the purpose of his visit, Chairman of FTUK Satybaldy Dauletalin noted that such meetings with labour collectives allow to discuss the situation in the social and labour sphere in detail and, if necessary, support social partners in solving urgent issues.
“All of our activities are aimed at protecting the rights and interests of the enterprises’ employees. This includes occupational safety and health issues, wage issues, indexation of wages, other social guarantees and relations with social partners on the ground,” said Satybaldy Dauletalin.
As it turned out, Great Wall had a difficult situation with registration of the new collective agreement. Bekbolat Umarov, chairman of the trade union committee, explained the essence of the problem. According to him, on 1 April 2023 after joint discussion of norms between Great Wall LLP employer and employees represented by Trade Union Organization of Great Wall LLP the Collective Agreement for 2023-2025 was concluded. According to the law, new collective bargaining agreements are subject to mandatory registration with the Labour Inspectorate.
“However, the Aktobe region Labour Inspectorate Department notified the company in writing that the Collective Agreement was not registered and returned. According to the Labour Inspectorate’s findings, there is no obligation under current legislation for employees to pay any money in order to join the Collective Agreement. By doing so, the state labour inspectorate ignored Article 156 of the country’s Labour Code,” said the chairman of the trade union committee.
Meanwhile, Article 156(1) (“Parties to a collective agreement. The procedure for collective bargaining, development and conclusion of a collective agreement”) states that “the parties to a collective agreement are the employer and the employees represented by their duly authorised representatives.
The Chairman of the FTUC, Satybaldy Dauletalin, after listening to his colleagues, noted that the Federation of Trade Unions would certainly intervene in the situation and assured that the misunderstanding by the local state body would be resolved.
“Each party to the social partnership must be committed to respecting its competencies. In this situation, when the collective agreement has been mutually agreed by the parties – the employer and the trade union, signed and ready for implementation, third party interference is unacceptable. No one has the right to infringe on the collective agreement – the constitution of any enterprise,” stressed the Head of the FPPC.
Immediately after the meeting with the staff, in the company’s auditorium, Satybaldy Dauletalin contacted Akmadi Sarbasov, First Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Protection, by telephone and discussed the precedent with the registration of the Great Wall collective agreement.
The social partners agreed that such obstruction of the company’s activities is unacceptable.
Media Centre of the Federation of Trade Unions of Kazakhstan