Direct Request (CEACR) - adopted 2013, published 103rd ILC session (2014)

Forty-Hour Week Convention, 1935 (No. 47) - Ukraine (Ratification: 1956)

Article 1 of the Convention. The principle of the 40-hour week. The Committee notes the Government’s reference to a finalized version of the new draft Labour Code. As this text has not been made available to the Office, the Committee is not in a position to assess the compatibility of its provisions with the principle of the 40-hour week laid down in the Convention. The Committee hopes that in considering flexible working time arrangements, the Government will ensure that the new draft Labour Code does not authorize practices that would possibly lead to unreasonably long hours of work and would thus directly contradict the principle of progressive reduction of hours of work. The Committee recalls, in this respect, Paragraph 12 of the Reduction of Hours of Work Recommendation, 1962 (No. 116) which indicates that averaging should be permitted only when special conditions in certain branches of activity or technical needs justify it. It also recalls paragraph 79 of its General Survey of 1984 on working time in which it pointed out that undue facilitation of overtime, for example, by not limiting the circumstances in which it may be permitted or by allowing relatively high maximums could, in the most egregious cases, tend to defeat the Recommendation’s objective of a social standard of a 40-hour week and make irrelevant the provisions as to normal working hours. The Committee requests the Government to keep the Office informed of any new developments in the process of adopting the new Labour Code, and to transmit a copy once it has been adopted.