An overview of women’s work and employment in Azerbaijan
have collective agreements signed at 676 enterprises, 91% up from the first half of 2008 (InformContact,
July-September 2009). This suggests coverage of only about 30% of the eligible companies, but obviously
this kind of contacts makes the US Dept of State (2010) conclude that the majority of unions remain tightly
linked to the government, with the exception of the journalists' unions.
While the labour law applied to all workers and enterprises in the country, there are exceptions to the law
and to the General Collective Agreement. First, the government can legally conclude bilateral agreements
with MNEs that set aside labour laws. The parliament must ratify these agreements. They are not officially
published, and neither unions nor even labour inspectorates have access to them. The ITUC (2008) states
that this anomaly is leading to the violation of labour rights in such enterprises. The international confedera-
tion adds that Azeri nationals employed by foreign companies, notably oil companies, often face discrimina-
tion. In many cases they are hired on short term contracts for as little as three months and then dismissed.
They are forced to work overtime, and do not receive annual holiday pay or compensation for occupational
injuries or diseases (ITUC 2008). The US Dept of State revealed that production sharing agreements (PSAs)
between the government and multinational energy enterprises signed in 1994 and subsequently did not
provide for employee participation in a trade union. By contrast, the ATUC reported that during 2009 there
was some progress in starting new unions and that multinational enterprises had begun to welcome these
initiatives (UN Dept of State 2010), though somewhat earlier it also stated that organizing efforts had been
blocked mainly by MNEs operating in Azerbaijan (InformContact, July-September 2009).
A second category of problems emerges in state-owned enterprises, as we saw in Azerbaijan jointly
with the public service covering no less than two-thirds of female and half of male paid employment. State-
owned enterprises are run by government-appointed boards of directors who set wages for all government
employees, according to a 1996 law. Despite this law, an effective system of collective bargaining between
unions and enterprise management has yet to be established. Unions rarely participate in determining wage
levels in the state sector, and where collective agreements exist, they are were often treated as formalities
and not always respected (ITUC 2008; US Dept of State 2010). Various messages point at a rather bad
reputation of the state-owned enterprises as regards compliance with the country’s labour legislation, in
particular in the field of occupational health and safety. For example, in January 2010 the cryptic formula-
tion of the chief of the main Labour Inspectorate of the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection was that
“the Azerbaijani state enterprises do not fall behind the private sector on the number of infringements on
the labour legislation” (NN 2010a).
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