New In Settlement Of Labour Disputes: Conciliation Commission

Most employers and employees inevitably face the problem of labor disputes, be it individual or collective ones. However, not many are aware of methods for settling labor disputes.

With adoption of the new Labour Code, the procedure for settlement of labor disputes has changed considerably, thus, consideration of discord between employee and employer by conciliation commission has become a mandatory step.

In this regard, we decided to consider in depth urgent issues of creation and operation of conciliation commission.

What does the Conciliation Commission imply?

The Labour Code provides that the conciliation commission is a permanent body created in an organization, its branches and representative offices. The commission is created on a parity basis with an equal number of employer's and employees' representatives.

Regarding this regulation, some important points are noteworthy.

Firstly, as opposed to the previous Labour Code, according to Article 159, paragraph 1 of the present Labour Code, it is mandatory that individual labour disputes are considered by the conciliation commissions, except the disputes concerning small businesses and chief executive officers of any legal entity. Only the disputes concerning outstanding issues or non-enforcement of the decision of the commission may be considered by the courts.

This condition correlates with Article 8, paragraph 6 of the Civil Procedural Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan, according to which, if the pre-trial procedure for settling a dispute for a certain category of cases is either established by law or provided by contract, legal action may be carried out only after complying with such procedure.

Secondly, the commission shall consider all kinds of individual labour disputes, except disputes involving the chief executive officers of any legal entity and the employees of small businesses.

An analysis of Chapter 15 of the Labour Code implies a general conclusion that the subjects of medium and large businesses, as well as their branches and representative offices must necessarily create a conciliation commission.

Procedure for Creation of the Conciliation Commission

The present Labour Code does not expressly provide a procedure for the creation of a conciliation commission.

The Labour Code merely provides that the representatives of the employer and employees in a written agreement or collective agreement in relation to the conciliation commission must determine the following:

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