The Phenomenon of Social Partnership in the Late USSR (on the Example of Collective Bargaining Agreements of Soviet Enterprises)

The article analyzes the collective bargaining agreements of Soviet enterprises in the late USSR as an instrument of social partnership. The source basis of the study is a set of documents, which includes both collective bargaining agreements themselves and the normative-legal documentation that accompanied their conclusion, party-state resolutions and orders, materials of trade union conferences on the discussion of collective bargaining agreements. The study involves draft transcripts of the meetings of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee, which allow us to reconstruct the position of the Soviet leadership and its leader in relation to the practices of social partnership. The empirical material of the article consists of examples of labor relations at the main enterprises of Chelyabinsk, which allows us to show the refraction of social partnership practices at the regional level. The conclusion of collective bargaining agreements in the post-war USSR began in 1947. Historical and legal studies interpret this type of documents in different ways, many researchers emphasize the loss of normative-legal character of collective bargaining agreements and their transformation into binding agreements aimed at meeting the requirements of socialist competition. A historical look at these documents and the activities that accompanied their conclusion and execution shows that around the contracts were formed practices that can be interpreted as social partnership in its «Soviet version» - discussion, dialog and conflict resolution between employers and employees, partly the participation of workers and engineers in the management of the enterprise - in terms of its social obligations to employees.