New booking rules: MP warns of risks

The government’s proposed changes to the rules for reserving military service personnel could pose risks to parents with many children, students, and other categories of citizens who are exempt from mobilization on certain grounds. Employers may begin to lay off such workers in order to preserve the ability to reserve other employees.

This was stated by Oleksandr Fedienko, a member of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence, in a post on Facebook.

According to the People’s Deputy, this is a draft amendment to Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 76, which regulates the procedure for booking employees.

In the current version of the document, employees who have a deferment for other reasons in accordance with Article 23 of the Law on Mobilization are taken into account in the total number of employees at only one place of work. However, the draft amendments propose to transfer such conscripts to the category of persons who are not taken into account when calculating the reservation quota.

Fedienko explains that under the new rules, employees on personal deferment will not increase the company’s quota for booking other employees. Because of this, employers who seek to keep as many reserved employees as possible may begin to consider such people as disadvantageous to the staff.

The MP called this a possible “cascade effect” and warned that a decision without proper analysis of the consequences could lead to the loss of specialists and layoffs. He also assessed that there is a risk of stopping enterprises that service critical infrastructure facilities.

According to Fedienko, instead of changing the rules, it is worth strengthening control over their implementation and introducing strict sanctions for abuse. In particular, he proposed automatically depriving enterprises of the status of critical in case of violations.

The People’s Deputy also asked Prime Minister Serhiy Koretsky whether the government had assessed the social and economic consequences of the proposed changes, in particular the risk of discrimination against parents with many children, students, and other protected categories of citizens.

It was previously reported that Ukraine is preparing changes to the rules for booking military conscripts. The project involves reducing booking limits for enterprises in the defense-industrial complex, energy, and part of the utilities sector, as well as creating a new body that will influence granting enterprises the status of critical.

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