626
Halyna Lavryk, Halyna Terela y Viktoriia Orel
Political and legal preconditions for supervision and control over the observance of factory law
in Ukraine
Relations, which were subject to the rules of supervision and control,
they had purely administrative, organizational and public law feature. At
the same time, these relations have become those regulated by factory laws
and have since been associated as an integral part of factory (industrial,
labor) law in terms of their law enforcement and human rights goals and
social purpose.
However, at the time of formal consolidation of such norms, factory law
was a sub-branch of police (administrative) law, which was determined by
the nature of the policy implemented in practice.
In general, factory law had a number of features. First, it was of a
guardian nature. The latter was clearly evident in the legal framework of
factory inspectors, who, in addition to the power to oversee compliance with
the law, could interfere in relations between workers and industrialists,
prevent conicts and promote their settlement, care for workers, education
of minors.
The purpose of these measures was to ensure «public peace», prevent
strikes, which, on the one hand, provided for the supervision of workers,
on the other – obliged industrialists to improve working conditions. A
contemporary of the events, economist V. P. Bezobrazov, responding to
the condition of law, wrote about the preventive activities of the factory
inspection, that «… is generally in the care for the mutual relations of
masters and workers…» (Bezobrazov, 1888: 56).
The scientist justied the need for its functioning as a special body of
the police state, of course, understanding the latter as a characteristic of
that time interpretation as a public administration body and the transfer of
inspection from the Ministry of Finance to the Ministry of Internal Aairs
«not only useless but harmful, capable of increasing the arbitrariness of
police actions and causing various abuses»(Bezobrazov, 1888: 62, quoted
by Kupriyanova).
However, the Law of the Russian Empire of June 3, 1886 and the
adopted «Rules on the Supervision of Factory Industry and the Mutual
Relations of Manufacturers and Workers» enshrined the guardianship
nature of supervision, which reected the essence of police policy on
labor issues. Reacting to such changes, V. M. Hessen commented: «The
government does not have a social program. Current law is the product of
police considerations, not social policy» (Hessen, 1902: 313).
In support of his conclusion, the scientist cited, for example, unresolved
at the law level, issue of sanitation in factories, which was extremely
important from a social point of view, but was of secondary importance
from the police point of view, because of unsanitary work conditions, will
not lead to strikes (Hessen, 1902). The same opinion was held by L. S. Tal,
noting that statesmen in the nineteenth century were guided mostly by
«police and nancial considerations rather than social motives» (Tal, 1918: 6).