The reservation policy should be transparent, stable and balanced

It is likely that the audit results will result in changes to the salary criterion for which discriminatory features have been identified

Recently, the problem of reservation has become much worse due to the Government’s decision to audit the existing statuses of criticality or confirmation of the status. As a result, the work of all criticality commissions was suspended not only at the level of military-civilian administrations (MCAs), which were most often audited, but also at the level of ministries.

The signing of all orders to issue deferrals and reservations was also suspended. Therefore, there were cases when the current status expired, the commission did not meet, and, accordingly, employees were unable to get a new deferral, i.e. in this regard, the protection from the state was not as predictable as we thought at the beginning of the year.

This has actually happened since mid-September, and the audit of all statuses granted after July 1 of this year will continue until November 15.

We know that there have already been cases of revocation of existing statuses, at least at the level of the military-civilian administration. We hope that on November 16, as promised, the system will be unblocked. We also realize that this may happen later, as the audit alone will last until November 15. The audit results should then be summarized and amendments to the legislation should be prepared to revise the existing criteria: basic, sectoral and regional. We anticipate that changes will be made to the salary criterion, which was found to have discriminatory features as a result of this audit.

The partial resumption of reservations took place under a protocol decision of the Government of 25.10.24 for those employees who received an order to defer until May 31 this year. Companies have the opportunity to submit rereservation lists to the body that issued the criticality, get approval from the Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of Economy will issue a reservation order for the duration of the decision on the company’s criticality.

The FEU once appealed to the Ministry of Economy to apply the practice that had been used several times during martial law, when the deferral was extended: once for one month, the second time for three months, and we actually hoped that this time, in connection with the audit, the state would be able to apply this practice and also extend the deferral. However, a somewhat different decision was made, but at least we believe that the state heard us, the only thing is that this issue is being resolved in a different way than we asked for, and partially.

We hope that the system will start working this year, there will be new criteria – transparent, achievable and the state will no longer change its policy on organizing reservations so often.

The main message we convey to the state every time is not to change the vector of the policy of organizing reservations for employees liable for military service so often. We want the business to understand that this policy is predictable, transparent and unchanged. That is, we can talk about some improvements, because we understand that there must be a balance between ensuring the national economic front and the resistance of our state, the protection of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but we still emphasize that such a policy should be based on the principles of a balanced approach.