Last December the Chamber for Civil and Economic Cases of the Court of Cassation of Armenia considered the suit brought by of Armen Sahakyan, a mechanical engineer with many years of experience at the Sotk mine and chairman of the Lernagorts Union of Sotk Mineworkers against the management of the Ararat Gold Recovery Company (AGRC). AGRC fired Sahakyan on June 3, 2005 for absenteeism without good cause on May 11 and 12. (See also: A 50 Million Dram Fine Where No Violations Were Found). Considering his dismissal illegal, Sahakyan turned to the Court of First Instance in the Kentron and Nork-Marash Districts of Yerevan, demanding his job back. He argued in court that what had happened was not absenteeism as the employer claimed but that he, as chairman of the Lernagorts Union, had been obliged to participate in the strike the union had organized on May 11 and 12. The employer had recognized the legal status of the union, negotiated with them, and met some of their demands. Therefore, the occurrence was not absenteeism and his dismissal was illegal.

The Chamber for Civil and Economic Cases of the Court of Cassation reversed the verdict that had been made in Armen Sahakyan's favor by the Court of Appeal and sent the case back for a new hearing by the Court of Appeal, stating: ". there is no evidence in the case that the Lernagorts Union of the Sotk Mineworkers is the trade union organization of the company, or that a collective agreement was signed between them." This formulation also appeared in the December 14, 2005 verdict by the Court of Appeal dismissing Sahakyan's request to have his employment reinstated during the second hearing, following the reversal by the Court of Cassation.

"The court has completely deviated from the heart of the problem. Armen Sahakyan presented a request to have his employment reinstated and the court was supposed to consider the legality of his dismissal from his position," M. Piliposyan, the head of the legal department of the Coalition of Trade Unions of Armenia, told us. Piliposyan also noted that Sahakyan's dismissal from office took place in violation of the law; in order to dismiss the chairman of the labor organization, the employer needed the consent of both the larger trade union and the local chapter. "If either of these is not present, the court must consider the dismissal illegal or inquire of the labor organization in question," the lawyer added.

Rather than dealing with the trade union, the court circumvented the problem by calling into question the legal status of the Lernagorts Union, ultimately concluding that since the employer had not signed a collective agreement with the labor union, its members could not claim that Lernagorts was a labor union. The fact that the Lernagorts Union had (in vain) sent written requests to AGRC on March 18 and July 22, 2005 to create a joint commission for signing a collective agreement was ignored as well. Parallel to this litigation, the Lernagorts Union filed suit against AGRC for not responding to its written requests. In its October 5, 2005 decision, the court obliged AGRC to respond to the Lernagorts' letters. It was only after intervention by the Office of Obligatory Execution of Court Orders that AGRC informed the applicant that the company had made inquiries among the mine employees and found that none of them was a member of the Lernagorts Union. "Since your organization does not represent more than a half of the employees, you cannot make a proposal to sign a collective agreement," the reply stated.

We have been informed that the inquiry as to whether the miners were members of the union or not was carried out in parallel to the court proceedings, and that the workers, seeing that the dismissed members of the union board couldn't get their jobs back even after the court intervened, stated that they were not union members, realizing that otherwise a short-term agreement signed with the employer could be their last.

Still, the Court of First Instance rejected Armen Sahakyan's request to enclose in the case the written requests of 304 miners to become members of the labor union, stating their readiness to allocate one percent of their wages to the union. The fact that there were written requests by miners to become members of the union but none renouncing their intention was ignored. In other words, the AGRC did everything it could to not allowing the trade union to organize in order to avoid being held responsible for subjecting the miners to degradation or for the increased number of accidents resulting in mutilation and death.

"The workmen are left alone vis-à-vis the employer and no state agency assists them in defending their rights," said Yevgeny Kozhemyakin, chairman of the Union of the Guilds of Miners, Metallurgists and Goldsmiths.