Lithuania

ENWith the transition to the modern market economy labour relations and regulation of employer-employee relations acquired a new quality. There were no more doubts that detailed legal regulation of labour relations failed to precondition good and optimum environment for market development and failed to ensure absolute labour and social guarantees to employees. This encouraged development of collective labour relations granting employees, employers and their organizations the widest possible opportunities to solve labour and related socio-economic issues through mutual negotiations. Therefore in the labour relations area encouragement of collective relations between employees and employers began, including such legal forms as collective bargaining, conclusion and performance of collective agreements, initiation of collective labour disputes, protection of violated collective labour rights and interests, and representation of parties to labour relations. In other words, Lithuania absorbed the principle that has been declared in Western countries for several decades by now, that labour relations are essentially collective ones and that this view is founded on the freedom of associations, on the principles of autonomy of the parties to collective labour relations and on the recognition of rights related to them.Development and simultaneous implementation of the new model of collective labour relations presented several conceptual and practical problems to be resolved, i.e. first, establishing the institution for representing employees and employers in collective labour relations; second, legalizing the status and importance of collective agreements in regulation of labour relations; third, developing a mechanism for collective labour dispute resolution, allowing to resolve such disputes with maximum rationality and efficiency. When speaking about the third group of issues forming the concept of collective labour relations, i.e. collective labour disputes, it must be noted that in practice they occur quite seldom.