Бұлғариядағы "Подкрепа" кәсіби одақтар конфедерациясы

Trade union centre in Bulgaria

The Confederation of Labour Podkrepa is a trade union centre in Bulgaria. It was founded on 8 February 1989 and has a membership of approximately 150,000 individuals. It is affiliated with the International Trade Union Confederation and the European Trade Union Confederation. in Bulgarian, its full name is Конфедерация на труда „Подкрепа“, which is commonly shortened to КТ Подкрепа (KT Podkrepa ).

Podkrepa was founded in 1989 as an anti establishment labour movement by a group of dissidents, led by Konstantin Trenchev. Initially the labour union took a right wing, anti communist stance, aligning itself with other anti communist labour unions such as the Polish Solidarity and American AFL CIO. As such, it became close to the opposition SDS and DPS movements and eventually became a full member of the rightist SDS, once it became a legally registered organization. Some of the more hard line members left and formed different trade unions, such as "Promyana", a movement which sought to take the socialists down from power. However, these splinter movements proved unpopular and ineffective, fading into irrelevance relatively quickly. In the subsequent development of the trade union system in the country, CITUB solidified its role as Bulgaria's leading syndicate, consistently beating out Podkrepa in membership numbers through the years. With the remaining movements side lined, CITUB and Podkrepa were earmarked as the only two nationally representative unions by the Bulgarian government.

With Podkrepa having moved away from its rightist roots, it reconciled with CITUB and came to openly cooperate with the Socialist led government elected in 2005, which it continued to support through to 2009. In 2011, Trenchev was pressured by the union's members to resign, but Podkrepa did not accept candidacies for his replacement and as such he remained at the head of the organization. He resigned, citing union members' demands, four years later in 2015, subsequently leaving Podkrepa entirely. This happened amidst a growing stagnation and decline in the labour union movement in general, with membership in labour unions declining from the nearly 100% of workers during the socialist era down to 15.4% in 2016. Other members of the original anti communist era also left the union, attempting to form other small unions, such as the "Defense Syndicate". The unions subsequently criticised each other, with a senior Podkrepa figure stating that they were "people that never moved their ass to go to a protest" and compared a proposed increase in overtime in Bulgaria to measures to policies taken by Viktor Orbán in Hungary. By this point the union had changed so much since its foundation, that a new generation of leading figures such as Podkrepa's Economics Expert and MEP candidate Vanya Grigorova defined herself as leftist and viewed the government as rightist. A senior member of the union, alongside Grigorova, also became one of the lead organizers of the 2020–2021 Bulgarian protests against the right wing GERB United Patriots SDS government, despite the fact that the union's head still did not support the protest movement.