articles - Labour and employment law

Our blog is for everyone professionally involved with labour law and human resources. The profile of employment law is clearly rising. The complexity of issues presented in this field is also growing. It can be said without exaggeration that nearly everything in business revolves around employees. Apart from inflation in the regulations, this is affected by changes in society and civilisation, including demographics, increased mobility of workers, and growth of new technologies. 

Polish employers sending workers on foreign business trips more and more often have legitimate doubts whether they should apply for an A1 certificate for such staff. This is a document required in the case of posting of workers, confirming that they are covered by the social security legislation of the given jurisdiction. The problem mainly involves how to understand the notion of “posting” as used in European rules for coordination of social security systems, which govern the issuance of A1 certificates.

Since January 2019, employers may keep their employees’ records in electronic versions. However, labour law regulations do not define the concept of electronic version. Nonetheless, certain guidelines are to be found in the provisions of the Labour Code and the regulation dated 10 December 2018 of the Minister of the Family, Labour and Social Policy on employee documentation specifying the requirements related to changing the version of employee documentation from paper to electronic.

Amendments to the Polish Labour Code in force since May 2019 resolved the existing doubts as to the admissibility of obtaining employees’ consent to processing of their personal data by employers. Before, the courts had held quite clearly that if an employee’s consent to processing of his personal data were considered a circumstance legalising the gathering of personal data from an employee other than those specified in Art. 221 of the Labour Code, that would constitute a breach of that provision and a circumvention of the law (Supreme Administrative Court judgments of 1 December...

A major change to the Labour Code entered into force on 7 September 2019, making it easier for employees to pursue claims for mobbing. Under Art. 943 of the Polish Labour Code, an employee may seek compensation (zadośćuczynienie) for a detriment to the employee’s health caused by mobbing, as well as damages (odszkodowanie) in an amount no less than the minimum wage. But previously, as a condition for seeking damages, the employee had to terminate the employment on the grounds of mobbing.

In the case of a foreigner who has lost or not yet obtained rights to work and stay in Poland, the issues of conclusion and termination of the employment contract and setting the starting date for work (discussed in earlier blog posts) largely boil down in practice to the issue of the employer’s obligation to pay salary to such an employee. This issue is basically resolved in its entirety by the applicable regulations.