articles - Labour and employment law

Protection of all categories of staff, including job candidates and former employees. A broad range of infringements subject to reporting. Protection of whistleblowers against all retaliatory measures, including defamation suits. A duty to establish internal whistleblowing procedures. These are just a few of the points included in the guidelines for the bill implementing the EU’s Whistleblower Directive.

The image of a natural person is a protected right. In Poland, it is subject to protection as a personal data, right to personality , but is also subject to copyright protection. Each of these regulations has a somewhat different presumption and terms of image use. An employer, in seeking to use the image of an employee in advertising, must ensure to meet requirements imposed by each of these regimes as well as observe requirements specified by all legal provisions applied in this regard. In this article we seek to address questions concerning copyright principles under which an employer...

The first day of June this year saw the entry into force of amendments to the Act on Rules for Registering and Identifying Taxpayers and Tax Remitters, of 13 October 1995 (Act). They have redefined the rules concerning the PESEL (Universal Electronic System for Registration of the Population) and NIP (Taxpayer Identification Number) tax identifiers. As a result, PESEL has become the primary identifier for taxpayers who are individuals and are not registered as taxpayers of goods and services or are not engaged in business. According to the justification for the Act, the amendments are...

The temporary regulations that were introduced in connection with the COVID-19 epidemic have temporarily amended certain labour law regulations. One of them concerns a suspension of Labour Code obligations regarding routine medical examinations. This has raised justified doubts among employers who are wondering whether the regulations have merely suspended the performance of the routine medical examination obligations, or if they should be interpreted as a temporary ban on performing them.

Employers frequently find no need to include provisions in employment contracts that regulate copyrights to work produced by an employee. They rest on the general principle that the employer automatically acquires economic copyrights to work created in the course of performing assigned tasks1 or that the right to them arises to his benefit by law (as in the case of computer software)2. Therefore, regulations in an employment contract are unnecessary. This is obviously true to a certain degree. The devil nevertheless lies in details. If an employer solely rests on statutory provisions, he may...

The shorter a regulation, the more questions and doubts it raises. And so it is in the case of Article 101(2) § 3 of the Labour Code, which regulates the minimum amount of compensation for a non-compete clause (or restrictive covenant) after employment termination. Compensation may not be lower than 25% of the remuneration the employee received before employment termination, for the duration of the competition ban. How this is interpreted is important.