On 14 April 2026, at the initiative of Prof. Magdalena Paluszkiewicz and Dr. Ewa Staszewska-Kozłowska, a na­tionwide academic conference entitled “Labour Market Reform in Poland in Light of the New Act on the Labour Market and Employment Services” was held online. The conference was organized by the Department of Labour Law, Social Insurance and Social Policy of the Faculty of Law and Administration, University of Lodz. The event was held under the patronage of the Rector of the Univer­sity of Lodz, the National Labour Inspectorate – Regional Labour Inspectorate in Lodz, Wolters Kluwer, the legal portal Prawo.pl, and the Polish Network of Labour Law and Social Security Cooperante. The conference attracted considerable interest, with more than 200 participants at­tending the event.

Abstract The aim of the paper is to discuss the legal notion of the unemployed person in the context of the draft of Act on vocational activity. Therefore a characterisation of selected and important changes in the legal notion of unemployed person has been carried out, taking into account both positive and negative conditions for this legal status. The analysis makes it possible to evaluate the proposed amendments, in respect of current views of doctrine and court jurisprudence and in the consequence to formulate de lege ferenda comments, following the scientific discourse on the appropriateness of the proposed regulation, initiated in previous issues of this journal (Włodarczyk, 2023, Staszewska, 2023).

The aim of the study is to determine an answer to the fundamental question, whether the request for accessibility, regulated by the Act of 19th July 2019 on Granting Accessibility for Persons with Special Needs, may be submitted by the persons with disabilities who are employed by the entity responsible for providing accessibility. In answering the above mentioned question, it may be ascertained whether such persons may avail themselves of this remedy in order to enforce the legal protection afforded to persons with disabilities by the labour law in force. This requires to outline briefly the concept of accessibility and its importance for the protection of the rights and freedoms of persons with disabilities in the first place, and in the following order to try to define the role of the accessibility motion by establishing the relationship between it and the obligation imposed on specific entities. The study will then examine the scope of persons entitled to submit the motion, the list of entities responsible for examining it, the principles and possible ways for its implementation and the consequences of noncompliance. Finally, the conclusions of the discussions will be presented, supplemented by possible de lege ferenda requests.

Over the last year the Senate of the Republic of Poland prepared two proposals of amendments to the Act of 6th March 2018 Entrepreneur Law (Senate forms 200 and 200s) which propose the introduction of so-called holiday relief due to the exercise of the right to rest by the so-called self-employed persons. The aim of the paper is to present the proposed legal regulations and to attempt to assess them from the point of view of making it possible to exercise the aforementioned entitlement in practice for the indicated group of persons. The legislative process on the Act has not been completed yet, which is not only influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic situation, but also by the numerous doubts around the proposed legal solutions, which resulted in significant alterations to the originally adopted amendment proposal before its draft was submitted to the Sejm of the Republic of Poland. Regardless of the further legislative future of the proposals it is worth considering whether the legal solutions in the scope of the entitlement follow the right direction and whether, as a consequence, they can be used in the construction of the model of legal protection of self-employed persons. Special attention is given in the discussion to self-employed persons performing work under conditions of strong economic dependence on one or a small number of contractors.