Labour and Social Security Journal 05/2024

This text poses the question whether the principles of equal rights of employees performing the same duties and of the non-discrimination in employment should be separately defined after Labour Code was amended by the Act on 16 May 2019. In the author's opinion an affirmative answer should be made. The separation of duties expressed by above-mentioned principles implies the differentiation of sanctions laid down in the case of their violation. The detailed analysis focuses on the construction of invalidity of employment contract provisions and the employer's compensation liability which are the legal consequences of an unequal treatment of employees as established in the Polish Labour Code.

The subject of this paper is a discussion of the provisions of the Act on Support Benefit, which introduces into the Polish legal system a new, universal system of cash benefits intended to partially compensate for the effects of the social risk specified in the Act as the "need for support". Author discusses the conditions for acquiring the right to a support benefit, including the procedure for determining the need for support and its level, critically assessing the requirement for the beneficiary to reside in the territory of the Republic of Poland, and. He also polemically refers to the adopted structure of the support system for individuals and families according the need for long term care, in particular the rationality of differentiating – depending on the age of the person requiring support – of the type of benefits, the conditions for acquiring them and their amount.

In the judgements in Cases C-587/20 and C-356/21, the Court of Justice formulated the guiding thesis that the scope of the Directive 2000/78 was determined by its objective of eliminating all obstacles based on discriminatory grounds to access to a livelihood and the ability to contribute to society through work, whatever its form. These rulings bring two new elements to the existing concept of protection against discrimination in employment and occupation. The first is the extension of protection beyond the circle of employment and self-employment; the second is the recognition of the mainly personal work of the self-employed person, and not their dependence on a contractor, as a feature of the exercise of gainful activity necessary to bring them within the protection of Directive 2000/78. It seems reasonable to expect that the criterion of mainly personal work and the extension of protection beyond the boundaries of employment and self-employment relationships will apply to other EU equality acts that contain wording similar to the provisions of Directive 2000/78.

The purpose of the study is to analyze social insurance regulations, as defined in Article 1 of the Law on the Social Insurance System, concerning the provision of personal care for a child constituting a title to social insurance and a circumstance determining the right to sickness insurance benefits, made from the perspective of factors and conditions making the provision of child care a circumstance relevant to social insurance law and its shape. The exercise of personal care of a child does not have a clear, understandable meaning in social insurance law. This state of affairs can only be considered natural to some extent, and is justified by the various contexts in which the phrase appears in social insurance law, or the problems of identifying the factors that determine such and not other normalization of this issue in social insurance law.

The purpose of the study is to analyze social insurance regulations, as defined in Article 1 of the Law on the Social Insurance System, concerning the provision of personal care for a child constituting a title to social insurance and a circumstance determining the right to sickness insurance benefits, made from the perspective of factors and conditions making the provision of child care a circumstance relevant to social insurance law and its shape. The exercise of personal care of a child does not have a clear, understandable meaning in social insurance law. This state of affairs can only be considered natural to some extent, and is justified by the various contexts in which the phrase appears in social insurance law, or the problems of identifying the factors that determine such and not other normalization of this issue in social insurance law.

Since the first judgments of 14 March 2017 concerning religious symbols in the workplace (C-157/15 and C-188/15), the CJEU has consistently followed a line of case law favorable to the principle of neutrality. The authors argue that in its rulings, the CJEU differentiates between the private and public sectors. In the case of the private sector, an entrepreneur's desire to be perceived by customers as neutral is a legitimate goal (Article 16 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights). However, an employer must also demonstrate that there was a real need to introduce a neutrality policy, related to the objective needs or expectations of customers or the need to mitigate the risk of conflicts between employees. In the case of the public sector (public authority), striving for neutrality (including exclusionary neutrality – including in relations with other employees) is considered a justified goal without the need to demonstrate a different need.

The subject of this article is to present the legal situation of the employer's access to data on the state of intoxication of an employee who has suffered an accident at work. In the current legal state, even after the amendments to the Labour Code in February 2023, this causes problems in some cases. This is due to the treatment of the work accident victim's intoxication data as data about his or her health. Under strict data laws, this type of information is subject to special protection in health care providers. This results in the employer, in some situations, not having access to knowledge of the incident victim's state of intoxication, with negative consequences in terms of establishing the actual causes and circumstances of the work accident and, consequently, inappropriate preventive conclusions to prevent such incidents in the future. In addition, the lack of knowledge of the employee's state of sobriety may result in consequences in terms of determining the extent of liability in connection with the work accident, as well as the payment of accident insurance benefits to an unauthorised person.

The paper reports on the position and reasoning of the Supreme Court regarding the collective bargaining agreement termination to a conditio.