Labour and Social Security Journal 10/2022

The article concerns the concept of legal entity in Directive (EU) 2019/1937 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2019 on the protection of whistleblowers under Union law. The main issues that need to be clarified in order to legally characterise this concept are its relation to the concepts of legal person and employer and the legal form of its functioning. The author discusses these issues by deriving conclusions from the characteristics of the legal relations into which the legal entity enters in relation to the role assigned to it in the Directive and from the nature of its legal rights,  duties  and  responsibilities. As a result, he concludes that the Directive does not impose a specific legal form on the legal entity. He considers, however, that it is justified to adopt the principle, not excluding the necessary exemptions, that national law links the attribute of a legal entity to organisational entities having legal personality or equivalent legal capacity.

The article deals with some aspects of the law on the social economy adopted in August 2022. This act is to become an instrument of active employment policy, introducing a new quality by focusing not only on the cost-based economic account, but also on the social value of work.

Social enterprises are an important factor in building  an inclusive labor market, and thus creating conditions for better social development.  Although  the newly introduced act has its limitations, strictly employment instruments should be assessed positively.

This article examines working time in parallel employment. General considerations about working time in such an employment model are presented, including the so-called 'split employment' sometimes found in capital groups. The authors present the disadvantages of parallel employment for the individual employee and consider the legitimacy of limiting working time. In this context, they briefly comment on working time in transport — both air and road. They juxtapose the transport solutions with the working time regulations for employees of medical entities. Given the motives for limiting working time in transport, the authors consider whether a similar mechanism should not also apply to employees of medical entities.

This article refers to the issues related to the possibility of withdrawing an application for granting an old-age pension, submitted under the rules recognized by the Constitutional Tribunal as inconsistent with the Constitution of the Republic of Poland. Against the background of the facts concerning women born in 1953, selected provisions of social security law,  civil law and the law on administrative proceedings were analyzed.  This   allowed   for   the   formulation   of   a conclusion that it isn't possible to withdraw the application for a pension in a situation leading to unjustified privileging of people initially aggrieved by unconstitutional provisions.  It's  unlawful  to  demand a benefit much higher than that, which would be due to other persons applying for the benefit at the same time and in the same factual situation, only on  the basis of provisions consistent with the Constitution of the Republic of Poland.

The institution of the renewal of the proceedings is an extraordinary means of verifying the decisions made in the disciplinary proceedings of academic teachers. Its essence  consists  in   reconsidering   and   resolving a closed and non-appealable disciplinary case, if the proceedings were affected by a qualified legal defect. The core function of the resumption procedure is to protect the rule of law and the vital interests of academic teachers and/or their families.

In December 2021, the European Commission proposed a directive aimed at improving the working conditions of employees of electronic platforms. It is the first legislative proposal aimed at regulating the rapidly developing electronic labour market. In the European Union, 43 million people are forecast to be employed via online platforms in 2025. Innovation in the workplace, as long as it does not harm workers' rights, has the support of the European Commission. The author presents the legal instruments and structures — the presumption of employee employment and transparent management of work organization — proposed by the EU bodies, the European Parliament and the Council. In order for the economy to achieve  an innovative and, at the same time, harmless to the employed goal, which is nowadays electronic employment technologies, it is necessary to uniformly regulate the workplace on the common European market. It is therefore necessary to regulate both the legal status of employees and to define the competences of national public, administrative and judicial institutions, which are obliged to provide legal protection for employees.

The author presents the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court linked to the concept of a cause unrelated to an employee within the meaning of the Act on collective redundancies and the related right to severance pay under Art. 8 of this act. She does so against the background of the latest judgment of the Supreme Court in this respect, in which the Court directly indicated for the first time, that not every situation of improper performance of duties by an employee may be classified as a cause not related to the employee and that unilateral termination of the contract with notice by an employee does not exclude his / her acquisition of the right to the severance pay provided for in this Act.