Labour and Social Security Journal 12/2024

The article is the second part of the study aimed at presenting the rules of protection of employees' participation rights under EU law in the context of cross-border company reorganisations (Part I) and their implementation in Polish law. This part critically examines some of the provisions of the Act of 26 May 2023 on the Participation of Employees in a Company Resulting from a Cross-Border Conversion, Merger or Division of Companies. As will be shown, they constitute an improper transposition of EU law, which creates certain risks both for Polish companies involved in cross-border reorganisations and for their employees who are or may be entitled to participation rights.

The article – based on the provisions of the Benefit Act– decodes the detailed rules according to which the amount of maternity allowance provided for under the (universal) social insurance system in Poland is determined. Next, an attempt was made to indicate the legal conditions and grounds for the Europeanization of social insurance law in the scope regulating the amount of maternity allowance and to determine its essence. The areas of EU regulation in the case of which the impact of EU law on the amount of maternity allowance can be determined have also been specified. The study concludes with an analysis and critical assessment of the rules for determining the amount of maternity allowance from the point of view of the purpose and provisions of EU directives and Article 45 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

Over the next two years, Poland will be obliged to implement two EU directives on remuneration issues. In particular, this concerns the strengthening of the application of the principle of equal pay for equal work or work of equal value between men and women. In this context, practical problems with the application of this principle in outsourcing companies, in which the amount of remuneration of individual employees depends on the budget of a specific contract, were presented. The author presents proposals for actions that employers should take to justify differences in the amount of salaries for objective reasons.

The publication takes a closer look at the issue of employment outsourcing and shows how far it is from labor law. The fundamental right of employees to collective labor law becomes illusory in the dawn of the decisions of the Supreme Court in Brazil and the adoption of the perspective of freedom of contract. This not only negatively affects the situation of the employed, but also undermines the concept and foundations of labor law.

The subject of the considerations undertaken in this article is an attempt to find an answer to the question of whether an employer may require an employee, in certain situations, to respect the principle of neutrality also outside the workplace as a specific expression of the obligation to care for the good of the workplace. There are undoubtedly situations in which employees, by taking up activity in social media, completely ignore the principles and values in force in the company, which may expose the employer to the risk of losing the image built over the years. In the opinion of the authors, the answer to the above question is affirmative. For the sake of order, it should be indicated that the subject of the considerations is not the issue of permissible criticism of the employer. The article focused on the role of employer branding in building a positive employer image and implementing neutrality policies in the workplace. The importance of creating an attractive work environment and promoting the values that attract talented employees is presented. Also discussed are the challenges of implementing a neutrality policy, which involves avoiding an explicit company stance on religious, political and worldview issues. The neutrality policy, although it can help with image consistency, also runs the risk of losing employees who may disagree with its principles. In addition, the article examines the possibility of termination in the context of a violation of the neutrality policy, pointing out the need for such actions to comply with applicable law. It is crucial to understand that both strong employer branding and a neutrality policy can significantly affect employees' and other stakeholders' perceptions of a company, which translates into its long-term business success.

The aim of the paper is analysis of article 66 of the Labour Code from the point of view of criminal procedure. The author points on inconsistencies of some of the expressions used in the provision with the terminology of criminal law and on the need to extend the grounds for re-employment. The obligation should, without a doubt, exist in case of termination of criminal proceedings due to passage of time. Moreover, it is worth to consider to link the obligation of re employment also with other decisions than the final verdict of not guilty or termination of the proceedings. The author expresses the opinion that the regulation analysed is needed, passes the proportionality test and the expiry of the employment contract due to provisional detention does not interfere with the presumption of innocence.

The study deals with the distinction between the notion of an accident at work and the notion of an accident during a business trip, which is treated as an accident at work for security purposes. The author examines the issue in the light of the established case law of the Supreme Court and also discusses the distinctions arising from recent case law in the title area.

On October 25, 2024, a national scientific conference "Around the presumption of an employment relationship" took place in Wrocław. The conference was organized by the Labour Law Department of the Faculty of Law, Administration and Economics of the University of Wrocław and the State Labour Inspectorate's Jan Rosner Training Centre in Wrocław. The event was held under the honorary patronage of Chief Labour Inspector and the Wrocław Bar Association.