Labour and Social Security Journal 3/2020

Social Insurance Institution (ZUS) is an important element of ICT transformation of Polish public
administration. Its past and current reforms fit into the process of building e-government. ZUS is first
Polish egov service. Since a few years ZUS has been realising its new strategy of transformation
towards the increase of customer satisfaction. This increase is expected to come from the
introduction of innovative solutions into the services offered by ZUS, as well as from bringing
efficiency and transparency to the management of public funds. The implemented reforms resulted in
financial gains and qualitative changes, which in turn allowed to improve this institution's image in
the society. Current ZUS strategy envisages the follow-up of these activities, mainly expanding the
electronic exchange of information.

Algorithms are becoming the key technology of power over employees. They allow for the
formatting of both the employees themselves and the interactions between them, basically for the
single purpose — optimisation of work processes to increase productivity. From this perspective, the
employees are digital models constructed from data and information. It means that all of their
expressions revealed in the work environment will be measurable in various ways. Algorithms also
sched new light on the issue of subordination in employment. And all thanks to their "blending" into
the biometric data environment of the employees. They somehow acquire attributes of subordination
in employment by combining them with supervisory and control functions encoded in algorithmic
technology. The foregoing means that the functions programmed in this way can be used identically
in any model of employment, and thus in complete isolation from the character of the legal
relationship on the basis of which the work is provided. Therefore, a key question arises, which the
author tries to answer, whether the algorithms can be perceived as tools by which subordination is
created in isolation from the legal basis of the provided work and what consequences it has for the
employees.

Regulations regarding tax- and social-security-related liabilities cover exemptions of benefits related
to contractors' business trip. Even though neither do the Civil Code nor the Labour Code provide for
contractors' business trip, it seems that under the aforesaid provisions these two types of business
trips have been equated. What has not been however determined is whether it is permissible to
interpret the concept of "business trip" with respect to contractors the same way the concept of
"business trip" is interpreted with respect to employees. The aim of this study is to resolve this
problem and to present the principles of exemption from taxation and from the social security
contributions with respect to benefits related to contractors "business trips".

This article discusses basic legal problems relating to the designation of professional soldiers and
functionaries of state services, e.g. the Police, the State Fire Service or the Prison Service, as
academic teachers at military and state service higher education institutions. The status of parties to
such an employment relationship is governed by the provisions of the Act on higher education and
science, the provisions of law pertaining to, respectively, the military service of professional soldiers
or functionaries of state services and the provisions of the statutes of higher education institutions.
The specific tasks in the field of national defence and security carried out by those higher education
institutions and the complexity of the methods of legally regulating the status of the parties result in
their simultaneous performance of different roles, with the employer acting as a higher education
institution and a military unit or a unit of the relevant state service represented by the commandant-
rector and the employee acting as an academic teacher and a professional soldier or a functionary. In
comparison with civilian higher education institutions, the differences regarding the designation of
professional soldiers and functionaries of state services to the position of an academic teacher stem
primarily from: a) the manner and mode of entrusting the position, b) the qualifying requirements for
candidates, c) the requirements regarding the duty to conduct a competition procedure prior to
establishing an employmentrelationship, d) the mode of resolving disputes.

The article is devoted to the presentation of changes made by the Act of July 4, 2019 and the Act of
May 16, 2019 amending the Act — Labour Code and some other acts, but only to the extent that
affects the current shape of separate proceedings in the matters of labour law. The two cited acts
include changes that have a breakthrough significance from the point of view of applying the law,
those of terminological character as well as technical and organizational ones, aimed at removing
current ambiguities that can be considered as ordering. The order of the changes adopted by the
author determines the stages of proceedings in the matters related to labour law. The article
essentially focuses on presenting the most important changes in the Code of Civil Procedure, but the
author does not avoid their assessment.

The Court of Justice of the EU on 27 February 2020 issued a judgement in case C-298/18, Reiner
Grafe, Jürgen Pohle vs. Südbrandenburger Nahverkehrs GmbH, OSL Bus GmbH. According to the
Court in the context of the takeover by an economic entity of an activity the pursuit of which requires
substantial operating resources, under a procedure for the award of a public contract, the fact that that
entity does not take over those resources on account of legal, environmental and technical constraints
imposed by the contracting authority, cannot necessarily preclude the classification of that takeover
of activity as a transfer of an undertaking, since other factual circumstances, such as the taking-over
of the majority of the employees and the pursuit, without interruption, of that activity, make it
possible to establish that the identity of the economic entity concerned has been retained.

The author reports the case law of the Supreme Court regarding the problem which of the ways to
terminate the employment relationship should be classified as a dismissal within the meaning of art.
1 of the Act on group redundancies, and as a consequence, how to correctly calculate the number of
employees covered by redundancies in order to determine whether the redundancies are of a group
nature and it is necessary to apply the procedure regulated in art. 2–4 of the Act. In this context, it
focuses on the termination of the employment relationship after the notice to change terms of work
and pay.