Kinga Moras-Olaś

The need to prevent the abuse of fixed-term employment contracts, having its legal basis in the framework agreement on fixed-term work, implemented by Council Directive 99/70/EC, may have been weakened by the tendency to become more flexible in the face of the socio-economic conditions related to the coronavirus pandemic. From the point of view of an employee, it is important to be employed under an employment contract, ultimately for an indefinite period. Long-term employment on a temporary contract is associated with the phenomenon of precarization of employment and leads to segmentation in the labour market. The purpose of this paper is to answer the questions of whether the state of pandemic affects in some way the possibility of concluding fixed-term employment contracts, in particular whether it can constitute an objective reason justifying the conclusion of such an employment contract.

ASJC: 3308, JEL: K31

The right to disconnect as an employees’ fundamental right

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the associated possibilities for the employers to order employees to perform their work remotely has caused the widespread perception of the employee’s right to be offline outside its working hours (also referred to as a “right to disconnect”) as a fundamental right. This article contains a synthetic analysis of the institution of remote working as the main source of threat to employees’ rights as well as considerations with regard to proposed solutions aimed at protecting the employee against such threat. On the one hand, remote work has a protective function being instrumental in safeguarding the continuity of businesses and the  employee’s workplace despite the pandemic, but on the other hand, it significantly interferes with the private sphere and may lead to violations of the regulations on working time. The European Parliament’s proposals on the right to be offline should be assessed positively, although they undoubtedly only guarantee an absolute minimum level of protection. The analysis was carried out following the formal dogmatic method also taking into account comparative tools.

ASJC: 3308, JEL: K31

This article concerns an extraordinary complaint which is a new remedy in Polish civil procedural law against legally valid judicial decisions terminating proceedings. The authors analyse pivotal issues related to the manner of shaping this measure against the background of other extraordinary remedies, with particular emphasis on the specificity of the application of this complaint in cases within the subject-matter and scope of labour law. An important issue of a general nature raised in the article is the impact of the new measure on the principle of finality of valid judgments established at the constitutional level and its impact on selected paramount principles of substantive and procedural labour law. These considerations lead the authors to a critical evaluation of the introduced regulation in terms of its legislative correctness, coherence with other extraordinary means of appeal, and in particular the principle of finality of valid judicial decisions.

The aim of this article is to analyze the impact of some of the major changes introduced to Code of Civil Procedure by the Act of September 10, 2015 amending some statutes in connection with the promotion of amicable dispute resolution methods on the labour-related proceedings, from the stand-point of the degree of harmonization of both regulations, in particular the assessment of the correctness of incorporating the new provisions in existing legal framework governing employment disputes. Discussed regulation is aimed at popularizing mediation and other methods of extra-judicial settlement of disputes in civil matters. It should be noted that the labour-related cases are assumed to have high potential for amicable resolution so one may also assume that the solutions introduced by the ADR promotion Act will have a strong bearing on the labour-related proceedings.