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Temporary Employees to Benefit from Improved Regulations

Temporary Employees to Benefit from Improved Regulations

Poland
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The Polish Act on Temporary Employees dated July 9, 2003 (Journal of Laws of 2003, No. 166, item 1608, as amended) has been in force since 2004. The Act contains many flaws, however, resulting in the unequal treatment of temporary employees compared to employees hired directly under employment agreements.

To better protect temporary employees’ interests, new provisions have been introduced to the Act, effective June 1, 2017.

The most important changes cover the following:

1. Period of Employment: The same user-undertaking (the entity using the services and work of temporary employees) will be able to cooperate with the same temporary employee only for a total of 18 months within a 36-month period. The 18-month limit applies both to employment agreements and civil law contracts.

A user-undertaking thus will not be able to cooperate with the same temporary employee after the lapse of this time limit, even via a different temporary work agency (an “agency”). The amended provision aims to prevent employers from circumventing the statutory time limits by concluding employment agreements with the same employee through different agencies.

2. Type of Work: A user-undertaking cannot employ a temporary employee to perform work that for the previous three months was performed by a direct employee of the user-undertaking who was released for reasons not attributed to the employee. This restriction is territorial in character. Therefore, a temporary employee cannot be employed by the same user-undertaking in any of the user-undertaking’s units located in the same municipality as the unit in which the previously released employee was employed. 

This regulation should prevent the intentional substitution of permanent employees with temporary ones.

Inspections carried out by the National Labor Inspectorate will investigate the type of work performed by the temporary employee, not the position of the previously released employee.

3. Rules on Remuneration: The new provisions impose an additional obligation on user-undertakings to submit their internal regulations on remuneration (i.e., remuneration rules or collective bargaining agreement), and to inform any agency which requests the information of any changes to remuneration rules. For its part, the agency is obliged to notify the temporary employee of the remuneration rules prior to concluding an employment agreement. This obligation was introduced in order to ensure non-discriminatory remuneration for temporary employees providing similar work to direct employees and agency employees.

4. Extension of Temporary Employees’ Agreements: To protect pregnant employees, agreements with pregnant employees who have been performing temporary work for at least two months in total that would have expired after the third month of pregnancy will be extended until the date of birth (in such cases the provisions of the 18-month employment limit will not be applied). Until now labor code regulation has not applied to temporary employees, and in order to avoid additional costs, employers were choosing not to extend the agreements of pregnant temporary employees, depriving them of their right to maternity leave. Because of this newly-automatic extension, the temporary employee will now be entitled to maternity leave and the statutory maternity allowance. 

5. Employee Records: The user-undertaking must keep records of temporary employees working on the basis of employment agreements and civil law agreements (including information on the start and end date within a period of 36 consecutive months). The user-undertaking is obliged to store this information in paper or electronic form for three years after the termination of temporary employees’ employment agreements.

6. Contact with the Agency: Agencies are obliged to provide temporary employees with the contact details of the agency’s representative to enable direct contact with the agency, as it is their official employer.

7. Financial Guarantees: Agencies must have financial guarantees (in the form of bank or insurance guarantees) in place in order to secure employee claims and sanctions imposed on agencies, and cannot have any social security payment arrears (voivodeship marshals will be obliged to monitor this). 

8. Jurisdiction: If agencies breach the rights of temporary employees, the affected employees will be able to sue them in court either in the jurisdiction of the agency’s registered address or in the jurisdiction of the place of employment.

 

The changes will contribute to the more equal treatment of employees employed through a temporary work agency. They will also reduce the practice of hidden permanent cooperation between a user-undertaking and the same temporary employee.

By Barbara Jozwik, Head of Labor & Employment, Schoenherr Poland

This Article was originally published in Issue 4.6 of the CEE Legal Matters Magazine. If you would like to receive a hard copy of the magazine, you can subscribe here.

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