The purpose of the article is analyse how essential the issue of personal data protection is in the procedure of leading a collective dispute. In order to make some findings in this matter, the dogmatic and legal method was primarily used and the provisions of the Act on Resolving Collective Disputes and the GDPR were analysed in the first place. The findings made lead to the conclusion that despite the fact that the dispute itself is collective, both parties (both the trade union and the employer) process a range of personal data during the dispute. Due to the specifics of the procedure and the fact that the Act was essentially created before the GDPR came into force and it was not amended for the inclusion of broadly understood requirements for the correctness of the processing of personal data, it is necessary to rely on general principles resulting from the GDPR, and a certain indicator of it may be opinions issued by the PDPO.
The issue raised in this paper has so far been included in certain statements from the doctrine, but its practical significance and importance for social partners who execute their constitutional right to lead collective disputes fully justify further research in this direction as well as the fact of findings resulting from that research reaching various target groups (apart from the above-mentioned social partners, representatives of the judicature and science should also be reached).

The purpose of the paper is to analyse issues related to personal data processing
within the framework of co-operation between the employer and trade unions in
individual employment matters. The issues of personal data processing in collective relations are becoming more important especially due to lack of detailed legislative solutions, which results in the necessity to apply the general provisions of the GDPR as well as the latest changes to the Trade Unions Act. Pursuant to these changes, not only employees, but also persons performing gainful employment who are not employees can create and join trade unions as well as can be defended by the trade unions. The legislator frequently finds it difficult to adjust the protection of personal data to the specificity of collective relations, and the way in which the relationship between employers and trade unions is shaped in individual employment matters raises many questions in the context of personal data protection. The issue in question has not been explored in depth in the professional labour law literature. Thus, research on this subject is novel and justified from both the theoretical and the practical perspective. In the article, the formal-dogmatic method of research was used.

The study discusses the principles of awarding benefits under the Company Social Benefits Fund (original Polish name: Zakładowy Fundusz Świadczeń Społecznych) from the point of view of legitimacy of the processing of personal data. The con-ducted analysis covers the present legal framework in force in Poland, taking the European Union law – GDPR – into consideration. Given the local specificity of the institution in question, the article does not include references to regulations adopted in other countries. The article proposes two theses. One is that the award-ing of benefits under the CSBF with the participation of representatives of the stakeholder community, especially in the area of hardship benefits, should be based on anonymised applications. Documents proving the circumstances acting as the grounds to apply for a benefit to be true should be verified by an employer’s authorised representative in charge of employee welfare initiatives. The other thesis is that copies of documents proving the legitimacy of application for a social benefit, especially in the area of hardship benefits, should be kept by the data controller – meaning the employer – for a period during which Polish tax authori-ties and Social
Insurance Institution (ZUS) may verify the legitimacy of application of the impost law. In this case, this refers to the practice of non-payment of the tax on the awarded benefits and the social insurance contributions. The conclusions the said theses lead to are significant to the practical application of law, and because they are controversial, they may pave the way for a further academic discourse.

Social labour inspectorate, as a special form of unionised representation of employees’ interests, has the right to control employers in the field of their compliance with the provisions of the labour law in place. Exercising this controlling function involves the need for a social labour inspector to access the information and docu-ments that may contain personal data of employees. The study advances a thesis that a social labour inspector is an entity processing personal data of employees on behalf of a company trade union organisation – who is the controller of these data, and the grounds for the processing of personal data of employees are the relevant provisions of the GDPR. The theses proposed in the study aim to challenge the Constitutional Tribunal’s standpoint regarding a social labour inspector’s right to obtain personal data. The problems addressed in the study have not been a sub-ject of the existing views of legal academics and commentators, nor have they been covered in the established line of judicial decisions yet.