The intense development of nanotechnology in recent years poses the basic question about the safety of employees who work with nanomaterials. The study attempts to determine how employers should regulate health protection when working with nanoparticles. Employers should be aware of the importance of the risks associated with nanotechnology and their responsibility for worker health and safety. The study is a continuation of the author’s previous analyses of ways to regulate occupational safety and health in the use of nanomaterials. The author examines the theory of responsive regulation in the context of health and safety with nano-materials and the importance of dialogue in this regulatory process. The regulatory agencies should intervene in this area depending on the attainment of the assumed objectives of the law. The sense of responsibility for the effect could improve the quality of OH&S with nanomaterials.

Mediation in the administrative procedure is a new institution that provides a chance for an improved perception of public administration, yet it also gives rise to a range of doubts. The latter spring chiefly, though not solely, from the nature of administrative control. The principles of the rule of law, objective law, and voluntary mediation, which may be taken an improper advantage of, contrary to the legislator’s intentions, are also identified as barriers.
Analysis of the issue implies that administrative proceedings leave room for mediation. Whether it will fulfil expectations, however, largely depends on the attitudes of parties and administrative authorities, or their employees, to be precise, for whom mediation is undoubtedly both a processual and mental challenge.
The introduction of mediation to the Code of Administrative Procedure is to be applauded, mainly from the perspective of inducing citizens’ trust in public authorities. Mediation may also prove an effective instrument of eliminating conflicts in administration and thus contribute to reducing the caseload to be heard by administrative courts.
It is important, though, for this opportunity to be taken proper advantage of and for the transformation of administration from controlling to mediating and more friendly to subjects administered to continue. This is a trend that deserves to be followed not only in Polish but also other legislations.

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 purpose of this paper is to attempt an evaluation of the legal regulations relating to the issue of monitoring in the workplace. The Author defines sources of the employer’s right to control the employee and analyses the limits of this right. Finally, the Author states some provisions of conducting monitoring in the workplace.

One of the main provisions in shaping legal obligations between the parties is the freedom of contract. Although the parties are free to choose the provisions of their agreement, the content and the aim of the contract cannot contradict the essence and nature of the contract of employment, the act and the principles of the community life. Thereby, in order to engage an employee based on a long term contract of employment for a specified period, along with a short, two weeks notice termination period, justified and rational presumptions should be in place. In other words, taking into consideration current provisions of law, long term contract of employment is acceptable; however its validity is depended on the circumstances of each individual case.

The article is an attempt to analyse the relationship between private security enterprises and citizens. Explored is what access to safety information has the user of guarded premises. The paper examined the regulations of private security firms and the requirements of keeping available monitoring records. The article reviews records of interviews with employees and managers, in which their work were discussed. The material used in this article are the result of controlled experiments carried out by a student research group operating within the framework of project NCN Opus 5 and headed by prof. Jolanta Jabłońska-Bonca. Under an established scenario, in which students took on different roles, the group were able to study the tendency of security personnel to disclose information related to their work. Parts of the conversations referred to in the text have been anonymised. The authentic spelling was retained to reflect in full a profile of a given worker and to give the reader an opportunity to perceive the atmosphere of the interviewing process.

The paper analyses challenging the validity of an employment contract by the Social Insurance Institution, in the course of a control of correctness of the determination of the social insurance obligation that results from the employee status. In the first part, the author analyses the problem of a fictitious contract and acting against the law or with the intention to circumvent the law, or contrary to the principles of community life. He indicates documents and information that are most often requested by ZUS, and describes the situations which are most thoroughly examined. In the next part, following issues are examined: the existence of an employment relation, salary, employing relatives, concluding the employment contract in order to register for insurance purposes and the situation of pregnant employees or employees shortly before retirement. The paper is concluded with the most frequent arguments for, or against the existence of employment and the most advantageous practices to litigate with the ZUS are described.

The purpose of the article is to discuss the employee’s right to daily and weekly rest regulated in the Labour Code and having its sources in European law. The study presents the scope of standards resulting from EU treaties, directives and recommendations, which constituted a kind of road map for shaping Polish provisions in this area. Detailed analysis of art. 132 and 133 of the Labour Code shows whereas their interpretation and adopted case-law, draws attention to the shortcomings of the established norms that appear during their application in practice and also provides the basis for indicating de lege lata and de lege ferenda conclusions.

The 2018 amendment of the Polish Electoral Code established the institution of electoral officials, who replaced the institution of electoral plenipotentiaries, existing since 1998. One of the main differences between the two institutions is that electoral officials may not work at commune offices in charge of preparing and holding election in the area of their jurisdiction. The aim of the adopted solution was to isolate local government administration from the election process. The article offers a critical analysis of the institution of electoral officials. The subject matter of the discussion is both the legal regulation and the conclusions drawn from the examination of the institution in question, conducted by the Stefan Batory Foundation after the end of the 2018 local government elections, when the electoral officials fulfilled their statutory duty for the first time. The discussion leads to the conclusion that the establishment of the institution of electoral officials was not well thought out, and actually took place without appropriate consultation. The provisions of the Electoral Code are often vague. They have not been clarified to a sufficient extent in the resolutions adopted by the National Electoral Commission either. It is reasonable to have electoral officials appointed for a six-year term of office by the Head of the National Electoral Office. What is surprising, however, is that electoral officials may run for an office during elections taking place in a constituency outside of their area of activity as well as engage in election cam paigns – except for their own campaigns – while they should remain completely impartial during the election. The vague status of electoral officials and of the principles of their remuneration made it very difficult to attract individuals willing to perform this function. The headcount originally assumed had to be reduced by half; now it is 2,600. It is also necessary to reconsider the number of electoral officials assigned to individual communes. A major flaw of the adopted regulation is the lack of a clear division of duties and responsibilities between electoral official and communes. All this casts a bad light on the institution of electoral officials. It is argued that they were poorly prepared to perform the duties they were entrusted with. They also lacked the necessary theoretical knowledge and were not familiar with local conditions and constraints. Therefore, instead of helping, they made the work of commune officials only harder. But the call for dissolving the institution altogether is not legitimate. It is necessary to return to the previous solution, where the electoral officials in a commune were the officials working at commune offices, regular employees of these basic local government units. In communes with larger populations, there may be even more such officials. It is essential to reinforce the status of electoral officials, which is why it is important to clearly definthe nature of their relationships with the commune heads (town/city mayors) as well as to strengthen their position and grant them authority in the field of duties carried out as part of elections and referenda over other commune officials. It is also requisite to appoint them for terms of office of a particular number of years, and remunerate them in fixed monthly amounts – with the amounts increased in periods of preparing and holding elections or referenda. Only this way will it be possible to have a proper Electoral Official Service composed of professional commune officials specialising in organising and holding elections and referenda.

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.

The coronavirus pandemic and the economic consequences it has caused are unprecedented. For the first time ever, we are dealing with the phenomenon of a global pandemic which has undermined the foundations of market economy to such a considerable extent. The fight against it has made it necessary for the govern-ments of individual countries to make decisions radically restricting the freedom of conducting business activity – including decisions to suspend the functioning of particular economic sectors. The imposed lockdown meant that a great many of employers had to completely abandon their operations or radically limit the scope of the activities they were involved in virtually overnight, which obviously had an impact on their ability to make any profit and on their financial situation. At the same time, limiting or even cancelling the possibilities of doing business was a threat to the labour market, heralding its collapse and therefore an increase in the rate of unemployment. This is because a natural consequence of such a situa-tion is that employers decide to dismiss employees. A real threat of an economic crisis of an unparalleled scale prompted the governments of most countries to take far-reaching measures to save the economy. The Polish government imposed restrictions on the functioning of many econo-mic sectors as early as in March 2020. At the same time, there began legislative work on the so-called Anti-Crisis Shield.4 The resulting act, passed on 31 March 2020, was subsequently amended several times. The subsequent editions of the Anti-Crisis Shield featured regulations aimed at, among others, employers affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The purpose of this text is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the measures incorporated in the Anti-Crisis Shield in order to protect the interests of employers, i.e. the solutions related to the situation of employment of employees. The starting point will be an attempt to establish the rationale guiding the legislator when introducing these solutions. Then, the analysis will focus on the instruments used by the legislator to provide the protection of employers’ interests – and on the subject of protection. Finally, an attempt to evaluate the effects of these regulations will be made.

In 2018 Student Services Employee Association (Stowarzyszenie Forum Dzieka na-tów) was established. One of its aims is to get involved in a dialogue with organi­sations and institutions dealing with higher education, in particular with the Ministry of Science and Higher Education as the relevant public authority. In this regard the Association proposed three amendments to the Act of Higher Education and Science in terms of administrative procedure, in particular: notice on initiation of procedure, simplified procedure and silent settlement of case, which were sub-mitted to the Ministry. As a bottom­up initiative of student services employees at HEIs, it enables them to get involved in consulting acts on higher education and proposing amendments to these regulations. This role of the Association is significant due to the fact that in many HEIs student services employees have no ability to provide feedback on the regulations that they are executing.

In 2018 Student Services Employee Association (Stowarzyszenie Forum Dzieka na-tów) was established. One of its aims is to get involved in a dialogue with organi-sations and institutions dealing with higher education, in particular with the Ministry of Science and Higher Education as the relevant public authority. In this regard the Association proposed three amendments to the Act of Higher Education and Science in terms of administrative procedure, in particular: notice on initiation of procedure, simplified procedure and silent settlement of case, which were sub-mitted to the Ministry. As a bottom-up initiative of student services employees at HEIs, it enables them to get involved in consulting acts on higher education and proposing amendments to these regulations. This role of the Association is significant due to the fact that in many HEIs student services employees have no ability to provide feedback on the regulations that they are executing.

Introducing Article 22, section 9b, item 1 into the Personal Income Tax Act of 26 July 1991 using terms that have not been defined in this Act and not specifying the provisions of other acts of law which would become the grounds for defining these terms, thereby creating a normative condition for applying 50% tax-deductible expenses to income arising from activities performed by IT employees, the lawmakers failed to observe the requirement of correct legislation determined by the Constitutional Tribunal in its judgements, creating a law that is vague and imprecise, and gives the entities applying it a sense of uncertainty about whether they apply the provisions of the Personal Income Tax Act correctly.

Research on the functioning of public administration is interdisciplinary. The analysis of the functioning of public administration requires a systemic view in which the system of relations between the entire system and individual subsystems of public administration on the one hand and its external environment on the other is an important element. This approach comes from the management sciences. It is reflected in the science of administration. The social subsystem is a particular subsystem of public administration requiring an interdisciplinary approach. In the Polish system of public administration, the social subsystem consists of employees forming the civil service corps and other staff employed in offices and other public administration structures. Formation of the administration staff is associated not only with the recruitment of properly educated candidates for work in the offices of public administration bodies. It is very important to shape appropriate ethical attitudes of officials of both government and local government administration. They should know the rules of official ethics. However, it is not possible to codify all the ethical standards of a public administration employee, so the general standards of the moral law should be applied in this respect. Currently, graduates of higher education studies preparing for work in administration are generally adequately prepared for analysing normative acts, issuing administrative decisions or understanding the rules of the legal system in general, but they lack the basis for addressing to a sufficient extent the issues related to ethics of acting and respecting the values adopted in the society.