Natalia Bigdowska
Natalia Bigdowska, attorney-at-law, practises individual and collective labour law, particularly issues of formation and termination of employment contracts, employment restructuring, and mobbing. She participates in litigation involving claims arising out of employment and termination. She also takes part in employment aspects of corporate due diligence projects.
The principle of non-discrimination has been in force in Polish labour law for over 20 years. At the same time, there is a noticeable tendency to specify and expand provisions in this area. Soon, on 24 December 2025, the principle of non-discrimination will be reinforced once again – by adding art. 183ca to the Labour Code. The adoption of art. 183ca LC relates to partial implementation of European Parliament and Council (EU) Directive 2023/970[1].
This provision introduces rules on transparency regarding remuneration at the recruitment stage. However, it also stipulates that: The employer shall ensure that job advertisements and job titles are gender-neutral and that the recruitment process is non-discriminatory. We focus in this article on new duties of employers in this regard.
[1] Directive (EU) 2023/970 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 10 May 2023 to strengthen the application of the principle of equal pay for equal work or work of equal value between men and women through pay transparency and enforcement mechanisms.
The holiday season can cause considerable organisational challenges for employers. On the one hand, they should provide employees with time to rest, while on the other, they must ensure there is no interruption of operations, such as key business processes and customer service.
Helping employees to raise their professional qualifications is a basic duty of employers and is also one of the cornerstones of labour law. Employee training is an integral part of today’s labour market, in which technological developments and the associated changes in how work is organised are, essentially, forcing upskilling and retraining. This topic is also particularly relevant to the policies that employers draw up, which increasingly offer subsidised training to employees as a benefit encouraging them accept offers of jobs or to remain in employment.
In the current Polish labour market, disclosure of salaries by employers is standard only in certain industries, particularly in the IT sector. Many employers do not disclose salary information to protect company secrets. Hence, it appears, that the norm is not to disclose salary ranges in recruitment advertisements, use of salary secrecy provisions and for employers to increasingly rarely set pay grades, which translates into less disclosure of salaries in organisations.
Infertility treatment using the in vitro method entails costs which, due to non-reimbursement by the National Health Fund, for many people constitutes an enormous expense, often impossible to cover with own funds. Although there are local government support programmes in some Polish cities, subsidies that can be obtained from them do not cover all costs and apply only to selected groups of people.