Worker’s Employment Agreement – Polish Legal Regulations of the Interwar Period

Abstract

In independent Poland, the legal regulations for a new area of law, labor law, which has previously broken the fundamental principle of the freedom of contract, on which the contractual relationship of the employee’s work to the employer was based, were started from scratch. On March 16, 1928, the President of the Republic issued a regulation on the employment contract for workers specifying the mutual obligations of the employee and employer, based on a contract of employment under which the employee undertook to provide work for the employer for remuneration. The legislator allowed for the conclusion of a contract of employment in writing, verbal or other form customarily adopted in a given workplace. As it was indicated above, the employer was obliged to pay the appropriate contractual remuneration which the employer specified in the employment contract in return for the work provided.

Importantly, the Regulation included a number of regulations protecting the employee and thus levelling his position in relation to the employer. These include provisions regarding the protection of remuneration or obligation in the scope of determining by the employer the work regulations. However, the most important ones are those defining mutual obligations of the parties in the scope of terminating the employment relationship, the regulation protected the employee against immediate and groundless termination of employment.