Stefan Batory Foundation:
The government claims that payment of salaries to striking teachers by local authorities is inadmissible. It refers to Article 23(2) of the Act on the Resolution of Collective Disputes: “During a strike organized in accordance with the provisions of the Act, an employee retains the right to social security benefits and entitlements arising from the employment relationship, with the exception of the right to remuneration.”
Meanwhile, according to Dawid Sześciło, an expert at the Stefan Batory Foundation:
The Act does not prohibit the payment of remuneration for the strike period. The provision merely prevents employees from demanding payment for that period and pursuing such a claim in court. The case law of the Supreme Court indicates a clear avenue that local governments wishing to pay teachers for the duration of the strike may use. These are so-called post-strike agreements concluded between the employer—in this case, school principals—and trade-union organizations. Such a solution is consistent with Article 9§1 of the Labour Code.
According to the Foundation, local governments independently decide how to carry out public tasks, including those related to education. Government administration bodies have no right to impose the content or scope of the obligations of local authorities toward striking teachers that are included in post-strike agreements. Nor is there any legal basis for “punishing” local-government units by reducing the education subsidy because of a strike.
Sześciło adds:
Warnings, pressure, or the imposition of a particular interpretation of legal provisions by the government administration are unfounded and, at the very least, inappropriate. The central government is failing to fulfill its constitutional obligation to provide local governments with funds adequate to the scale of their tasks, and the situation is worsening year by year. Today, the education subsidy is sufficient to cover only 85% of expenditure on education-sector salaries, not to mention other expenses. In such circumstances, decency should dictate restraint in lecturing local governments.
The expert opinion “Can local governments pay teachers’ salaries for the duration of a strike?” can be found here: https://bit.ly/SamorządyMogąWypłacaćWynagrodzeniaStrajkującym.
What do you think? We invite you to join the discussion.
Dr hab. Dawid Sześciło is Head of the Department of Administrative Science at the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University of Warsaw. As an OECD expert on public administration reforms, since 2014 he has worked, among other places, in Armenia, Albania, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Ukraine. He was a scholar of the Foundation for Polish Science at the Institute of Local Management at the Vienna University of Economics (2014–2015). He has been a guest lecturer at universities in Austria, Portugal, and Sweden. He was a visiting professor at the Center for Comparative Research on Metropolitan Development at Georgia State University in Atlanta (2019).