Anniversary awards for doctors are a bone of contention. There is legal dualism

The new regulations on including contractual working time as seniority allow you to extend your leave, but do not bring you closer to, for example, jubilee awards. Reason? The shield of health care institutions is their remuneration regulations – writes “Dziennik Gazeta Prawna” on Thursday.

The amendment to the Labor Code, which entered into force in January for public hospitals and will cover commercial companies and institutes in May, was intended to equalize the situation of thousands of medics working under contracts with full-time employees. The new regulations allow for periods of running a business and civil law contracts to be included in the total length of service. In practice, however, according to the “DGP” analysis, this change is becoming a source of growing conflict between staff and management, and hospitals are looking for legal ways to avoid additional costs.

The main point of dispute are the anniversary awards. While medical facilities relatively easily accept certificates from the Social Insurance Institution (ZUS) in order to extend the amount of holiday leave or notice period, they are strongly resistant when it comes to pay. The mechanism for blocking payments lies in the autonomy of remuneration regulations. National regulations leave the issue of determining the length of experience entitling to “jubilee bonuses” to the discretion of individual employers, reports “DGP”.

Many hospitals introduce provisions into their regulations limiting the length of experience entitling to an award only to periods of employment under an employment contract. Other institutions, as we read in “DGP”, anticipating the effects of the amendment, made changes to their internal regulations just before its entry into force.

This situation creates legal dualism: the same contractual experience is recognized in the calculation of days off but ignored in the calculation of seniority bonuses. Experts indicate that facilities that have not managed to tighten their regulations face the specter of huge expenses. In turn, trade union representatives announce that staff do not intend to give up the benefits they believe they are entitled to and predict that many of these cases will end up in court.

Dec/San/