The Legal Community of the Workplace vs. the Community of Labour: the fictitiousness of the workplace

Abstract

The attempt to construct a legal community of the workplace in the practice of the capitalist system, however socially tinged, although possible, is very difficult. This difficulty stems from the very nature of capitalism, but is also significantly conditioned by the period of its development and results from the real position of the state, from which,in the process of legal communitarisation of the workplace, one would expect activity. Remaining on the grounds of the Polish capitalist system, or more precisely the social-market economy referred to in Article 20 of the 1997 Constitution of the Republic of Poland, it can be said that in the light of successive transformations of labour law in Poland, there has been a consistent dismantling of the legal community of the workplace,but also the emergence of successive legislative barriers that pushed back the possibility of building such a community. This (legal) community of the workplace does not exist today in principle. Employee awareness, which also determines the existence of a legal community, has been effectively erased and replaced by slogans about the company’s ‘mission’ or ‘corporate culture’. Thus, the element of ‘community’ in a market economy system, materialised in a living dialogue between the social partners crowned with a company law conditioning the community of law, is blanket. As a consequence, the workplace is only a fiction of its bodies, detached from reality, because it is impossible to speak of democratic mechanisms actually built into it. Thus, the distinction between contractual labour hire and slave (or semi-free) labour, which is based not on a voluntary economic relationship but on personal dependence, must also disappear.

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