You accepted a job with a certain salary, position and place of work. A few months later, your manager calls you
into the office and puts a document in front of you. Your salary will be lower. Your responsibilities will change.
Maybe you will work at another location or under different conditions. “Just sign here. These are the new rules.”
Do you have to agree?
If you work under an umowa o pracę in Poland, your employer cannot simply rewrite the important terms of your
employment contract whenever they want. Some decisions about how work is organized belong to the employer,
but changing the conditions that you and your employer actually agreed to is another matter.
The first thing to understand is the difference between a normal workplace instruction and a change to your
employment conditions. Your employer generally has the right to manage your work, assign tasks that fall within
your role and organize the workplace. Not every new responsibility requires a new contract. But if the employer
wants to change important contractual conditions — such as your pay, type of work or other terms established in
the employment contract — different rules apply.
One way to make such a change is through an agreement between you and the employer, often called a
porozumienie zmieniające. For example, your employer may offer you a new position with different responsibilities
and ask you to sign an annex (aneks) to your contract. If the change is based on mutual agreement, you do not
have to accept it simply because the employer has proposed it. You can read the document, ask questions and
decide whether the new conditions are acceptable to you.
This is why you should never treat an aneks as “just paperwork.” Read what is actually changing. Compare it with
your existing contract. Is your salary being reduced? Is your position changing? Has your workplace changed? Are
new responsibilities being added? Also check when the new conditions are supposed to take effect. Once you
voluntarily agree to a contractual change, reversing it may be much more difficult than refusing it before signing.
But refusing to sign an agreement does not always mean that the employer has no other options. Under Polish
labour law, an employer may in some circumstances use a formal notice changing working or pay conditions,
known as wypowiedzenie zmieniające. Instead of asking you to voluntarily agree to new terms, the employer
formally gives notice of the existing conditions and proposes new ones.
This procedure has consequences. If you accept the proposed conditions, they begin to apply after the relevant
notice period. If you refuse them within the legally specified time, the employment relationship can end when that
notice period expires. In other words, you cannot always force an employer to maintain your old conditions
indefinitely. But the employer also cannot pretend that a formal change requiring a legal procedure is simply an
instruction that you must immediately accept.
There are also limits on what can be changed informally. Suppose your contract says that you are employed for a
particular type of work, but your manager suddenly tells you that from now on you will permanently perform a
completely different job. Or your employer tells you that your contractual salary will simply be reduced starting
next month without asking you to agree or following the required procedure. Situations like these should make
you stop and check what your contract actually says.
At the same time, not every temporary change is automatically unlawful. Polish law allows employers, under
certain conditions, to temporarily assign an employee different work without formally changing the employment
contract. Such situations are subject to legal requirements and limits. This is another reason why the details
matter: being asked to help with a different task for a limited period is not necessarily the same as permanently
changing your job.
If your employer gives you a document changing your conditions, do not let yourself be rushed into signing it on
the spot. Ask for time to read it carefully. Keep a copy. Compare it with your existing contract and make sure you
understand which conditions are changing and from what date. If the document is a formal wypowiedzenie
zmieniające, pay particular attention to the information about deadlines and your options, because doing nothing
can have legal consequences.
Your contract is not meaningless simply because your employer has changed their mind about what they want. At
the same time, refusing a proposed change does not guarantee that your existing employment conditions can
continue forever. What matters is how the change is being made, what is being changed and what legal
procedure applies.
If you are unsure about a proposed contract change, especially one involving lower pay, a different position or
significantly different working conditions, you can seek advice from a trade union, labour rights organisation,
lawyer or Poland’s National Labour Inspectorate (Państwowa Inspekcja Pracy – PIP) before signing.
“Sign here” is not an explanation. Read the document first. Know what is changing, and know what agreeing — or
refusing to agree — actually means.