Employers may reduce the risk of infections, proceeding with care

Instructing employees to work from home, or furloughing them altogether, are perfectly legitimate steps, provided that they are justified.

Faced with the spread of the Covid-19 virus, companies are taking preventative measures geared at reducing the risk of possible infection. Some have ordered employees who have just returned from locations where coronavirus cases have been confirmed to stay at home for two weeks, working from there. Is this permitted ?  “Prima facie, yes – subject, of course, to keeping the employee on her full salary. It is situations such as this that show that the home office, understood as partial or occasional work on a remote basis, is ripe for some sort of regulation”, explains Adam Kraszewski, attorney at GESSEL. (…)

The full text of this article is available (in Polish) in Dziennik Gazeta Prawna (26.02.2020). If you are interested in an English-language version, please contact: kontakt@gessel.pl