The aim of this paper was to estimate the gender wage gap in Poland and in the 16 NUTS2 Polish regions in 2010, and to verify the predictions of the spatial monopsony model for Poland with a newly created, harmonized database for wages of individuals in Poland. According to the model, the unexplained part of the gender wage gap, identified with wage discrimination, tend to be lower in regions with more competition between employers.

The results of the analyses performed in this paper show that in more urbanized regions the average wages are higher than in the rural ones. In each of the 16 NUTS2 Polish regions, women earn less than men. Raw differences in wages between men and women are largest in the most urbanized regions but a significant part of the differences in those regions can be explained by differences in workers’ characteristics, especially by different sectoral structure of employment. The part of the gender wage gap which remains unexplained, and in the literature is commonly attached to discrimination, is the highest in rural regions of Eastern Poland in line with the predictions of the spatial monopsony model.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous abuses of labour rights of seafarers have been reported within international community. Seafarers’ rights, stipulated in Maritime Labour Convention of 2006, were violated by bans on going ashore in harbours, as well as by abandonment by seafarers’ employers after the end of contracts, partly as a result of national lockdowns. The Convention, aimed at creating a comprehensive regulation on maritime labour issues, including medical care and health protection, proved to be insufficient to safeguard proper working conditions of seafarers. Consequently, it is necessary to evaluate implementation of the Convention in the period of pandemic, for the purpose of taking into account knowledge and best practice developed in this period in further amendments to the Convention.

The article presents an analysis of the real role of the complementarity principle and the reasons why immi-gration law is still based on this principle. The basic assumptions of the state’s attitude towards labour im-migration were set out in a period when this kind of immigration to Poland was at a much smaller scale than currently. First and foremost, one of the basic premises is the complementarity of labour immigration (com-plementarity principle) with the labour market test as an element of the procedures, although with some exceptions. The mechanism of controlling the complementarity is obligatory and preventive. The current economic situation in Poland, including the conditions for the functioning of immigration law, is very differ-ent from the reality of that time. In view of growing shortages of Polish employees on the labour market one can doubt whether preventive enforcement of complementarity by law is needed. The complementarity of labour immigration to Poland is a socio-economic fact and legal guarantees to ensure this result seem ob-solete. There are strong arguments to consider that opportunistic political motivations are the main reason against the rationalisation of legal regulations concerning immigration of workers. The complementarity principle has become a facade of restrictive immigration law, while allowing for its use in a way that ensures the access of immigrants to the labour market.

Effective and safe labour requires good cooperation of all the physiological systems. A proper synchronization of uterine and abdominal muscles is necessary for labour progression. Therefore, a new method for simultaneous monitoring of uterine activities and parturient’s pushing efforts is presented. A high sampled, rectified electrohysterographic signal is divided into a low, uterine passband (0.1-3.00Hz) and a high, muscular (40-100Hz) one. The time-dependent mean frequencies arse estimated for each passband separately. At the moments of uterine contraction the time-dependent LOW mean frequency was locally increased. During parturient’s pushing effort the HIGH mean frequency was increased in the manner typical for the skeletal muscles. It seems that the proposed method would be less sensitive to a measuring noise than the previously published RMS based estimators. Moreover, the proposed method enables to monitor fatigue of a uterus or abdominal muscles during the prolonged 2nd stage of a labour. It can be helpful to make a decision of Caesarean section.

In the paper, forty-five Polish and British incongruent labour law terms are analysed. Polish terms under the analysis appear in the Polish labour code. The research aims to verify whether the published typology of translation methods used in the Polish-English translation of civil law terms (Kizińska 2018: 247–251) encompasses translation methods applied when translating Polish and British incongruent labour law terms. The definitions of the source terms and the equivalents in question are analysed to identify the translation methods applied while producing equivalents.

The Maritime Labour Convention (MLC 2006) entered into force in 2013. The MLC 2006 aims at creating a single, coherent global instrument, consolidating existing International Labour Organisation conventions, and as well constitutes one of the main international maritime instruments of the International Maritime Organization, together with the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution From Ships (MARPOL) and the International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW). Seafarers are entitled to lodge complaints on board a ship in case of non-compliance with the legal standards, procedures, or guidelines set forth in the MLC 2006, including seafarers’ human rights. The complaint system must include safeguards against victimisation. In 2015, the regulations of the MLC 2006 were implemented into a new Polish Act on Maritime Labour (MLA 2015). One of the most innovative aspects of the MLA 2015, as far as ILO Conventions are concerned, is the certification of seafarers’ living and working conditions on board ships, regulated in Chapter 8 of the Act (entitled: MLC documents and inspections and controls of the ship), as well as the on-board complaint procedure described in a detailed manner in Chapter 9 of the new Act.

We analysed the empirical importance of the capital flows in processes of economic convergence of the CEE region. We depart from reference net measures of capital flow reflecting the level of development of the financial system and focus on gross capital flow. Our econometric model is based on Seemingly Unrelated Regression Equation (SURE) elaborated by Arnold Zellner. This environment seems an alternative to standard panel regression, because it enables cross-country heterogeneity of parameters of interest (like pace of convergence). We tested several restrictions of the unconstrained SURE model, leading to simpler specifications that would allow for regional homogeneity of the role of a particular factor (like capital flows) in growth fluctuations and β-type convergence.

The topic of intra-European youth mobility has been under investigation for some time. This contribution discusses a particular youth migration, that of the children of immigrants who leave Italy to move to Northern Europe. What are the motivations behind this de facto migration? How much do discrimination processes count in the decision to move abroad and under what conditions and for what reasons do people leave Italy? This paper – based on my extensive qualitative research on young people of foreign origin, born and/or raised in Italy – discusses the opportunities and limits of these young people’s coping strategies in the face of difficulties in inclusion and entry into the labour market. It does this based on the broader research project, by taking into account the mobility ideas, drivers and relationships between mobile youth and their (ethnic or not) social networks.

This article presents selected results from a survey conducted in 2014 and 2015 in the Province of Opole, among 263 entrepreneurs representing companies from different sectors which varied due to the number of employees and the labour market segment. Organisations with experience in employing a foreign workforce as well as those who had not previously employed foreigners were asked about their willingness to engage a foreign workforce. The analysis was made taking into account the labour market segment. Majority of respondents claimed that the country of origin of the foreign workforce is irrelevant. Such attitude was more frequent among entrepreneurs with experience in hiring foreigners than among those who have not yet taken on foreign labour. Entrepreneurs, especially those employing foreigners during the study, tended to view foreigners as more available and more willing to work overtime, hence ‘better’ then Polish employees. Interestingly, among respondents representing the secondary labour market, the opinion that foreigners are ‘better’ employees was more common than in the group representing the primary labour market.

Between 2014 and 2016 the number of foreigners on the Polish labour market increased by over 300 per cent. They were mainly Ukrainian citizens taking up seasonal employment on the basis of the so-called ‘sim-plified system’. According to the literature, such a large increase in labour immigration in a short period of time may be an important factor in the growth of unemployment and the reduction of the employment rate of natives. The main purpose of this text is to show the correlation between the increase in the employment of foreigners in Poland and to determine whether or not this has had an impact on the deterioration of the state of the labour market. For this purpose, data from the Central Statistical Office and the Polish Ministry of Family, Labour and Social Policy were collected. As a result of our analysis, it was found that the significant increase in the presence of foreigners on the Polish labour market, which the country has faced in recent years, was not correlated with the rise in unemployment, the increase in the rate of economic inactivity and the availability of seasonal jobs. On this basis, we can state that the increase in the supply of foreigners on the Polish labour market, compared to other factors influencing it, was weak enough for the negative effects of the increased employment of foreigners to not occur.

This paper describes and tries to explain return intentions of Polish, Romanian and Bulgarian labour migrants in the Netherlands. Previous research has often emphasised the temporary or ‘liquid’ char-acter of Central and Eastern European labour migration. We find that a substantial number of labour migrants intend to stay in the Netherlands for many years, and sometimes forever. Data from a survey of Central and Eastern European (CEE) labour migrants (Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians) in the Neth-erlands (N = 654), is used to test three hypotheses about return intentions. Economic success or fail-ure is not found to be related to the return intentions of migrants. Apparently, some migrants return after being successful in migration, whereas others return after having failed. Migrants with strong links with Dutch society have less strong return intentions, whereas migrants with strong transnation-al ties intend to return sooner.

The Covid-19 pandemic is having an unprecedented impact on health systems, on many economic sectors and on the labour market. This critical situation is also accompanied by social destabilisation, which has exacerbated inequalities and severely affected the most disadvantaged population groups, such as migrant workers. This study provides insights into the consequences of the first wave and the lockdown period in Spring 2020 of the Covid-19 pandemic on Romanians living in Italy, using data collected by the International Association Italy-Romania ‘Cuore Romeno’, within a project financed by the Romanian Department for Di-aspora and developed to support actions while strengthening the link with Romanian institutions during the pandemic. Findings show that, during the lockdown, two opposite situations occurred among Romanians. Workers in the ‘key sector’ become indispensable and experienced only small changes, while others lost their job or experienced a worsening of working conditions, with lower wages or an increase in working hours. Most workers chose to stay in Italy, relying on their savings or the support of the Italian government. Job losses, not having new employment, and having limited savings all influenced the decision of a smaller group to return to Romania. In conclusion, the analysis suggests that measures adopted should take into consider-ation that the Covid-19 pandemic might disproportionally hit population groups such as migrants, women, young people and temporary and unprotected workers, particularly those employed in trade, hospitality and agriculture.

Construction planning always requires labour productivity estimation. Often, in the case of monolithic construction works, the available catalogues of productivity rates do not provide a reliable assessment. The paper deals with the problem of labour estimation for reinforcement works. An appropriate model of labour prediction problem is being introduced. It includes, between others, staff experience and reinforcement buildability. In the paper it is proposed, that labour requirements can be estimated with aggregated classifiers. The work is a continuation of earlier studies, in which the possibility of using classifier ensembles to predict productivity in monolithic works was investigated.

This study presents an artificial intelligence technique based on ensemble of artificial neural networks for the purposes of analysis and prediction of labour productivity. The study focuses on the development of model that combines several artificial neural networks on the basis of real-life data collected on a construction site for steel reinforcement works. The data includes conditions, characteristics, features of steel reinforcement works and related efficiencies of workers assigned to particular tasks recorded on site. The proposed ensemble based model combines five supervised learning models — five different multilayer perceptron networks, which contribution in the prediction is weighted due to the application of generalised averaging approach. Testing results show that the proposed ensemble based model achieves the satisfactory evaluation criteria for coefficient of correlation (0.989), root-mean-squared error (2.548), mean absolute percentage error (4.65%) and maximum absolute percentage error (8.98%).

This article deals with migrants’ experiences of precarious working conditions in the cleaning and con-struction industries in the Danish labour market as seen from their perspective. The experiences are retained through biographical narrative interviews with migrant workers from Central and Eastern Europe and are used to gain an understanding of the concrete strategies they apply when coping with their short-term contracts, demanding working hours, risk of unemployment and other insecurities. Mi-grants’ experiences of precarity and insecurity in their work is confirmed, to some degree, in numerous research studies. However, the resistance and strategies expressed by the migrant workers in their nar-ratives show that they have also developed specific ways to cope with this precarity. The article con-tributes to a new understanding of migrants’ responses to precarity in which they engage their social and cultural resources to cope with the labour market conditions they face in Denmark.

The author champions the belief that Karl Marx offered a theory of capitalism, and not a theory of socialism. This explains, she argues, why we cannot find a detailed and well-constructed conception of human society that will exist in the future. Marx continued, however, to draw prognostic conclusions from his diagnosis of the capitalist status quo, and his numerous manuscripts are replete with social predictions. They were different at different times, and as the capitalist system tended to change in his lifetime, so changed Marx’s expectations about the future course of events. One thing remained unchanged, however. He always proclaimed the coming of a classless community based on the principle that a free development of each is a necessary prerequisite of a free development of all.

In his introduction to the German translation of Norwid's Vade-mecum Hans Robert Jauss calls the work of the Polish poet a lasting challenge to German poetry. This essay attempts to show the ways in which Norwid’s further reception could help re-evaluate German assessments of their own Romantic tradition. For instance, the ironic undermining of the value of work, both creative and physical, in Norwid’s ‘Irony’ can be used as a tell-tale clue for the pursuit of similar intima-tions in the writings of early German Romantics, especially the barely noticed ironic undertones of their representations of labour economics. Furthermore, the adoption of the newly-developed concept of a political and economic Romanticism for the critical study of Norwid leads to the discovery of an unexpected theoretical coherence of his oeuvre, which in effect (let it be made absolutely clear) loses nothing of its heterogeneity and dialogic nature. The irony generated by the habitus of Norwid’s crypto-parabases (a technique which is a distinctive feature of his dramas) reveals the productive role of time in this mode of poetic representation, the time of work and the time of great projects, and conjure up the jeering specter of eternity.