The primary and outstanding legal policy objective of Act I of 2012 on the Labour Code (hereinafter Mt. with its Hungarian abbreviation) is to extend the opportunities of collective autonomy and the regulatory role of agreements concluded between entities subject to collective labour law. With a view to this, the content of the legal institution has been significantly altered, establishing a „complex system” of specific rules that are instrumental in generating a system. The Labour Code is very often characterised as an especially complex piece of legislation, a „law intended for lawyers”, though it is one of the laws that are widely referred to and used, applied by people other than lawyers, including the classic actors (entities) of collective labour law. Below I will underline five regulatory „contradictions” in the area of collective labour law, which due to the lack of sufficient clarity and various ways of possible interpretation might become the source of legal disputes and conflicts of interest between the entities of collective labour law. These critical observations and proposals - which are far from being exhaustive - are related to the conclusion, amendment and termination of collective agreements, and the exercise of certain trade union rights.

Thus, in the paper I will analyse the issues related to the conditions of collective agreements concluded by multiple employers from the perspective of workers (trade unions); the contradictions of the situation of the trade unions becoming entitled to conclude collective agreements subsequently; the possibilities for a trade union losing its capacity to conclude collective agreements and its consequences for the workers (the rate of unionisation dropping below 10% at the employer concerned); the problems related to the various levels of hierarchy in trade union structures; and finally, I will discuss issues of establishing and calculating the working time allowance, the grounds for and problems of its application.