In the preface, the content of the given issue is described by the editor. In addition to the latest changes to the journal, here is the explanation of the Latin phrase on the back cover.

Labor law has not been able to dispose of the shackles of the locatio conductio for a long time; the system of traditional labor law was built on this contract. However, new forms of employment are beginning to break down this structure. Outsourcing and employment by digital platforms have broken the dominance of the employment contract and the contractual structure is shifting towards private law. The study seeks to answer the question of what all this means in terms of protecting the worker and the responsibility of the employer. Finally, does the theory of the personal employment contract offer a solution?

The European Social Charter is a human rights treaty of the Council of Europe. For 60 years, the Charter has been protecting the social and economic rights of citizens across Europe. During these years, the Charter has been revised and new rights have been included to take into account the challenges facing our modern societies. But the Charter has remained at the heart of the Council of Europe’s statutory goals: human rights, rule of law and democracy, which cannot be realised without respect for social rights. However, sixty years after the adoption of the Charter, and thirty years after the adoption of the Turin Protocol of 1991 reforming the supervisory mechanism, the Convention has yet to realise its full potential. In this article the Charter’s two supervisory mechanisms are analysed and some proactive dilemmas and possible solutions are outlined.

The special feature of temporary agency work is that the employee does not work for the agency which concludes the employment contract with them, but for a third party, the user company, with which the agency enters into a civil law contract for the remunerated transfer of workforce. The article summarises how an international element can appear in this tripartite employment relationship. It covers the rules under which an agency may conclude an employment contract with a foreign employee and also the cases where the agency and the user company are established in different states. Although Hungarian law generally prohibits third-country nationals to work in Hungary as agency workers, this is made possible by an expanding range of exceptions. The article explores the labour law and social security law situation of third-country agency workers in Hungary.

The focus of the study is on the emergence and spread of digitization in employment. In this context, the study presents the forms of work that use digitization. On the other hand, it describes the labour market effects of digitalization. The study looks in detail at how COVID-19 has changed the role of teleworking and the home office in employment. This is followed by the presentation of the Hungarian labour law regulation, which deals exclusively with telework. The study makes two proposals to address the codification gap. On the one hand, in connection with application-based work, the introduction of the status of a person with a similar legal status to an employee, which was regulated in the draft of the Labour Code. On the other hand, to impose employer obligations (retraining, job offers) in connection with the spread of automation and robotics in order to prevent dismissal.

The study shows the dogmatic effect of the specific legal nature of public holidays on the organization and remuneration of working time. This effect can be seen in the duality that the public holiday affects (reduces) the duration of the parties' performance on the one hand, but also affects the conditions of actual performance, mainly because working time can only be prescribed under special conditions. But this duality also determines the dogmatics of public holiday pay rules: the legislature compensates for the reduced working hours due to public holidays, on the one hand, and the “inconvenience of work” that an employee performs on public holidays, on the other.

In the case of state- and municipality-owned companies providing public services, the 2021 salary increase was settled with a six-monthly delay, which was manifested in three-year, so-called “income policy” agreements. However, for the purposes of this paper, the process became relevant mainly due to the aspect of labor relations and it also became suitable for a legal science analysis. During the course of this, within the available space limits, I discuss the process of salary negotiations (with its labor law content and consequences), the theoretical bases of the different collective labor law regulations regarding public assets, and finally, the newly emerging practical issues related to the strike rights regulation of this sector. 

From the outset of labor litigation, both theoreticians and practitioners have been preoccupied with the question of what specific regulation this area of law – which has essentially additional elements of private law – requires in order to ensure fair treatment and proceedings for all participants. The aim of the present study is to show how labor litigation is evolving today, outlining the phenomena that have arisen due to the new labor and civil procedure codes.

Act LXVI of 1994 on the Wage Guarantee Fund and the guarantee system regulated by it, is especially topical nowadays, as more and more employers in Hungary have become insolvent in connection with the crisis caused by the coronavirus epidemic. In many cases, the employers subject to the procedure are not able to meet their wage obligations to their employees, so the state must guarantee the values ​​that can be expressed in exact monetary terms – the work performed and its  financial compensation – and at the same time the social security of employees. In the present study, we examine the applicability of the Wage Guarantee Fund, which serves to cover the wages to be paid by insolvent employers, from the perspective of the social security and the enforcement of employees’ claims.

In view of the special nature of the employment relationship, subordination of the parties results in a weaker legal position on the employees’ side. Certain guarantees of protection are absolutely necessary to compensate for this asymmetry, thus, among other things, the effectiveness of employees’ enforcement plays a key role. This is why our research seeks to answer the question whether some crucial employment-related directives of the European Union, as well as the broader European Union legal corpus also including legal practice. Furthermore we try to find the answer to the question that, how do these legal sources appear in the domestic legal practice, primarily in the relevant judgments of the Curia of Hungary, and the extent to which these references facilitate the effective enforcement of the workers’ rights.

We are currently living in a period when technological, economic and other changes fundamentally influence the nature of legal relationships. There is no difference in the labour law palette, as atypical employment is gaining ground in law enforcement circles. In our view, this development cannot be derived solely on substantive law, but should also be presented at the level of litigation and, where appropriate, ADR procedures. Perhaps it is somewhat ironic that it is precisely the collective labour dispute, which is not popular in Hungarian civil society litigation law, in which the emergence of innovative dispute resolution methods can be observed from time to time. Therefore, our work primarily examines the extrajudicial practice of collective dispute resolution, complemented by the solutions used in the legal systems of some countries less researched by the domestic labour law environment. Our aim is to highlight the potential of ADR methods in collective disputes and to explore new, unknown opportunities for domestic law enforcement.

Changes in the organization of public services often have the consequence of changing the employment relationship of those employed among them. The change is often caused by the transformation of civil service legal relations into private employment law. In the background of changes are usually the legislature's intention to maintain legal relations with the successor employers. This intention is realized in Hungarian labor law and civil service law by various legal and technical methods. The paper reviews these in different areas of public services.

The challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are having an impact in many areas of life. The vocational and adult education system is no exception. In line with the changes, system-level transformations and developments are taking place in Hungary in this field, creating the basis for ensuring quality professional training. We consider the issues related to the warehousing sector to be of special relevance, as well as the examination of the possibilities that, in accordance with the new changes, offer solutions to the high-risk activities as well.

The study focuses on the relationship between civil service law and labour law. In Hungary, there have been significant changes in the last decade regarding the regulation of civil service law. The types of the civil service legal relationships have increased, the forums and procedural rules for adjudicating civil service law related disputes have changed, and the number of public employees providing public services has rapidly decreased. This is of particular importance because the existence of these branches of the law is determined by legislation as well. The study concludes that the ability of civil service law to become an independent branch of law will be determined not by 'internal' developments but by legislative ambitions.