Miners' pensions. “This may upend our entire transformation process”

According to the president of ZE PAK, Piotr Woźny, the problem already affects over 400 employees of the “Konin” mine and related companies. This is almost a quarter of the employees of the Konin plant entitled to benefit from the protective act adopted in 2023, guaranteeing mining holidays to employees from the lignite mining industry. The condition for obtaining them is granting by ZUS pensions mining.

The protection act adopted in 2023 will cover nearly 23,000. employees throughout Poland, but miners and energy workers from the ZE PAK group will be the first to benefit from it. The company is in the process of phasing out further lignite open-pit mines. Currently, only the last open pit, “Tomisławice”, is operational. The president of ZE PAK, Piotr Woźny, announced its closure in mid-2026 at the latest.

As the Woźny argued ZUS refuses to grant the right to miners' pensions to four groups of employees employed at ZE PAK: working in the repair of basic machines, in mine management and supervision, drainage and reclamation workers and mining railways.

– All these people were employed either in the energy or mining industry. They did not differentiate their situation depending on what section of technological processes they worked in in the energy or coal industry. They were simply mine or power plant workers. Their colleagues who worked in the same, identical positions, doing the same work as they did, were entitled to a miners' pension, Woźny said.

In his opinion, the situation changed at the turn of 2016 and 2017, when ZUS began to refuse to grant rights to certain groups of employees. Woźny reminded that in 2022, an amendment to the Act was adopted, which replaced the concept of an “open pit” as a workplace with a “mining plant”. In his opinion, this change helped, but did not solve all the problems.

Deputy Minister of Family, Labor and Social Policy Sebastian Gajewski confirmed that the problem concerns the interpretation of the definition of “mining work” by ZUS, but also by the courts.

– This mining work, which involves, for example, transporting outlays from a deposit, must be assessed functionally, depending on what it is associated with. If in such work (…) the functional connection is primarily not with coal mining, but with the sale of this coal, then according to ZUS, according to the Court of Appeal in Poznań, it is no longer mining work – he said. Gajewski, however, added that this was not the intention of the amendment to the Act introduced in 2022, which was to extend the rights to additional groups of employees.

Ewa Bednarczyk, coordinator of the Department of Pension and Disability Benefits of ZUS, pointed out that the company bases its decisions on job descriptions obtained from employers and court decisions. As she pointed out, after the 2022 amendment, the Supreme Court's rulings in this type of cases have not changed significantly. Bednarczyk assessed that the changes introduced then “did not eliminate all the doubts that ZUS had and still has and that the courts have as to what types of work constitute mining work.”

The president of PGE GEiK, Jacek Kaczorowski, announced that the protection act of 2023 will cover 2,000. jobs in the “Bełchatów” and “Turów” mines. He added that the solution was to catalog mining positions covered by authorizations so that the courts and ZUS would have no doubts as to which of them were related to actual mining work. – All positions operating in the operation of a mining plant should be covered by the benefits of this Act (…). We need to refer to positions whose descriptions exist directly in the history of mining companies, he said.

Gajewski presented three options for solving the problem: dialogue with ZUS to take into account applications from all employees of mining plants, changes in regulations containing catalogs of mining positions or changes at the level of the Act. He pledged that, together with the Ministry of Industry, he will strive to find answers to the industry's demands.

Tomasz Nowak, vice-chairman of the committee, declared his readiness to prepare a parliamentary draft amendment to the act if positions are not cataloged at the regulation level. He called for quick changes in the law due to the transformation process that has already started in the ZE PAK group.

– This may disrupt the entire transformation process. This may result in people feeling that there is no transformation with this adjective just, he said.

The act passed in 2023 provides for paid leaves for employees who are no more than four years away from reaching retirement age and annual severance pay, which may replace severance pay under collective labor agreements. At ZE PAK, over 1.7 thousand people can benefit from it. employees. The program will consume approximately PLN 280 million from the state budget.