Anti-Mobbing Policy: The Shield You Don’t Have
How an anti-mobbing policy can save your company—and why, very soon, the law will require one.
In Poland, as in much of continental Europe, workplace bullying has a name that sounds vaguely zoological. Mobbing—derived from the English “to mob,” which ethologists once used to describe the behavior of animals ganging up on a lone member of the herd—entered the Polish Labor Code in 2004, when lawmakers, responding to two decades of research pioneered by the Swedish psychologist Heinz Leymann, decided that psychological terror in the workplace deserved its own statutory definition. The definition they produced was ambitious, meticulous, and—as twenty years of litigation have demonstrated—nearly impossible for employees to satisfy. All of that is about to change.
On February 26, 2026, a government bill landed on the desks of Poland’s lower house of parliament. Bill No. 2289 proposes to overhaul the country’s mobbing regime so thoroughly that employment lawyers have taken to calling it the most significant reform of individual labor law since Poland’s accession to the European Union. The bill rewrites the definition of workplace bullying, introduces a mandatory anti-mobbing compliance framework for any employer with nine or more workers, raises the statutory floor for damages to six times the national minimum wage, and—in a provision that has sent a particular chill through boardrooms—gives courts an obligation to assess, in every mobbing case, whether the employer also violated the employee’s personal rights, even if the mobbing claim itself fails.
For employers, the message is unambiguous: the internal anti-mobbing policy you probably don’t have is about to become the document you cannot do without. And you will have six months to get it right.
To understand why the bill matters, it helps to understand the architecture of what it replaces. Under the current Article 94³ of the Labor Code, mobbing is defined as conduct directed at or concerning an employee that consists of “persistent and prolonged harassment or intimidation,” producing in the employee a diminished sense of professional worth, and causing or aiming to cause humiliation, ridicule, isolation, or elimination from the team. Every one of these elements must be proved—cumulatively—by the employee who brings the claim. The bar is, by design, extraordinarily high: a worker must demonstrate not only that she was harassed, but that the harassment was both persistent and prolonged, that it was aimed at a specific catalogue of harms, and that those harms actually materialized.
The result, as the bill’s explanatory memorandum candidly acknowledges, has been a landscape of failure. Of the 551 mobbing cases resolved by Polish courts in 2022, judges found for the plaintiff, in whole or in part, in just seventeen. That is a success rate of roughly three per cent. The government’s own analysis attributes this dismal figure not only to the difficulty of proof but to a more fundamental problem: workers cannot reliably tell what mobbing is. The statutory definition, drafted in the abstract language of legislative compromise, has proved so opaque that employees routinely confuse ordinary workplace conflict—a harsh performance review, a denied vacation request, the ambient stress of a restructuring—with legally cognizable bullying.
Employers, for their part, have not exactly risen to the occasion. Data from the National Labour Inspectorate’s 2023 report reveal that only fifty-six per cent of audited employers had adopted any kind of written anti-mobbing policy, and just fifty-five per cent had established procedures for handling complaints. Training programs existed at a mere twenty-three per cent of workplaces—and even there, they were aimed exclusively at managers, not at the rank and file. Fewer than one in four employers had appointed an anti-mobbing officer. Nearly half of Poland’s employers, in other words, have been operating without any institutionalized defense against a liability that can, in theory, be unlimited.
The Supreme Court has spent the past two decades trying to fill the gaps that the legislature left open, and its jurisprudence offers a kind of user’s manual for employers who want to stay out of trouble.
The landmark ruling came on August 3, 2011 (Case No. I PK 35/11), when the Court held that the employer’s duty to counteract mobbing is an obligation of diligent effort, not of result. An employer who can demonstrate that it undertook genuine preventive measures—and that those measures, assessed objectively, were potentially effective—may be absolved of liability even if mobbing occurred on its watch. The logic is intuitive: if a company put real safeguards in place and bullying happened anyway, then either the victim failed to use the available procedures, or the perpetrator deliberately flouted the rules, or both. The employer should not be held responsible for that kind of failure.
The Court reinforced this principle on June 11, 2024 (Case No. II PSKP 38/23), in a case involving a small-town mayor who had harassed his city secretary after she rejected his romantic advances. The mayor had stripped her of responsibilities, publicly berated her, and—in an incident that led to a separate criminal conviction—slapped her on the buttocks in his office. The appellate court, in a remarkable exercise of judicial imagination, concluded that the secretary could not have been a victim of mobbing because, among other things, “if the mayor had been in love with her, he would not have been aggressive toward her.” The Supreme Court reversed, noting acidly that “creating a scenario for how a person subjected to mobbing-like behavior should act undoubtedly requires specialized knowledge in psychology and/or psychiatry” and cannot be reduced to “the intuitive experience of the adjudicating panel.” More practically, the Court reminded employers that they must “select managerial staff and define their competencies with due regard for the principle of mobbing prevention,” train them in proper conduct, and “establish procedures enabling the swift detection and elimination of signs of mobbing.”
Then, on October 15, 2025 (Case No. I PSKP 24/25), the Court introduced a refinement that matters enormously for the design of internal policies. The assessment of whether mobbing occurred, the Court held, is to be made from the perspective of a “reasonable victim,” using objective criteria—a standard that filters out claims rooted in hypersensitivity. But this standard becomes irrelevant when the perpetrator acts with culpable intent. In such cases, the sheer persistence of the conduct is enough to establish mobbing, regardless of how the victim perceived it. “It cannot be the case,” the Court wrote, “that a highly reprehensible degree of ill will on the part of the perpetrator is depreciated by the manner in which the victim experiences it.”
The practical takeaway is stark: an anti-mobbing policy is not a corporate-social-responsibility decoration. It is the instrument that determines, in litigation, whether the company pays.
What, then, does the bill actually do?
The new Article 94³, Section 2, defines mobbing as “conduct consisting of persistent harassment of an employee.” Gone are the requirements of “prolonged” duration and “intimidation” (the drafters regard the former as inherent in persistence and the latter as merely one form of harassment). Gone, too, is the laundry list of effects that the employee had to prove under the old regime. In their place, the bill offers a streamlined definition supported by an open-ended catalogue of illustrative behaviors: humiliation, intimidation, unjustified criticism, undermining of professional standing, obstruction of the employee’s ability to function in the workplace—including interference with task performance, communication with colleagues, and access to necessary information—and isolation or elimination from the team.
Persistence, the bill’s crucial concept, is defined in Section 3: harassment is persistent when it is “repetitive, recurring, or constant.” Incidental conduct—even if it constitutes a violation of the employee’s personal rights—does not qualify. This is the bill’s attempt to draw the line that the old law drew badly: between the chronic pattern that constitutes mobbing and the isolated episode that, however unpleasant, belongs to a different legal category.
Section 7 codifies what the Supreme Court has been saying for over a decade: mobbing does not require intent. Conduct qualifies “even if its purpose was not persistent harassment.” The perpetrator’s state of mind is no longer a threshold question; what matters is the objective character and pattern of the behavior.
Section 9, which employment lawyers have been calling the “safe harbor” clause, provides that “justified conduct expressed in an appropriate manner toward an employee, in particular holding the employee accountable for assigned work or criticizing that work, cannot be deemed mobbing.” This is, in effect, a statutory license to manage—provided that the form matches the substance. It codifies a line of Supreme Court precedent holding that the exercise of supervisory authority, performance evaluation, and even disciplinary measures do not constitute mobbing so long as they are conducted with due regard for the employee’s dignity. The clause matters because it gives managers a clear normative basis for doing their jobs, while simultaneously reminding them that the manner of delivery is as important as the message.
Section 10 establishes that every assessment of whether mobbing has occurred must be “individualized and take into account the circumstances of the specific case, both as to the nature of the conduct toward the employee and the employee’s situation.” This is the statutory incarnation of the “reasonable victim” standard, adapted to require case-by-case analysis rather than mechanical application of abstract criteria.
And then there is the money. Section 11 sets the minimum damages for mobbing at six times the national minimum wage—which, for 2026, means a floor of roughly 28,836 Polish zlotys (approximately seventy-two hundred dollars). The explanatory memorandum is blunt about the rationale: “Harassment that is persistent in nature cannot be compensated by damages amounting to merely a single minimum wage.” This is a sixfold increase over the current statutory minimum, and it applies to every successful claim, with no upper limit.
Section 12 introduces a statutory right of recourse: an employer that has paid damages to a mobbed employee may seek reimbursement from the person whose conduct constituted the mobbing. Until now, employers seeking indemnification from perpetrators had to rely on general provisions of the Civil Code—an uncertain and cumbersome path. The new provision puts the right of recourse squarely within the Labor Code.
Perhaps most consequentially, Section 13 requires the court, in every mobbing proceeding, to assess sua sponte whether the employer also violated the employee’s personal rights under Article 11¹ of the Labor Code. This means that even if the court determines that the statutory definition of mobbing has not been met, it must independently examine whether the employee’s dignity, health, reputation, or other protected interests were infringed. For employees, this is a safety net; for employers, it is a second front.
The bill’s structural innovation, however, lies not in the redefined tort but in the new Article 94³a, which mandates—for the first time in Polish labor law—that every employer with at least nine employees must adopt a formal regulatory document setting out the rules, procedures, and frequency of actions in four domains: preventing violations of employee dignity and personal rights, preventing violations of the equal-treatment principle, preventing discrimination, and preventing mobbing. The document must be negotiated with trade unions or, in their absence, with employee representatives. Employers will have six months from the statute’s effective date to comply.
This is a sea change. Under the current regime, the employer’s duty to counteract mobbing is a freestanding obligation—the law says “you must,” but it does not say how. The bill says how: you must have a written policy, it must be negotiated with your workforce, it must cover prevention, detection, response, remediation, and support for affected persons, and it must specify the frequency of your preventive efforts. The shift is from a reactive posture to one that is, in the bill’s own language, “active and continuous.”
The temporal provisions deserve attention, too. Article 4 of the bill states that the new rules will apply to mobbing that began before the statute’s effective date, provided it was still ongoing after that date. This retroactivity—or, more precisely, this application to continuing conduct—means that employers cannot assume that pre-existing workplace dynamics will be grandfathered in.
What should an employer do now?
The answer begins with a recognition that an anti-mobbing policy is not a compliance document to be filed and forgotten. It is an operational instrument—part legal shield, part management tool, part cultural statement. The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, read alongside the bill’s requirements, suggests a system built on several interlocking components.
The first is a written code of conduct that goes beyond parroting the statutory definition. The policy should catalogue, in concrete and recognizable terms, the kinds of behavior that constitute mobbing—disruption of communication, social isolation, interference with professional responsibilities, attacks on reputation, conduct harmful to health—while making clear that the list is illustrative, not exhaustive. It should also explain, with equal specificity, what mobbing is not: justified criticism, performance management, the exercise of supervisory authority, the stress attendant to organizational change.
The second is a reporting and investigation procedure that employees will actually use. The National Labour Inspectorate’s finding that only nineteen per cent of complainants who had access to internal procedures chose to use them is a devastating indictment of current practice. Employees stay silent, the government’s research shows, because they do not trust the process and they fear retaliation. A credible procedure requires confidentiality, protection against reprisal, a clear timetable, and—critically—an investigation panel that includes representatives of both management and the workforce.
The third is training—not the perfunctory, check-the-box variety aimed exclusively at executives, but regular, substantive education for all employees. Awareness of what mobbing is, what it is not, what its consequences are, and how to respond to its early signs is the first line of defense.
The fourth is monitoring. Anonymous workplace-climate surveys, conducted at regular intervals, allow employers to identify psychosocial risks before they metastasize into conflict—and they serve, incidentally, as evidence of the employer’s proactive stance in the event of litigation.
The fifth is accountability. The policy must specify consequences for perpetrators—from disciplinary warnings to termination—and the organization must be willing to enforce them.
There is a temptation, in the face of legislative change, to wait—to see the final text, to study the implementing guidance, to observe the first wave of judicial interpretation. That temptation should be resisted. The bill gives employers six months to comply, and those months will not be enough if the work starts from zero. The companies that begin now—auditing their existing practices, drafting or revising their policies, negotiating with employee representatives, training their managers—will find themselves in a fundamentally stronger position, both legally and organizationally, than those that treat the statute’s effective date as a starting gun.
The deeper point is that an anti-mobbing policy, properly conceived and faithfully implemented, is not a burden imposed by an overreaching legislature. It is an investment in the quality of the working environment—one that pays dividends in reduced absenteeism, lower turnover, fewer litigation costs, and a workforce that feels, in the most basic sense, safe. The law, in this instance, is merely catching up with what good management has always known.
Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.
There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.
One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).
Kancelaria Skarbiec holds top positions in the tax law firm rankings of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Four-time winner of the European Medal, recipient of the title International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.
He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.
