Poland - 1

Title of the survey

Reports on Employment, Earnings and Hours of work.

Organization responsible

Central Statistical Office.

Periodicity of the survey

Monthly, quarterly or annual, depending on the size and sector of the units surveyed.

Annual only for hours of work.

Objectives of the survey

To obtain information on the total number of employed persons and the corresponding earnings, hours of work and absences. The statistics are used by the government in the monitoring of labour market policies.

Main labour topics covered by the survey

Employment, earnings and hours of work.

Reference period

For employment and earnings: the whole month or quarter and the end of month.

Hours of work

The whole year.

Coverage of the survey

Geographical

The whole country.

Industrial

All branches of economic activity, except private farms, the Ministry of National Defence, the Ministry of Interior and Administration and the Office of State Protection.

Establishments

Monthly: establishments with more than five employees in all branches of economic activity of the enterprise sector.

Quarterly: establishments with more than five employees in all branches of economic activity, including the budget sphere.

Annually: all establishments irrespective of size.

Persons

All persons employed and, separately, employees.

Occupations

Data are not collected by individual occupation.

Concepts and definitions

Employment

Employment data comprise all persons employed on a full or part-time basis at the main place or work. They include:

persons employed on the basis of a labour contract (by appointment, choice or nomination), i.e.: employees, including trainees and workers on probation;
seasonal, temporary and casual workers and persons employed abroad by national organizational units;
outworkers;
commission agents and persons employed by agents;
owners and co-owners of units engaged in economic activities, including unpaid contributing family members;
members of agricultural production co-operatives.

Data on employees exclude persons temporarily absent from work because of unpaid leave, persons receiving rehabilitation benefits and students on child-care holiday and diploma or training leave (who are treated as other persons employed).

In annual reports, employment data are collected by employee category, i.e. wage earners, salaried employees and apprentices.

Earnings

Data refer to monthly earnings of employees. They include, in principle, all individual payments made to employees: wages and salaries for time worked or work done, premium pay for overtime, payments distributed from profits and balance surplus in co-operatives, incentive pay (production and productivity bonuses); regular bonuses and premiums; irregular cash bonuses such as year-end, seasonal and similar bonuses; premiums from establishment premium fund; remuneration for time not worked (for annual leave, vacation, public holidays, sickness, standstill and other time off with pay); fees to selected groups of employees with a labour contract (e.g. to journalists, film, TV and radio programme producers); earnings in kind in the form of food, fuel, free or subsidised housing and clothing; and impersonal wages and salaries (i.e. payments for commission work).

Excluded from earnings are allowances such as housing, transport and family allowances paid directly by the employer.

Monthly and quarterly data on earnings of employees include only the following components: personal wages and salaries (excluding wages and salaries of outworkers and apprentices), payments from profit and balance surplus in co-operatives, premiums from establishment premium fund, and fees paid to selected groups of employees.

Information is collected separately on employees' income tax and contribution to social security. Average earnings are presented in gross and net value, i.e. before and after deduction of personal income tax and contributions.

Wage / salary rates

Not relevant.

Hours of work

Data are collected on hours paid for and include: paid normal hours of work, whether actually worked, or paid for but not worked for reasons such as vacation or holidays, sickness or accident, occupational injury or illness, personal leave or study leave, paid overtime hours.

Normal hours of work, overtime, hours paid for but not worked for vacation, sickness, occupational injury or illness, and hours not worked and not paid (for instance, due to maternity leave or work stoppage), are identified separately.

Hours actually worked are obtained by deducting hours paid for but not worked (for holidays, sickness or accident) from the total number of hours paid for.

Normal hours of work are those fixed in the employment contract. Legal hours of work are 42 hours per week. A shorter working time may be fixed for specific occupational groups, by labour laws and collective labour contracts. Time spent on travel from home to work and vice versa is always excluded.

International recommendations

The definition of earnings complies with the international recommendations. However, certain allowances such as housing, transport and family allowances are excluded from data collection.

The concept of hours actually worked is in line with the international recommendations.

Classifications

Industrial

Since 1994, data are classified according to the Polish version (Europejska Klasyfikacja Dzialalnosci - EKD) of the Statistical Classification of economic activities of the European Communities (NACE) Rev. 1, which is itself based on the International Standard Industrial Classification of all economic activities (ISIC), Rev.3, 1990.

Occupational

Not relevant.

Others

Data are classified by sector, type of ownership and employment size of establishments. The public sector includes the units of state ownership (Treasury and state legal entities), communal ownership and mixed ownership with public sector capital majority. The private sector includes units of private domestic ownership, private foreign ownership and mixed ownership with private sector capital majority. In addition, data are classified by type of workers (manual or non-manual).

Sample size and design

Statistical unit

The reporting unit is the establishment (local unit), defined as an organised legal entity, situated in a geographically identified place, in which a financially separated activity is maintained by at least one employed person.

Survey universe / sample frame

This consists of the Register of economic units (REGON), which covers all establishments regardless of the number of employees. In 1996, the REGON covered about 165,419 establishments with more than five employees and some 1.9 million establishments with five or less employees representing some 898,600 employees. The REGON is updated monthly.

Sample design

Monthly, quarterly and annual reports are obtained from:

All entities of the budgetary sphere (State and local government units) on a complete enumeration basis;
All large economic units of the enterprise sector, i.e. all units with more than 20 employees (more than 50 employees in mining and quarrying and manufacturing);
A 10% sample of medium size units, i.e. units employing between 6 and 20 employees (between 6 and 50 in mining and quarrying and in manufacturing).

In addition, quarterly reports are collected from a 5% sample of small establishments (employing up to five persons). For these small establishments, the regional statistical offices draw a random sample of units from the list of establishments, stratified by branch of economic activity. The sample is proportional to the share of employees in each branch. The sample size is about 95,000 establishments representing some 55,700 employees.

Field work

Data collection

Data are collected by means of mailed questionnaires. In the case of non-responding units, follow-up letters are sent or contacts are made by telephone.

Survey questionnaire

Available in Polish.

Substitution of sampling units

There is no substitution of sampling units in the case of total non-response.

Data processing and editing

Data are verified by the regional statistical offices, then entered onto a mainframe computer. In the case of missing or inconsistent data, contacts are made by telephone. If the reference period used for data collection presents abnormal circumstances (e.g. strike, lockout or flood), data are estimated on the basis of employment data recorded in the Registers.

Types of estimates

Monthly, quarterly and yearly averages of total employment and employees; monthly, quarterly and annual series of average monthly earnings; average monthly and weekly hours of work (annual series).

Part-time workers are converted to full-time equivalents on the basis of the working hours fixed in their employment contract.

Construction of indices

Monthly indices of average total employment and average number of employees are calculated on two bases: previous year=100, and previous period=100. Indices of average monthly real gross and net earnings are calculated as the quotient of the average nominal gross and net wage and salary index and the consumer price index of households of employees and employees using farms, since 1991. Prior to that date, the denominator was the cost-of-living index of households of employees and employees using farms.

Weighting of sample results

In the sample part of the surveys, the survey data are grossed up by multiplying the sample results within each stratum (e.g. employees or total earnings of a group of employees) by the total number of employees in that stratum, obtained from the REGON.

Adjustments

Non-response

No adjustments are made for non-response. Data reporting is compulsory.

Other bias

No adjustments are made for any other bias.

Use of benchmark data

Not relevant.

Seasonal variations

No adjustments are made for seasonal variations.

Indicators of reliability of the estimates

Coverage of the sampling frame

The Register covers, in principle, all establishments and is updated on a continuous basis.

Sampling error / sampling variance

Not calculated.

Non-response rate

Not available.

Non-sampling errors

Not available.

Conformity with other sources

Not available.

Available series

The following tables are regularly prepared, by branch of economic activity:

Employment (at end of month or quarter);

Monthly averages of employees in the enterprise sector;

Quarterly averages of employees for the national economy;

Quarterly series of average monthly wages and salaries for the whole economy;

Average gross and net monthly wages and salaries in the enterprise sector;

Structure of working time, per year and economic activity;

Indices of employment, employees and average monthly earnings.

History of the survey

The Reports on Employment, Earnings and Hours of work in the National Economy started in 1997, as a result of the merge from two existing surveys: the Reports on Employment and Earnings which were introduced in 1956, and the Use of Working Time by Workers in Production, in 1955.

For more information on the history of these two surveys, see ILO Sources and Methods: Labour Statistics - Vol. 2 (second edition), 1995.

Documentation

Central Statistical Office: Biuletyn Statystyczny (Statistical Bulletin) (monthly, Warsaw); the monthly results are published two weeks after the survey reference period.

idem: Employment and Earnings in the national economy (quarterly, ibid.).

idem: Yearbook of Labour Statistics (annual, ibid.).

Methodological principles of the Statistics of Labour, Earnings and Social Benefits are contained in Methodological Book No. 64.

Web-site: http://www.stat.gov.pl

Confidentiality / Reliability criteria

Data in respect of a single establishment are not released.

Other information

Data supplied to the ILO for publication

The following data are published in the Yearbook of Labour Statistics: Average paid employment and average monthly earnings of employees by economic activity and in manufacturing, by industry group;

Quarterly series of paid employment and of average monthly earnings in non-agricultural activities and manufacturing, in establishments with more than 5 persons employed, are published in the Bulletin of Labour Statistics.

Other sources of data

The Central Statistical Office of Poland conducts another survey not described in this volume, the Survey on Earnings by occupation every two years. The results of this survey are published in Statistics on occupational wages and hours of work and on food prices - October Inquiry results, a special supplement to the ILO Bulletin of Labour Statistics.