Legal protection of mental health of employees in Slovakia

Abstract

The development of technology has a significant impact and creates new requirements in the field of labour-law relations. One of these requirements is the protection of occupational health and safety by preventing the blurring of boundaries between employees’ work and their private lives. In general, it can be stated that health protection legislation in Slovakia complies with standards, international obligations, and European legislation. On the other hand, we have to emphasize that the protection of mental health has only recently come into serious expert discussion, mostly because of the enormous mental health problems of employees caused by the pandemic. In the article we stressed the negative fact that mental disorders cannot be considered as an occupational disease and that means that employees with mental illness are excluded from the social security payments. There is an obvious necessity to include mental disorders and mental illness to the catalogue of occupational diseases as they are a legal basis for social (security) protection. Besides that, the current subject of discussions in the professional community and also in the application practice is the right to disconnect. We consider an adoption of the right to disconnect to a telework regulation in the Labour code as a progress. Despite the fact that it is a progressive step towards a health and safety policy, on the other hand we just cannot resist adding that the above-mentioned right to disconnect should apply not just to domestic work and telework, but to any employment relationship.