“We issued gloves” is a sentence that means nothing during a PIP (National Labour Inspectorate) inspection or after an accident unless there is a record behind it: to whom, what, when. This article is about how to issue personal protective equipment so that the proof creates itself.
What the Polish Labour Code says
- Art. 237⁶ — the employer provides the employee free of charge with personal protective equipment that protects against dangerous and harmful factors and informs them how to use it.
- Art. 237⁷ — the employer provides workwear and work footwear free of charge where the employee's own clothing could be damaged or soiled, or because of technological, sanitary or OHS requirements.
- Art. 237⁸ — the employer determines the types of PPE and of workwear and work footwear, as well as their expected periods of use; this is the basis of the so-called allocation standards table.
- Art. 237⁹ — the employer may not allow an employee to work without the PPE provided for the given workstation; PPE must have the appropriate protective and functional properties, and the employer ensures that it is washed, maintained, repaired and decontaminated.
Detailed rules, including the annex listing work that requires PPE, are in the regulation of the Minister of Labour and Social Policy of 26 September 1997 on general occupational health and safety regulations.
What proof is needed
The regulations on employee documentation provide that the employer keeps, for each employee, a record card of the allocation of workwear and work footwear and of personal protective equipment, as well as of cash equivalent payments. In practice the inspector wants to see three things:
- the allocation standards table — what is provided at which workstation and for what period,
- the issue records — who received what and when, with confirmation of receipt,
- consistency between the two — whether the employee at the machine actually received what they are entitled to before starting work.
Three ways of issuing
A notebook at the counter. It works in a small company. With several hundred people the entries are illegible, signatures are sometimes made “for a colleague”, and the standards table lives in a different file from the records. The most common result: it was issued, but nobody knows to whom.
An employee card and a list in a spreadsheet. Better: each issue has a name and a date. Worse: the spreadsheet does not know whether the employee is still entitled to the item, so the storekeeper keeps track of allowances from memory.
A dispensing machine with identification. The employee taps their badge or enters a PIN, and sees only the items assigned to their workstation and only as many as they are entitled to in the given period. Each issue is recorded with the person, the item and the time. The records are created as part of the issue, not after it.
How it works at ErgoFlow
The SmartBox software runs the dispensing machines: permissions per person, workstation and department, allowances per item and period, a history of every withdrawal and return. Gloves, safety glasses and earplugs are issued by the DynaBox drum dispenser, and returnable equipment goes into LockerBox compartments. An issue with a name is at the same time an entry in the records. More on the OHS at ErgoFlow page.
Legal status as of October 2026. This article is for information only and does not replace legal advice or the opinion of your OHS team.
