Balancing Public and Private Interests When Assigning Additional Duties to Employees and Military Personnel

The temporary or permanent need to perform a particular labour function for which no position is provided in the staffing structure of a state institution has become a widespread trend. At the same time, legislation regulates the procedure for assigning additional, non-staff duties to personnel differently depending on their legal status: employee, state civil servant, or military serviceman. The methodological basis of the study consists of general scientific and special methods of cognition, primarily the dialectical, formal legal, and formal logical methods, as well as the method of legal interpretation. The use of universal principles of scientific inquiry made it possible to identify defects in the legislation governing the assignment of additional duties to personnel with different legal statuses. The article compares the contractual nature of labour relations, which is based on equality and the free will of the parties, with the more authoritative nature of service relations in the public service, identifying their common and distinctive features. In examining the legal relationship between an employer, or the employer’s representative, and an employee, particular emphasis is placed on relations of subordination in the military environment as a type of relationship arising in the course of public service. The article identifies the procedures for assigning to employees, state civil servants, and military personnel additional duties not provided for by their position. Law-enforcement practice treats such assignment of duties as unlawful in relation to employees and state civil servants; as lawful under strictly defined legal regimes in relation to police officers; and as lawful by default in relation to military personnel. The article concludes that service law contains elements of a contractual nature concerning the professional activity of personnel in any type of public service, particularly with regard to determining the specific features of their work and the time devoted to professional activity. The Author proposes amendments to legislation governing military service in order to eliminate the arbitrary possibility of expanding the scope and nature of the duties performed by military personnel.

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