Learn Polish: Pracodawca kazał pracownikom milczeć. - The employer ordered the employees to be silent.

In Polish, verbs of commanding, allowing, and forbidding (like kazać, pozwalać, and zabraniać) take the Dative case for the person receiving the instruction. You can think of it as giving an order to the employees. So, pracownikom is the Dative plural form of pracownik.

Does kazał always sound as strict as "ordered" in English?

Not necessarily. While kazać translates to "to order" or "to command," it is very commonly used in everyday Polish simply to mean "to tell someone to do something." A parent telling a child to clean their room would also use kazać. The strictness depends entirely on the context.

Why use the imperfective verb milczeć (to be silent) instead of a perfective verb like zamilknąć (to fall silent)?

The employer isn't just ordering them to perform the momentary action of shutting up (zamilknąć), but rather to maintain a state of silence over an unspecified period of time. When kazać is followed by an imperfective verb, it focuses on the ongoing state or process of the action requested.

The word pracodawca looks like a combination of two words. Is that right?