Commission points out a few home truths on teleworking

Date: 25/06/1998

By Simon Coss

IN THE 1970s, many 'futurologists' argued that in the world of 20 years hence cities would cease to exist.

The Nineties, they said, would see a planet populated by millions of stay-at-home workers living in leafy suburbia and using state-of-the-art communications technology to keep in touch with colleagues around the globe.

Anyone who spent this morning sitting in a kilometres-long traffic jam before arriving at the office tense, irritable and half an hour late knows that such Utopian dreams have yet to be realised.

However, it is true that the advent of the information society has seen a real increase in working from home, or 'teleworking', and the practice is still growing.

“Current numbers of teleworkers do not seem to meet the expansive forecasts made in the 1970s,” the European Commission noted in its recent Green Paper on The New Organisation of Work. “However, the lowering cost of telecommunications, changes in managers' and trade unions' attitudes towards telework, as well as new practices in respect of alternating telework, are strong indications that the number of teleworkers will increase substantially in the coming years.”

It has also become apparent that while telework is an advantage for some people, offering greater flexibility and fewer hours lost in commuting to and from the office, working at home can also have considerable drawbacks.

Most current EU labour legislation was designed to cover employees in traditional working environments: mainly offices or factories owned by their employers.

In such situations, it is relatively easy to ensure that basic health, safety and other rules are observed.

When an individual works at home, however, the issue becomes more complicated.

As teleworkers' workplaces are also their homes, it would be unacceptable from a civil liberties point of view for health and safety officers to make random inspections.

It is also much more difficult to ensure that employers fulfil their responsibility to provide adequate health and safety protection when their staff are not 'on the premises'.

The Commission has also noted that teleworkers often have less-favourable employment conditions than their office-based counterparts and can sometimes be excluded from ongoing discussions about how their company is developing.

In addition, teleworking can present people with problems of a psychological nature.

If you work at home, it can be hard to decide when the job ends and your private life begins. Teleworkers may find themselves working extremely long hours, often without realising it.

In 1996, the Geneva-based International Labour Organisation (ILO) drew up a convention designed to protect the rights of teleworkers.

The document highlights many of these issues and calls on signatory states to introduce laws to ensure homeworkers do not face labour market discrimination.

Last month, the Commission called on all EU governments to ratify the ILO homeworking convention as quickly as possible. Only Germany and the UK have yet to do so.