New focus on teleworking

Date: 09/01/1997

By Simon Coss

TELEWORKING is finally receiving the European Commission's full attention after the institution was criticised for paying scant regard to the topic in a recent Green Paper.

The Directorate-General for social affairs (DGV) is currently putting the finishing touches to a report on the implications of the increasingly popular practice of working from home, which it hopes to release later this year.

The forthcoming communication is set to examine the legal, social and health and safety implications of telework.

Traditional labour legislation has always been built around the assumption that employees will work on their employers' premises. As a result, health and safety rules have traditionally focused on the need for employers to make sure factories or office buildings are safe to work in.

When employees start to work at home, the employer's responsibility becomes more difficult to define. “We will be looking at ways to strike a balance between people's right to privacy in their own home and an employer's obligation to ensure a safe working environment,” said one DGV official.

It is thought the Commission will suggest the two sides draw up so-called 'telework agreements', under which employers would agree to ensure that 40 or so basic requirements were met at the employee's home, including adequate insurance, proper heating and lighting, and paying work-related communications costs such as telephone bills.

When it comes to making sure such rules are enforced, the Commission is likely to suggest a broadly self-regulatory approach. “People's need for privacy at home means the sort of inspections carried out in traditional workplaces would not be appropriate. One method could be to introduce a system of licences which would be issued for premises which come up to the relevant standards,” said one official.

The Commission is also likely to propose a review of the status of self-employed workers across the Union, since a very large proportion of teleworkers fall into this category.

“Telework is an expanding sector and has the potential to generate new jobs. If this potential is to be fulfilled, we should try to ensure a decent social framework for the self-employed,” said one official.

Self-employed people currently tend to have less advantageous conditions when it comes to issues such as sick-pay and holidays.

The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) criticised the Commission last year for failing to address the issue of teleworking adequately in its Green Paper on Living and Working in the information society.

“The conference on telework organised by the Commission with its recommendations for the social shaping of the information society is not mentioned,” said an ETUC document released in response to the Green Paper.

Last November, teleworkers' organisations from across the EU met in Vienna to discuss the future of the sector. The two-day event looked at three broad themes; getting people to work, training for life in the information society and working towards sustainability.

Like the Commission communication, delegates stressed the need to re-examine labour legislation in the light of the new trends and considered the development of so-called 'telecentres' which house more powerful machines and support technology than would be available to a single home-based worker and which act as a sort of half-way house between home and office.