The Congress is publishing a guide to employment rights for remote workers today and calling for a government review of existing labour laws to accommodate this.
Social policy officer Dr Laura Bambrick says protections are hard to monitor when people are not in the office:
“One of the things we’ve discovered in the last five months is remote workers tend to work much longer hours than they would if they were working in the office.
Now we have working time protections there, but how do we ensure that we can ensure that legislation is carried through when people are working remotely.”
Dr Bambrick wants to see a change in the law to see employers obliged to give requests for remote and flexible work serious consideration:
“The EU are requiring our government to introduce law by 2022 that will allow working parents with children under eight and carers to have that right, but what Congress are calling for is government to go beyond this minimum requirement and give that right to request working from home to all workers.”
She also says workers should not have to pay expenses incurred while making profits for their employers:
“One of the big gaps that we see is ensuring that workers don’t carry the cost of doing work from home, so you’ve no legal right for your employer to pay you your additional expense.
That’s a discretionary allowance that they can choose or choose not to pay their workers, to cover that extra broadband, that extra lighting and heating that you’re using up.”
