Conference Agenda

The pandemic wave significantly aggravated the labour market structural gap, particularly the correlation between the gender gap and family care work. This kind of work is often invisible, although it is very burdensome constituting one of the main obstacles to overcoming glass ceiling and gender differences. In fact, the time dedicated to family care affects female employment rates, vertical and horizontal segregation in the labour market and the gender pay gap.

The need for specific policies on this issue is crucial also in the post-emergency if the real goal is inclusive, economic, and sustainable growth.

Care work is invisible and is composed of a complex activity that articulates in forms of assistance that are not only direct, personal, and relational, such as breastfeeding a child, but also indirect, like cooking for an elderly parent or doing house cleaning. Considering this is not surprising that the amount of time dedicated to these activities is high in Europe.

Empirical evidence shows that 179 million hours a day are spent on care work, mainly concerning women of working age (between the ages of 25 and 54), who carry out 76.2% of total family care, namely 3.2 times more than men (ILO, 2018). On the other hand, two thirds convergence objective countries' adult population believe that the principal social role of women is the care of the home and family (Eurobarometer 2020).

In Europe, if we sum up paid work time with unpaid care work, the average working day for women would be almost forty minutes longer than men. Moreover, that figure has increased in recent years in many European countries, including Italy (1,2 minutes per day) (ILO, 218).

Academics highlighted that unpaid care work translates in time poverty, which in turn translates into significant hidden poverty in women (Aloe, 2020).

In this paper, we will first analyze European work-life balance policies, thus, by means of statistical and econometrical analysis on EU-LFS data, in particular the ad-hoc module on reconciliation between work and family life, and EU-SILC we will identify the main characteristics of the caregivers and their risk of vulnerability, by country. In the case of Italy, we will also refer to INAPP-PLUS data.

Finally, the research aim is to provide policy recommendations by answering to the following questions: do the European work-life balance policies protect the caregivers from vulnerability risk? What kind of policies could better address this real risk?

Telework can increase flexibility and autonomy and enhance work life balance for some workers. Telework also made it possible for workers to continue to work from home during the pandemic and this ability may prove valuable in the face of climate change disasters such as extreme weather events. However, telework also has disadvantages; it can result in overwork and blurring of boundaries between work and private life with associated detriment to work life balance, and wellbeing. This is compounded by new technologies which extend the possibilities of employer surveillance to all aspects of employees’ lives both during and outside of working hours.

This paper poses two questions: firstly can current and emerging legal rights to limitation of working hours and rights to disconnect adequately protect teleworkers right to a private life, dignity and work life balance? Secondly, should there be a right to freedom from after-hours data extraction?

To answer these questions a range of laws will be evaluated building on and extending on the critiques of authors from a range of jurisdictions. It will be concluded that existing rights to disconnect do not adequately protect workers’ rights and that although all workers are potentially negatively impacted by after-hours surveillance, the risk is particularly high for teleworkers. It is proposed that rather than continuing to rely on the approaches exemplified in existing “right to disconnect” laws, law makers and labour unions should pursue an absolute prohibition on after hours data extraction.

References

De Stefano, V. (2020). ‘Masters and Servers’: Collective Labour Rights and Private Government in the Contemporary World of Work. International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations, 36(Issue 4), pp.425–444. doi:10.54648/ijcl2020022.

Eurofound. (n.d.). The rise in telework: Impact on working conditions and regulations. [online] Available at: https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/publications/report/2022/the-rise-in-telework-impact-on-working-conditions-and-regulations [Accessed 26 Jan. 2023].

Katsabian, T. (2022). The Telework Virus: How COVID-19 has Affected Telework and Exposed Its Implications for Privacy. [online] papers.ssrn.com. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4092787 [Accessed 26 Jan. 2023].

Lerouge, L. and Trujillo Pons, F. (2022). Contribution to the study on the ‘right to disconnect’ from work. Are France and Spain examples for other countries and EU law?. European Labour Law Journal, 13(3), pp.450–465. doi:10.1177/20319525221105102.

McCann, D. and Cruz‐Santiago, A. (2022). Labour/data justice: a new framework for labour/regulatory datafication. Journal of Law and Society, 49(4), pp.658–680. doi:10.1111/jols.12392.

Covid19 crisis has multiple separate and interlinked consequences for labor markets. One of them is the increased number of employees working remotely even after the end of curfews. The revelation of the alternative mode of work made employers consider telework much more feasible and acceptable than before the pandemic. However, the unexpected massive switch to telework as well as the special social policy and protection deficit triggered a certain magnitude that impacted on pre-existing conditions such as a gender gap and inequalities of the labor market. The study seeks implications of an abrupt change of the mode of work for female employment based on the case of Portugal.

The research questions of the study investigate what kind of changes telework brought to women’s employment in Portugal, assesses the transformative effect of recent legislation on telework and looks for the way how the legal regime of telework can be improved to make it more adequate and beneficial for female employment and the Portuguese labor market as a whole.

In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with fifteen Portuguese specialists who professionally deal with issues of labor and gender (trade unionists, researchers, governmental officers) and fifteen women who were exposed to an unexpected change from the in-office mode of work to a remote one. The study included an inquiry on the impact of telework on productivity of women and enterprises as well as its emerging effect - feminization of telework as the growing number of women choose a remote mode of work to an office one in temptation to manage the load of paid and unpaid work (home- and childcare). The collected data was analyzed via MaxQD software.

The study considers recent academic and non-academic research, concludes that it is mostly focused on employment in general and lacks studies on female employment in particular and fills in this gap.

The findings provide an overview that within a Portuguese context growing inclusion of female workers into remote work not only hampers efforts to make the labor market more equal and inclusive but even contributes to a persistent gender gap as Portuguese female teleworkers tend to accept vanishing borders between professional and private life while working remotely. The need of transformative policy towards telework which would consider a positive discrimination of female workers is revealed as in the middle-term and long run female telework is capable of fragilizing even more the position of women on labor markets.

A recent shift towards a new paradigm normalizing remote work (including through hybrid arrangements) in many ways reflects a more general tendency towards workplace fissuring and labour market flexibility and fragmentation. It can accelerate the spread of a ‘platform work’ model for hiring labour, and a use of algorithms to monitor and remotely manage dispersed and precarious workforces. Workers, unions and regulators thus need to be aware of the risks associated with the unregulated and exponential proliferation of remote work practices.

In particular, unions might need to enhance their efforts for organising remote workers. One of the barriers for recruitment is rooted in the prevailing focus on workplace-oriented organising strategies, with physical co-presence crucial for installing and maintaining a social norm of union membership. What kind of strategies then could unions develop for organising a scattered remote workforce?

For tackling this research question and contributing to the literature on union revitalisation, this paper focuses on work-based online communities as fertile grounds for engaging and organising remote workers. Drawing on recent research on online communities in low-unionised industries and the gig or platform economy, with the latter similarly comprising a dispersed, isolated workforce, the main argument is developed that work-based online communities of remote workers could be an entry point for unions to recruit and organise them.

The analysis uses a large-scale micro-level data from the ETUI Internet and Platform Work Survey, carried out in 2021 across 14 European countries, and representative of their working age populations (in total 36,140 respondents).

Applying a nuanced analytical framework based on union norms, this paper makes the following empirical contributions: First, it demonstrates that despite deteriorating the (physical) connection between the workers, remote work is linked to more engagement in online communities. Secondly, the activity of workers in digital spaces is associated with a stronger probability to unionise. This indicates that online communities are more than simply a way of coping with remote work; they can play a supplementary role to unions, adding a ‘virtual workplace’ besides a physical one, thus opening new potential channels for unions in an era of fissuring workplaces. A dispersed workforce due to remote work calls for a diversification of union strategies adapting to occupational, work-based online communities and prevailing union norms for complementing or supplementing traditional workplace-based unionism.