Digital and Remote Work
The Future of Work will be more flexible and operate both physically and remotely. This requires us to adjust our way of thinking to enable a new work-life balance that could reduce commuting while maintaining connection to the labour market and delivering on societal needs.
Digital work should boost new ways of working and improve the labour market!
New technology enable new ways of working. We should take advantage of the potential by ensuring suitable frameworks for decentralised and more flexible working models. As we seek to boost flexibility in the labour market, we must meet the changing demands in oscillating economies with safe juridical and social frameworks and protection in these new situations.
Flexibility and work-life balance
Volt supports a Working Time Choice Act and will become the recognised political voice for the growing number of start-ups, self-employed, crowd and gig workers and working parents/guardians.
More people are leaving the traditional 9-17 job routine and feel that autonomy is more empowering and satisfactory. Cross border cooperation in the economy requires flexible working hours and offers opportunities for people who want to work more autonomously and for those who have fewer chances to find a permanent job. [1]
Flexible working hours primarily improve the work-life balance for working parents [2]
Any new policy to encourage and regulate work flexibility will have to balance at least three principles:
enabling more flexible, digital, mobile forms of working
protecting workers’ health, their continued employability, and their basic income at all life stages
increasing the international competitiveness of companies.
Administrative support to enable the labour mobility
Flexible legal and tax-related solutions need to be found for citizens who are working in one EU Member State and residing in another or working in multiple Member States throughout the year. The current regime of double-taxation regimes is too rigid to reflect the reality of many EU citizens and can therefore act as a deterrent to free movement within the EU.
Pilot programmes to take advantage of decentralised digital work
From lending devices to low income and unemployed individuals, using existing online training platforms, or setting up internet-enabled libraries with trainers to teach people how to find jobs and earn a living remotely via the internet.
Volt would also look to creating remote-working models especially for the elderly, assuming that digital literacy will soon increase among older citizens as well.
Incentivise part-time schemes, e.g., through subsidies or tax deductions, and introduce relocation allowances and on-the-job training for the long-term unemployed.
We advocate a telework policy like in the Netherlands, where employers cannot refuse an employee’s request to work remotely unless they can clearly explain why their presence in the workplace is essential.
Sources
EPSC, 2016, The Future of Work - Skills and Resilience for a World of Change, available at https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/5236ecf2-ac93-11e6-aab7-01aa75ed71a1
OECD, 2016, Be Flexible!, available at https://www.oecd.org/els/family/Be-Flexible-Backgrounder-Workplace-Flexibility.pdf