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Ahead of the 2020 pandemic, steps were taken to help maintain healthy working lives around the world. Because technology increasingly blurs the lines between home and work, to the point that many receive business emails 24/7. These conditions have led to calls around the world for “right to leisure” laws that could protect employees from invading their free time and vacations.
According to what was published by the New Atlas website, following the emergence of the emerging Corona virus, large sectors of the workforce around the world have been forced to work from home. While the ability to switch to working from home is undoubtedly a privilege offered by new technologies, a growing body of study and research finds that this massive switch to remote working has resulted in longer and longer hours. challenges to the ability to separate work and home. life.
Work at home
“People’s experience of working from home during a pandemic varies widely depending on their job, the conditions in their home and, most importantly, the behavior of employers,” says Andrew Bucks, Director of Prospect Research at the British Labor Union, adding that “it is clear that for millions of [الموظفين]Working from home was like sleeping in the office, where remote technology made it difficult to stop working altogether, which contributed to poor mental health.
Forward-looking research, conducted in early 2021, found that around one in three UK employees struggle to leave work, and who also said they worked more overtime than before the pandemic. Other studies, conducted around the world, have found similar results.
An Australian survey of academic professionals, conducted in late 2020, found significant rates of after-hours business contact, with 55% of people sending business emails in the evenings. One in five employees said they have supervisors who expect to receive answers to calls and correspondence outside of working hours.
expressive
Psychological stress and physical symptoms
Amy Zadoo of the University of South Australia said that when comparing groups that received out-of-hours work calls and those that weren’t exposed to the same situations, there were more levels. high psychological stress (70.4% vs. 45.2%) and emotional exhaustion (63.5% vs. 35.2%, as well as reported physical health symptoms, such as headaches and headaches back (22.1% vs. 11.5%). “
Researchers at Harvard Business School conducted a study of the metadata of anonymous meetings and emails of 3.1 million people. The data included urban areas in North America, the Middle East and Europe and compared pre-pandemic levels with figures collected during lockdown periods.
Researchers found “significant and lasting increases in the length of the average workday” in remote working during epidemic prevention measures, as email activity increased and the total number increased. number of meetings increased, despite the decrease in the average length of meetings.
“Consistent with the general pattern of more meetings and more emails, our results also indicate that virtual communication has spread beyond normal working hours,” the researchers said. hand, can make it difficult to meet obligations during normal working hours.
“The right to separate work, life and private life”
Laws protecting employees from having to communicate outside of working hours have grown in popularity in the wake of the pandemic-induced shift to remote working. At the start of 2021, the European Parliament called for the right to cut off contact to be clearly defined in EU law.
Alex Agios Saliba, Member of the European Parliament, called for the right to separation of work and personal life to be declared a fundamental right for all workers in the EU. The proposal is designed to protect workers against “discrimination, criticism, dismissal or other negative actions by employers” when they are forced to engage in work-related tasks outside of working hours. clearly defined work.
Agios Saliba says: “The right to cut off communication [في غير ساعات الدوام] It is vital for mental and physical health. [وأنه قد] It is time to adapt workers’ rights to the new realities of the digital age. “
Slovakia went further by amending its labor laws earlier this year to include the right to log off after working hours while Argentina passed a similar law, banning employers from requiring workers to contact them outside of working hours. The Irish code of good practice in the workplace included a new right allowing an employee to separate his work and his personal life.
the other opinion
Of course, not everyone finds it a good idea to enact laws that give the right to separate personal and professional life. Lynne Shackleton, economist at the University of Buckingham, says that restricting working hours can cause employers to impose strict control over their employees during working hours and guarantee their productivity rates, ”which means in his round that “a lot of flexibility, which was provided by working from home, which allowed some to go to the supermarket or pick up the kids and make up that time at work later, will wear off.” “Employers will want to know why they don’t answer a phone call or email. Shackleton explains. [خلال ساعات الدوام]. “
Monitor employees in their homes
Over the past year, the demand for employee monitoring software has exploded. A report found that interest in monitoring software had increased by 55% in June 2020 compared to pre-pandemic averages. These programs can include logging keystrokes, monitoring instant messages, or even sending notifications to administrators and managers if keyboards are left idle for too long.
And Andrew Beaks says pushing for the right to log off from non-working hours doesn’t mean workers have to accept invasive digital surveillance practices. What needs to happen now, he says, is that workers’ rights need to be rewritten in a clear and comprehensive way as the way we work radically changes.
“There is a need to put in place appropriate legal frameworks around the ability of employers to monitor their employees and use their data for their own purposes,” Pax said. “This step must be taken now, because it is much easier to protect freedoms than to restore them once they are lost. The pandemic has changed a lot of things, but it cannot be allowed to limit the work without that employees have the right to express themselves on the changes to be made.
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