The plenary session of the Congress of Deputies will vote on Thursday to validate the, a rule that, in the workplace, contemplates a wide range of measures for companies and workers to reduce their consumption. But the norm does not include a word referring to teleworking.
Spain is one of the few European countries in which the implementation of remote work has regressed.
If in the second quarter of 2020 it reached 15.27% of wage earners, in the second quarter of 2022 only 5.4% teleworked regularly.
The reasons are several, starting with the relaxation of activity and movement restrictions due to the pandemic. However, in 21 of the 27 European countries, the same progressive return to normality has not led to a decrease in teleworking.
Spain’s step back, whose intensity is only surpassed by Italy and Poland, raises our differential with the euro zone, from 2.6 to 6 points according to the latest Eurostat data.
Not a few experts attribute what happened in Spain to the . A rule that, with the excuse of adapting the Spanish regulations, which dated from 2012, to the new reality of employment.
This is what the Foundation for Applied Economics Studies (Fedea) points out in a recent study signed by José Ignacio Conde-Ruiz, Marcel Jansen and Jesús Lahera Fortez. The document criticizes the legal duality between regular teleworking, that is, one that exceeds 30% of the day, and the occasional one that falls below this threshold and which is equivalent in practice to one day a week.
“At the beginning, this distinction is striking, which legally and rigidly channels regular remote work, excluding non-regular work from any regulation,” the experts point out.
But this same difference affected teleworking justified by the pandemic, which also continued to be governed by the previous lax regulations, and which would be carried out under normal circumstances.
This ‘exceptional’ telework has been disappearing especially from 2022, .
An evolution that the Government has ignored in the design of its energy saving plan.
A recommendation without content
When the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced in the Debate on the State of the Nation the implementation of the savings plan, in line with the European agreements to tackle the impact of the energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, it was clear about which ones were going to be the most outstanding.
“We will have to promote measures such as increasing teleworking, promoting public transport, lowering the temperature of our heating a little or raising it in the air conditioning,” he said. Of the three measures listed, only those referred to remote work were left out of the decree.
Nothing is known about what the chief executive was considering to “increase teleworking”. When presenting the rule, the third vice president, Teresa Ribera, specified that it is a “recommendation” for the General State Administration and large companies to do what had been done in the pandemic.
Although with the current legislation, much more rigid and restrictive for experts.
Telecommuting, neither public nor private
In any case, the final wording of the decree has been a jug of cold water for those who expected a modification, even a temporary one, to really promote teleworking. The standard does not even include a mention of that recommendation.
In fact, the idea seems to go in the opposite direction, by focusing all the measures on face-to-face work, from the bonus to transport passes from September 1, to the temperature limits in the work centers. This last issue has focused much of the political debate, without remembering that teleworking can also be a way of saving energy.
Provided, of course, that the regulation facilitates an agreement between the company and its workers that is advantageous for both. In fact, less than 9% of the agreements signed in 2021 regulated teleworking, according to UGT estimates.
Also in the case of civil servants, pending the approval of the announced regulation that allows them to telework at least three days a week, by virtue of an agreement between the Executive and the unions signed in 2021.
But this still hasn’t materialized. In the previous savings plan, dated May 24, the Government announced that remote work was included for civil servants in terms similar to those included in the aforementioned agreement. But as the CSIF union denounces, not even this was fulfilled. In the new decree, it is not even mentioned.
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