At the European Telework Development Initiative website
ACTS Telework Chain (GAT: General Access - Telework)
This Provisional Guideline has been drafted by the DIPLOMAT project for
comment and discussion by ACTS Telework Chain (GAT) participants and other
interested parties.
Comments should be sent to etd-gat-g3@eto.org.uk;
any earlier comments can be seen on the www at http://www.eto.org.uk/gat/guides/g3-mail
and your comments will be added there. The current draft is online at http://www.eto.org.uk/gat/guides/gat-g3.htm.
A general note on terminology explaining the GAT Chain use of the word "teleworking"
is provided at the end of this Provisional Guideline, along with a brief
description of the GAT Chain's approach to the development of Guidelines.
Contents List:
This draft addresses work issues in the transition period from an Industrial Society to an Information Society. It stresses the urgent need for policies which properly recognise the present speed and acceleration of the technology driven changes taking place, the deep public anxiety about the changes and the need for government to be seen to be acting quickly and decisively. The paper recommends protection for teleworkers, close monitoring of exported and imported work and useful activities such as education for redundant workers. Most controversially, new methods of sharing wealth as necessity-jobs diminish, are called for.
Automation - v - Jobs
European jobs are rapidly disappearing as office automation accelerates. In a few decades white collar workers will be as endangered a species as blue collar workers.
Most clerical functions will be performed by computers, possibly at a distance, and many production facilities will be peripherals on the Internet, remotely controlled and switched on or off as stocks of goods require. The machines will possibly be, after the Industrial Revolution piece-workers, the most flexible and certainly the most uncomplaining workforce in history, performing many of society's dangerous, tedious, repetitive and demeaning tasks.
We have worked hard to abolish work and humankind might congratulate itself and celebrate its progress. The rapid pace of the changes, the acceleration of the emergence of the Information Society, is exemplified by a news headline on 5 December 96 "Nat-West to shed 10,000 staff" - National Westminster Bank, UK has already closed 350 local offices and is now reducing computer centres from 150 to 60. More jobs are being given to the computers. Very few people believe the trend to automation should be or could be slowed but most citizens who still must work to live, harbour fears about their own and their children,s futures. Heightening these fears are the apparently official reliance on the quasi-magical, free-market forces which, re-animated as a "return to Victorian values and experimented with in the UK for the past ten years, has created 90,000 new millionaires alongside 5 million new, under and unemployed citizens - several thousand who sleep on London's streets.
In the USA; gated, guarded towns are the new middle class retreats from increasing crime. Is self-imprisonment in armoured, rich ghettos the best way to enjoy the unprecedented wealth of modern society?
USA Wall Street stock brokers are now encouraging corporations to stop down-sizing, to recruit and retain educated teams and to expand business's social roles - to maintain national economic growth and to improve profits. Most citizens understand that while free, allegedly incalculable, market forces have a role in a modern economy; it is science and infinitely careful planning that builds, for example, the safe and functional Boeing aeroplane fleet and offers health cures via genetictreatments. Will economists belatedly recognise that the greatest magic on Earth actually results from the work of the wonderful human intellect.
Government,s most imperative task is to publicly address the issues of socio-economic change and to re-assure all of us, who might no longer be needed to help produce the necessities of life, that we will not be excluded from a role in and a fair share of the wealthiest society in history; that we will not also be consigned to sleeping in shop doorways. When work is no longer needed, government must find new ways to distribute wealth.
As the Bangemann Report identifies, the largest single application of advanced communications is in education. To steer the Information Society through these turbulent years into pleasant and calm waters for all our children, to avoid the spectre of the armed village compounds of the USA, we must accept the need for continuing, universal education and training. Would you prefer to be outsmarted by university students or be beaten to death by the lumpen proletariat when they break through the fences. Learning is working - working is learning.
Guidelines for positive employment policies in Teleworking.
Teleworkers need to be assured they will not be treated like disenfranchised Industrial Revolution piece-workers and that they and their children will share in the unprecedented benefits, liesure and wealth of modern society .
1.1 Teleworkers Rights - for Employees and for Solo Self-Employed:
Teleworkers and, where teleworkers work at home, their families should be protected from exploitation by having their work hours, communications and responsibilities defined in a teleworkers employment contract. Such contracts should address:
1. Equal to core team workers in pay and benefits.
2. Days to be spent at central office.
3. Managers visits by appointment, no more than two per month.
4. Adequate equipment and office furniture supplied by employer.
5. All cost of home-office re-imbursed
6. Equal to core team in promotion and training opportunities.
7. Union Contacts via teleworkers equipment enabled.
8. Limits to management monitoring of teleworkers.
9. Necessary training and regular support on equipment use.
10 No enforced change of status from employed to self-employed.
11 Teleworkers must be volunteers and their families must agree.
12 Automatic right to return to core team
13 Adequate office space, separated and safe from living areas.
14 Regular contact with core team colleagues.
15 Rights to use equipment to communicate with colleagues.
16 Responsible manager identified for each teleworker,s conditions.
17 Specified Health and Safety inspections by appointment.
18 Access by teleworker to all usual officers - e.g. Personnel, Medical.
19 Teleworkers rights to see pay levels of core team counterparts.
20 Right of refusal to work from home.
21 Cap on maximum hours available for communications.
22 Right to not work at weekends, evenings, early mornings.
23 Right to claim overtime pay or take time-off in compensation.
24 Right to holidays without communications access.
25 Right to deny unreasonable access and invasions of privacy.
26 Right to wear casual clothes when at work.
27 Responsibility to protect self and family from dangerous equipment.
28 Responsibility to maintain confidentiality on employers information.
29 Responsibility to work hard and be available in business hours.
30 Responsibility to report regularly to manager.
31 Responsibility to communicate with colleagues as directed.
32 Responsibility for safety and integrity of equipment.
33 Responsibility to return equipment on request by employer.
34 Access to other teleworkers, their families and to special support.
35 Retention of all normal employment protections and rights.
36 Right to continual skills training on latest IT equipment in use.
37 Right to have core team back-up and support.
38. Right to have home-office-taxes negotiated and paid by employer.
Where teleworking and the application of information society equipment brings measurable productivity increases:-
1. Same rewards for same output regardless of hours worked.
2. No teleworking/downsizing trade-off programmes by employers.
3. Emphasis on Quality rather than Quantity of work.
Millions of new jobs in thousands of new occupations have been created by information society technology and advances. High value, new information society jobs are likely to be those dealing with complex, team tasks requiring intensive initial training and continuous re-training as techniques and products evolve. Where new information society jobs might be created, major organisations should adopt social responsibilities for envisioning, encouraging, innovating and investing in the expansion of their organisations, services and goods and thus stimulate the expansion of new jobs in their organisations. For example:-
1. Information Society hardware production, sales and support.
2. Information Society software production, sales and support.
3. Extending traditional services to 24 hour services.
4. Additional, increasing quality training and education for work.
5. New Information and Entertainment multi-media services.
6. Universal Access systems.
7. Interactive information and entertainment systems.
8. Monitoring and Guidance systems; e.g. for transport systems.
9. Robotics in the home and workplace.
10. Access to professional advice and to elected representatives by "wire.
11. Provision of medical supervision and treatments by wire.
12. Monitoring vulnerable children, elderly and other needy people.
13. Global Just-in-Time stocks of goods delivery systems.
14. Electronic global money, low cost banking and financial services.
15. Exploration of remote and inaccessible areas for energy and minerals.
16. Exploration of oceans and space for research and leisure purposes.
17. Wired democracy - voting via the networks..
18. Environmental protection systems.
19. Tracing missing persons.
20. Delivering clean water and clean air.
21. High-Tech waste recycling, disposal and containment.
22. Solo-Specialists in science, academia and professions accessing global
markets.
1.4 Virtual Teams - working conditions
Virtual Teleworked teams are still rare. Those that have been studied demonstrate new hierarchical structures as well as new technologies, work times and work locations.
Current business theory advises that virtual team members should be hired on a project by project basis; when a project finishes they are automatically unemployed and must re-apply for work. Such insecurity of tenure, especially among the middle and professional classes, could have disturbing impacts on the rest of the economy.
Guidelines for virtual team members should include the protections afforded to teleworkers, as set out above, and be drafted to also include:-
1. Secure terms of employment in parity with equivalent core team jobs.
2. OR Freedom to utilise the projects, intellectual property and share in
profits.
1.5 Trans-border import and export of work
a) Low skills work
The fear that low skilled desk work will be exported to relatively low cost regions such as India (1/10th of European prices) or Russia (1/60th of European prices), depriving Europeans of the work, are not unfounded. There are examples of such work being exported by European organisations to India and other regions. Conversely, USA insurance companies export work on a daily basis to Ireland, Jamaica and other regions which are not especially low priced economies. The key to such exports and imports is sharing and being able to work in a common language. As the information society expands, language tuition will also expand rapidly, enabling a greater exchange of work between regions. Just as tourism has led to harmonisation of prices in different countries, the import and export of work will level out wages. The problem of losing work to foreign low-priced regions will not persist.
In the period of change and adjustment, low skilled telework-able jobs may need a measure of temporary protection, enabling employees and the self-employed to adjust their work lives:-
While small amounts of work and individual jobs very much effect individual lives, the macro-economic effect on Europe depends not only on numbers of jobs won or lost but also on the trade balance between low skilled and high skilled imports and exports of work..
Exporting or importing high skills work is of paramount importance to the European trade balance with the rest of the world. Each necessary skill which Europe neglects to train sufficient numbers to perform is likely to be imported by wire and to cost the European economy dear. The emergence of the information society highlights as never before the direct economic value of having a highly educated and trained workforce relative to global competitors.
Guidelines for the import and export of high skills work should include:-
1. Scrutiny to avoid underselling of expensively acquired skills.
2. Scrutiny to avoid poor quality imports
3. Protection of the skilled European teleworkers as set out above.
4. Central identification and response to high imports of any particular
subject.
As machines take over the repetitive and tedious tasks which have formed the bulk of necessary office and factory work for centuries, European citizens may spend just as much or even more time tackling complex, high level tasks, working in virtual teams to solve transborder and transcontinental problems. Air and ocean pollution respect no man made national boundaries. Disease and pestilence are also transcendent phenomena. Just as problems cross national boundaries, so must the teams, possibly virtual teams, who set out to provide solutions.
In developed economies, relatively secure in the basic necessities of life, Future Jobs are likely to evolve towards working internationally, in virtual teams, on complex tasks and on global problems.
1. Educators, courses and modules for interactive distance learning.
2. Researchers in all sciences, professions and all social disciplines.
3. Implementors, the virtual teams putting plans into action
One of the greatest repeated vanities of mankind is the self-satisfied assumption that we have arrived, that all that could be done has been done. While reaching the present plateau of success, where developed nations can now reasonably rely on the basic necessities being produced, is a matter for celebration - appropriately coinciding with the end of the second Millennium - this success should be viewed not as an end but as a beginning; as a foundation for starting to realise and to release the enormous potential of each interdependent individual on the planet. The immediate goal of the emerging Information Society should be universal, higher education.
To provide Labour Unions, Employers, the Self-Employed and their employing clients with guidance on working conditions for teleworkers and a guide to the medium and long term future for work.
GATChain - 1st Draft by 30 November 1996.
Agreed draft by 30 January 1997.
ACTS project leaders comments by 28 February 1997.
Distributed to policy makers for comment by 30 March 1997.
The main issues are detailed above in the Socio-Economic Context
(1) paragraphs. They can be summarised as;
1. Loss of traditional jobs;
2. Gaining modern jobs;
3. Contractual protection from "piece-work exploitation;
4. Shorter work hours and other new methods of sharing rewards;
5. Length of work contracts in Virtual Teams (tenure);
6. Import and Export of low and high skilled work;
7. Shaping society's future;
8. Economic science replacing guesswork;
9. Continuous work training;
10. Universal higher education - useful activities for non-working citizens
to avoid civil unrest.
5. Potential Practical Policies:
In section 1 above , the issues which might currently be regulated by policy are explained. In summary they are:
Draft for comments and editing by ACTS project Diplomat and the GATChain
members
Return to Contents List