As the High Level Group of Experts on Social and Societal Aspects of the Information Society91 expressed in their interim report in early 1996: "technology in itself is neither good nor bad: it is the way that we use it...". The speed in which we succeed in adapting the new technologies to our social lives will determine the effectiveness of our society.
In order to be kept informed and play a part in the new developments, it is important for all to participate in appropriate networks of people with similar needs, rather than doing nothing and hoping for the best. Information on all the events mentioned below is available at, the website of the European Telework Development (ETD) project92. As such the ETO website is supporting the emergence and existence of "virtual communities" by facilitating on-line discussions and providing information, and links to information, of interest to the regular visitors of the website.
The Information Society Forum93 is an independent unit, set up jointly by the Council of Ministers and the European Commission about three years ago, as a deliberate attempt to foster a much broader and independent view of Information Society developments. Its membership includes individuals from all walks of life and all interests, including industry, the trades unions, employers’ organisations, as well as special interest groups of all types. The Forum is thus very different as a source of policy advice than anything else at European level. Given its 130 members, it is very difficult to obtain a consensus, but despite this the six working groups have convincingly succeeded in pursuing their objectives.
One of the working groups, chaired by Joan Majó, is concerned with employment and job creation, and has been considering telework a great deal, even though it is not its main concern. The group originally had a broader remit across economic and growth issues but has tended to focus down strongly on employment and jobs because of the political concerns surrounding them. After the Amsterdam Treaty, the EU established a more dynamic approach to employment policies, including six-monthly high level summits on employment, and this has opened the possibility for a more productive relationship between the IS Forum and the European Union. The Forum has now created a parallel process in which every six months the working group issues an advice paper feeding directly into the summit schedule, and thus into the highest levels of policy development in Europe. These papers have come to be known as declarations, so that just before the Luxembourg Summit in December 1997 the Barcelona Declaration was issued as the working group met in that city in November 1997. Similarly in May 1998, the working group issued the Newark Declaration which fed into the Cardiff Summit in June 1998.
The Barcelona Declaration concentrated upon explaining the new relations between growth and employment in order to counter the fallacy that growth alone will solve employment problems. Member States are currently spending about ECU 200,000 million every year on their employment policies. Based upon the legitimate political objective of solidarity, two thirds of this amount are spent on passive measures, which mainly consist of ensuring minimum levels of income for unemployed people. Progressively, awareness has increased and it is now acknowledged that public money is better spent on active measures that favour employment, trigger job creation and encourage people to acquire new skills or update their existing ones.
The Newark Declaration contains policy recommendations. These are related to the necessary restructuring of education and training systems, the adaptation of the business environment to make it conducive to adaptive organisations of companies and favourable to start-ups, the need for incentive for training and better valorisation of up-dated skills in the unfolding of professional life, and the need for demonstrating best practice in the uptake of new ways of work.
In its Social Action Programme, 1998-200094, the Commission has announced that it will continue to consult the social partners on the need for Community action on the protection of teleworkers. (See also section 4.2.2 above.). As telework is a specific form of work organisation, this consultation process will be initiated after the communication on work organisation and adaptability adopted in October 1998. It is expected that a consultation document will aim to give an overview of the social dimension of telework within the European Union in order to identify the horizontal and specific problems of the legal and contractual framework of telework, especially in the fields of labour law, social security and occupational health and safety, gender issues, and trans-border work.
Within the social dialogue at European sector level, the Joint Committee on Telecommunications has already agreed that telework will be the first of their priority areas for 1998. The social dimension of telework has also been given a central place on the agenda of the Fifth European Assembly on Telework and New Ways of Working in Lisbon in September 1998 (see section 5.3.6 below) and can also be expected to figure strongly in European Telework Week events (see section 5.3.7 below).
As explained in section 3.17.1 above, the European Telework Agenda is a series of key events spanning the spectrum of telework issues, put together and promoted by the European Commission together with the ETD project95.
As explained in section 3.18.1 above, THE W.I.S.E. FORUM (on Work, Information Society and Employment) has been established as a follow-up to the DIPLOMAT project in order to continue discussion on telework and related issues and to further the enhancement of the best practice Guidelines for implementation and dissemination of telework96.
Following on from successful workshops in London in 1996 and Amsterdam in 1997, the Turku workshop from 1-4 September 1998 is being designed to provide the opportunity for in-depth discussion of key contemporary issues in teleworking, alternative officing, virtual organisations, Internet-based working and computer-supported distributed work. In particular, the workshop aims to draw together the latest conceptual, theoretical and analytical work of researchers and academics, and the practical experiences and problems of practitioners and policy-makers97.
The event will concentrate in particular on four environments of telework:
Next section
Previous
section
Return
to Status Report contents page
Return to European Telework Online home page
This html version of the European Commission report is provided and maintained by Marco
Colonna, Telework Specialist in the European Telework Online website team.
Please address comments, suggestions and corrections for the status report to editors-tw98@eto.org.uk
This page address: http://www.eto.org.uk/twork/tw98/htmpages/tw98-5.3.htm
Page last updated: 12 October 1998