Workers' paradise? Portugal's new teleworking law takes flak

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LISBON, PORTUGAL -- Portugal's new law on working from home makes the European Union country sound like a workers' paradise. Companies can't attempt to contact their staff outside working hours.

LISBON, PORTUGAL -- Portugal's new law on working from home makes the European Union country sound like a workers' paradise.

In many places around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated a prior trend toward the digitalization of work and more flexible work arrangements. Without a promised European Commission directive on how to legally frame the shift to more extensive working from home, governments' legislative responses have been patchy and piecemeal.

But Portugal is taking that concept a step further, by flipping the onus onto companies. "The employer has a duty to refrain from contacting the employee outside working hours, except in situations of force majeure," meaning an unanticipated or uncontrollable event, states the new law. "We have to have common sense," she says, adding that she doesn't mind being contacted out of hours if it's an urgent matter. "We have to judge each case by its merits."

Nevertheless, practical questions abound: must staff be taken off company email lists when their shift finishes and then put back on when they start work again? The Portuguese Business Confederation, the country's largest grouping of companies, wasn't involved in drawing up the new law and thinks it is full of holes.

 

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