Impact of new technologies on labour legislation
- Author(s):
- Parliamentary Assembly
- Origin
- See Doc. 8751, report of the Social, Health and Family Affairs Committee, rapporteur: Mr Birraux. Text adopted by the Standing Committee, acting on behalf ofthe Assembly, on 9 November 2000.
- Thesaurus
1. New communication and information technologies
(NCIT) are one of the driving forces behind economic progress in European
countries and have a major impact on employment in terms of the creation of new
products and services.
2. Insofar as NCIT affect all sectors of the economy and jobs, they have
also transformed working life, by changing working organisation, working
systems and methods, production processes, working conditions and labour
relations.
3. The rules laid down in most laws and collective agreements governing
working life are out of date, based as they are on the concept of full-time
work performed in a single workplace during set working hours.
4. Firms’ growing recourse to new communication technologies, combined with
the development of e-commerce and teleworking, have resulted in a new approach
to the way work is organised based on the concept of flexibility.
5. Teleworking, in particular, is work performed at a distance, sometimes in
the home, and which consequently offers opportunities for conducting business
outside the traditional workplace, thus improving access to employment for
people living in rural or isolated areas. It also offers workers the
possibility of modulating their working hours so that they are more flexible
and better suited to their family and personal life.
6. At the same time, however, NCIT give rise to new constraints which it is
important to assess insofar as they can sometimes lead to abuse or outright
violation of human rights and the rights of workers. They include a blurring of
the boundaries between work and private life, notably because of the
possibility of increasing the amount of overtime and time spent on call, a
potentially destabilising effect on family life, elastic working hours that it
becomes difficult to quantify, the risk of a deterioration in the medical and
healthcare monitoring of teleworkers, an increase in occupational diseases
related to stress and pressure and the constant need for workers to update
their skills, and teleworkers’ isolation and inadequate corporate
integration.
7. In addition, employers may be tempted to use NCIT to assess workers and
monitor their behaviour rather than simply for the purposes for which they were
originally intended. Such practices are a breach of workers’ privacy and of
their personality.
8. New communication technologies increase the opportunities available to
employers for violating their workers’ privacy, making use of full-scale social
monitoring in firms by placing employees under electronic, audiovisual or
computerised surveillance (for example, video surveillance, checking of e-mail
or voice box content, monitoring of phone calls, holding of files on employees
and data relating to their perceived career profile, personality, potential and
state of health, assessment of the work actually done by employees, as well as
their working hours, trips, and productivity, using surveillance methods such
as electronic badges, PAX systems, analysis of telephone calls and log
tracking, etc.).
9. As a result of these facts, it is necessary to reconsider the rules and
regulations on employment and on working conditions as laid down by the social
partners in national collective agreements and national worker protection
laws.
10. The Assembly therefore urges the member states to take account of the
impact of new technologies on working life and the nature of the changes they
have wrought, to assess the effect they have on corporate life and the lives of
workers, and to make sure that their development does not go hand in hand with
a reduction in the protection to which they are entitled.
11. It recommends that member states make the necessary statutory amendments
to ensure that new and existing laws and regulations guarantee a high level of
protection for workers and workers’ rights, as regards:
11.1 respect
for workers’ private lives and dignity:
a by
limiting the collection of personal data so that files compiled and kept by an
employer are restricted to those which:
11.1.1.1 are
strictly necessary for enabling the employment contract of the person in
question to be fulfilled and for ensuring the employer’s compliance with
statutory obligations resulting from employment legislation or the rules on
preventive medicine;
11.1.1.2 make no reference to really personal
or private data, particularly data relating to sex and sexual orientation,
race, religion or political views and contain no medical data other than the
results of check-ups performed by the works doctor;
11.1.1.3 in any
case, contain no unlawful data that might be used to justify an employee’s
transfer, reclassification or dismissal;
b by placing employers under an obligation to respect the principle of
transparency, in particular by:
11.1.2.1 guaranteeing
employees the right to receive prior notice of the existence or creation of
personal files or systems used to monitor staff or their
productivity;
11.1.2.2 requiring that employers seek their
employees’ prior and explicit consent to the firm's use of such monitoring
systems and files;
11.1.2.3 establishing the right of employees to
have access to documents and to correct data contained in any files held on
them;
11.1.2.4 guaranteeing the right of employees to be informed of
any personal data concerning
them;
11.2 respect for
working conditions:
a by guaranteeing employees
or their representatives the right to be informed in advance of the
introduction of new technologies that are likely to affect employees’ working
conditions, skills, pay or training;
b by making sure that employers provide for reasonable daily and weekly
working hours that are as well as a weekly or Sunday rest period and annual
paid holidays, in accordance with the provisions of the European Social
Charter;
c by making sure that the periods when staff are required to be on call
do not, as such, or as a result of their frequency or duration, encroach upon
an employee’s private life by demanding an excessive degree of
availability;
d by bearing in mind the need to put a stop to the social isolation and
marginalisation of teleworkers and to ensure that all employees maintain social
ties with their firm;
e by updating the components of employees’ wages to take account of the
conditions for performing work involving new technologies, in order to ensure
that wages are fair and just;
f by guaranteeing that employees’ health is protected against the
hazards and new illnesses caused by the use of new technologies, and that
teleworkers undergo regular medical check-ups.
