Brave new world of teleworking still to materialise

Predictions of a brave new world in which teleworking transforms work as we know it have failed to materialise, according to a recent report.

Britain's TUC issued a report last week that said the expectation that teleworking was comparable to a new industrial revolution was a claim too far and the reality didn't measure up.

It found teleworking could contribute to promoting greater choice and flexibility for individuals and improve work-life balance. But it could also become "simply an extension of white-collar work intensification, with some teleworkers placed at a disadvantage compared with their workplace-based colleagues".

The TUC says teleworking is most developed in European economies that have "comprehensive labour market protections and widespread collective agreements".

Telework should develop within best practice guidelines being developed by trade unions and employers. The TUC expects telework to further increase as technology and the structure of employment change, but "telework is not driving a fundamental shift in work organisation or the balance between working at home and working in an office", it claims.

Somewhat disparagingly, it describes most telework as "old wine in new bottles", with the self-employed people running businesses or working freelance from home or managers and professionals taking work home.

In Britain, "employee teleworkers who usually work at home rather than in the office account for less than one in 10 of all teleworkers and only 0.5 per cent of all employees".

Teleworking is an ambiguous term. It includes "teleworker homeworkers", who use the telephone or computer in their main job at home; "home-based teleworkers", whose base is at home but who also work in different places; and occasional teleworkers, who don't usually work from home but who do so at least one day a week.

In spring 2000, almost 1.6 million people, or close to 6 per cent of Britain's workforce, teleworked. Of these, only 130,000 were employees working from home, just 0.5 per cent of all employees.

Most teleworkers (almost 75 per cent) were in managerial, professional, professional-related or technical jobs, such as lecturers, doctors, accountants, media workers and computer analysts.

About 60 per cent of telework homeworkers, who worked mainly at home, were self-employed, some 44 per cent of whom worked part-time and were female.

Home-based teleworkers, who work in different places but are based at home, were mainly men (80 per cent). Most home-based teleworkers (56 per cent) were self-employed and worked full-time. Occasional homeworkers, who spend one day or more homeworking, were almost all employees. Most were managers and professionals, two-thirds of them male.

The report concludes that teleworking can make a positive contribution to employment strategy, offering greater choice, flexibility and improved work-life balance. But it warned that telework jobs can be repetitive and "open to abuse by unscrupulous employers". Telework can become "an extension of work intensification and the long-hours culture".

It argues that telework needs to be developed within a collective bargaining framework following codes of practice established by trade unions. It sees no fundamental shift in work organisation.

"Most forms of telework are essentially old wine in new bottles, albeit enhanced and improved by the use of computers." Telework has not changed the balance between work at home and office or factory-based work, it says. "Over the past decade the share of the workforce who works mainly at home has fallen."

Homeworkers need to be better protected and workers should be permitted to "move from home to office or factory as well as vice versa. The key aim must be to extend genuine choice in both directions." The report accepts that telework will grow over the next decade and that it is transforming a traditional image of homeworking and self-employment.

Ms Ursula Huws, associate fellow of the Institute for Employment Studies in Britain, a labour market research organisation, told The Irish Times that as many as 200,000 additional people telework each year in Britain, including people who work from home for at least one day per week.

Ms Huws was involved in a survey of companies, including Irish companies, employing more than 50 people who were "e-working", her preferred term to teleworking, the details of which can be read on the internet (see below).

She regards the TUC report as "sensible but not new". She sees it focusing mainly on the relatively small number of employees who telework from home, whereas the real growth in e-working is in companies outsourcing to e-workers.

Web: TUC report: http://www.tuc.org.uk/work_life/tuc-3504-f0.cfm

Survey of companies with more than 50 employees e-working: www.emergence.nu

jmarms@irish-times.ie