The legislation on the right to request remote working is failing workers and presents only a minor inconvenience to employers wanting to refuse staff permission to work at home, an Oireachtas committee has heard.
Politicians were told a key element of a recent assessment by the Department of Enterprise of the operation of the Code of Practice intended to regulate the landscape “lacked credibility”. The committee heard figures given prominence by the Government were drawn from a “tiny subsample” of those who participated in the exercise.
Irish Congress of Trade Unions’ Social policy officer Laura Bambrick told members of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise, Tourism and Employment that employers were perfectly happy with the way the code was being operated. This was because “it is, at most, an administrative inconvenience for an employer who does not want to give their permission or has changed their mind”.
“Recent high-profile examples of return to the office mandates, changes to the minimum in-person attendance levels required and the close to zero per cent success rate for the Workplace Relations Commission cases taken by employees [refused permission to work remotely] make it abundantly clear that the right to request remote working as currently legislated is failing to deliver for far too many employees.”
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She said the union movement recognises there is not a blanket right to hybrid or remote working anywhere in the world at present. She said there are many roles that simply cannot be done remotely, but the current legislation in the Republic needs to be strengthened as it is not working and is, in many cases, viewed as an irrelevance, with companies and their employees relying instead on collective agreements or contracts of employment.
“One-third of the workforce is remote or hybrid, so that is a success story, but the legislation is there to set minimum standards when things go wrong. So what happens if an employer is refusing permission for you to work from home, or withdrawing that permission and calling you back for more office days?
“The legislation, as currently drafted and enacted, only requires the employer to state a reason. They don’t have to provide evidence that that reason is being caused by the remote or hybrid arrangement, or how bringing you back into the office, or bringing you back more days is going to resolve that problem.”
She said the two-year assessment by the Department of Enterprise of how the legislation is working had attracted a huge level of engagement by the standard of these things, with more than 8,000 responses from employers, workers and members of the public.
The department’s widely quoted figures on the rate of requests being granted, 94 per cent and 97 per cent, were based on just 124 employees and 72 employers, respectively, the committee heard.
“These are tiny subsamples, the figure for employers is within the margin of error for no requests being refused and that certainly doesn’t tally with our experience.”
Financial Services Union head of public affairs Brian McDowell said recent moves by the two main high street banks, AIB and Bank of Ireland, to bring people back to the office more were the “biggest issue in the sector since the strike of 1992″.
He said people were, in some cases, being asked to drive past the hubs where they had been successfully working two days a week for the last few years and complete long commutes to Dublin without any evidence being presented that this brought any tangible benefit to the company.
Pressed by some of the committee’s members for examples of what sort of evidence from employers would be accepted, the union representatives did not provide any concrete examples but, said McDowell, “we would be very happy to have those conversations”.
