Law should make it easier for employees to claim the right to work from home
The increase in home working since March 2020 as a result of Covid-19 has brought remote working to the forefront of working life.
A new law on remote working should be tightened up to make it harder for an employer to refuse an employee’s request to work remotely, an Oireachtas committee has said.
The joint Committee on enterprise, trade, and employment made the recommendation in a report on the pre-legislative scrutiny of the Right to Request Remote Work Bill 2022.
Tighter grounds should be introduced into primary legislation so that unreasonable refusal by an employer should be open to challenge, the committee recommended.
Remote working should also incorporate hybrid and flexible working, it said.
The purpose of the bill is to make remote working a permanent and positive feature of Ireland’s workforce for economic, environmental, and social benefit.
It also aims to provide legal clarity and procedures to employers on their obligations for dealing with such requests.
The committee made 20 recommendations that it believes will improve the bill.
These include removing the need to have worked 26 weeks before requesting remote work, thereby strengthening the employee’s initial right of request. The committee proposes the timeframe be to 12 weeks or less.Â
The committee also recommended that codes of good practice are quickly evolved so that once in place, refusals must be grounded in a stated policy from employers founded on these codes.
The principles underpinning a reasonable code of practice should now be set out in law and allow the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC)Â to design how they should be applied in different workplace situations, it said.
Legislation should mandate the WRC to draw up a code of practice in the first instance upon which employers' policies would be based. This code could be changed as required as technology and other factors change and evolve, it said.
The committee noted that the employer should retain the right to respond within 12 weeks if the employer could cite a reason such as the need to engage health and safety consultants or check a proposed remote working location for internet quality.
The report acknowledged difficulties faced by small and medium enterprises in drafting policies related to remote working. Bureaucracy should be kept to a minimum for such enterprises and supports should be provided, where this is the case, it found.
“The sudden introduction of home working often resulted in less-than-ideal working conditions for both employers and employees," committee cathaoirleach Maurice Quinlivan said when launching the report.
The proposed bill is one element of the Government’s broader remote-working strategy. The increase in home working since March 2020 as a result of Covid-19 has brought remote working to the forefront of working life in Ireland and globally.
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