Home office rules? Legislative amendment back on table
Work from home has boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many employees continue to use it. Yet, the Labour Code addresses work outside employer's workplace only marginally, and no amendment to the existing regulation has passed so far. This should change now: according to a recent statement by Minister of Labour and Social Affairs Marian Jurečka, the amendment is back in the game. And what is more: work-life balancing, to which working from home undoubtedly contributes, is now one of the priorities in the government's manifesto.
Currently, work outside an employer's workplace is only mentioned in Section 317 of the Labour Code, concerning employees who do not work at the employer's workplace and schedule their own working hours. However, employees whose working hours at home are scheduled by their employer are not covered by the Labour Code or by any other law for that matter. Employers thus have to think hard whether and what regulations to follow in such cases. Application issues and uncertainty concern, e.g., OSH or the compensation of costs incurred by employees working from home.
The latest legislative proposal to regulate work from home primarily aimed to replace existing Section 317 of the Labour Code with new wording, was prepared by KDU-ČSL MPs in February 2021, but its debate ended with the end of the parliamentary term. However, since one of its proposers was current minister Jurečka, it is to be expected that the new governmental bill will follow similar lines. Below, we therefore present a summary of the main points of that last bill.
The amendment provided for three possible bases for work from home:
- Employee and employer may conclude an agreement of any form.
- The employee may request to work from home. The employer is obliged to grant permission for at least half the working time, unless the nature of the work means that it cannot be performed outside the workplace.
- The employer may order work from home on serious operational grounds and for as long as necessary. This point has provoked the most controversies. We also perceive the proposed regulation as problematic, as it, e.g., does not consider situations where the employee’s performance of work from home is technically impossible.
- The amendment also set some new OSH rules and proposed to regulate the compensation for costs relating to work from home, allowing them to be set as a lump sum.
Notably, the amendment also reflected the requirement for a work-life balance: where employees do not schedule their working hours themselves, meaning that their working hours are scheduled by the employer, the employer cannot demand work to be performed from 8 p. m. to 6 a.m., on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays (unless the nature of the work necessitates scheduling work also during these times). This ‘right to be offline’ reflects current trends in the European Union.
In view of the increased use of work from home, the adoption of a more detailed regulation is, in our opinion, a step in the right direction. The question remains, of course, what the final wording of the bill proposed by the current labour minister will be, and whether it will pass through the legislative process.