Committee proposes legislation to protect teleworkers

In September 1998, an official committee proposed some minor changes to Swedish legislation to protect teleworkers.

An official committee was appointed in 1997 to investigate the extent of different kinds of telework in Sweden, and to propose legislation to promote telework and give teleworkers adequate protection. The committee presented its report (SOU 1998:115) on 9 September 1998. It states that three items of labour law need to be modified:

• the Act on Working Time does not apply to work performed in the employee's own home, or otherwise applies only in such a way that the employer has no responsibility to supervise how working time is organised. This exception, which may even be inconsistent with the 1993 EU Directive on certain aspects of the organisation of working time, should be repealed;

• the Annual Leave Act may also, under the same circumstances as the working time legislation, exclude employees from the right to annual leave, allowing them only to claim special holiday pay. This provision should be repealed; and

• the Employment Security Act should be clarified, to the effect that the teleworker's home would normally not regarded as a separate production unit within the meaning of the Act. This is significant for the teleworker's protection, as the order of priority in the case of redundancies is determined within each production unit.

Apart from a small modification of the rules on taxation, the committee does not propose any other legislative measures. It concludes its investigation of collective agreements, joint recommendations and unilateral guidelines by stating that trade unions and employers seem to handle the issue of telework sensibly.

In a statement, the Swedish Employers' Confederation (Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen, SAF) criticised the proposals, claiming that the committee has ignored the fact that working life has changed. For SAF, the committee should have removed obstacles to the introduction of telework and done more to promote it. Instead, it is claimed that the committee: proposes that the Employment Security Act should become more restrictive; proposes hardly any measures that could facilitate and stimulate telework; and ignores the need for deregulation of, for example, the Work Environment Act.