TonHis week in the Portuguese Parliament attracted Headlines around the worldAnd even some attention Daily showAfter we banned the boss from contacting them Employees outside working hours. According to the new law, employers will face sanctions if they send text messages, phone calls or emails to employees during off-hours.
For us, this is an important measure to strengthen the boundaries needed to achieve a good work-life balance. There should be a line between the time when employers’ authority prevails and the time when workers’ autonomy prevails. There should be a line between the time when workers are a resource serving the paid person and the time when they should become the masters of a life that is not entirely about work. We have introduced these new labor laws to avoid blurring the line between the time we serve others and family time. The boundary between time as a commodity of economic value and precious time for enjoying life.
In the age of the Industrial Revolution, workers may just be workers. From the beginning, the requirement to shorten working hours was a core principle of the labor movement. It is this need to find a way out of the extreme fatigue caused by long hours of work and the poor health caused by overwork. This one reason alone is sufficient.But the requirement to shorten working hours is also to establish that workers should not be just labor, they should also be human In fact, Not just in Law.
The worrying thing is that the rise of remote work may bring us back to the period before unions won protection for their members, when working days were endlessly extended. Remote work must move forward, not backward. As more and more of us work remotely, it becomes more important to establish a clear boundary between work time and personal time.
The ongoing digital transformation necessitates legislation for remote work. The pandemic made it urgent. We conceived this new legislation before the pandemic began, but now it has become even more necessary: to deal with the adverse effects of the rapid expansion of telecommuting.The necessity of various digital software methods The monitoring of workers is also growing very fast. Remote work has great advantages, but like all new phenomena that are developing rapidly, it also brings new risks. The risk, first of all, is for the weakest part of the labor relationship: the workers.
Labor market supervision cannot ignore the inherent inequality between the parties: employers and employees. The working relationship is not an equal relationship that can be freely regulated by individual contracts. In passing these new labor laws, we kept in mind the words of the 19th-century French missionary and writer Henri Dominique Lacordaire: “Between the strong and the weak, between the rich and the poor, between the lord and the Between slaves, the freedom of oppression and the law of liberation.” Between the weak and the strong, the state must intervene to correct the balance.
In this unequal relationship between bosses and workers, it is not enough to establish that the latter has the “right to sever diplomatic relations”; turn off their cell phones, turn off their laptops, or ignore calls made during dinner with their families. Any abuse that conflicts with this right must be stopped through sanctions. This is why we prohibit employers from contacting workers outside of working hours and may be fined for violation of the regulations. In practice, the right to disconnect must be strengthened through this ban.
We can always weaken the new labor law by invoking the difficulties of enforcing the new labor law when employment is unstable and wages are low—but we shouldn’t. If it is difficult to apply the new laws to the labor market, then we must insist on reforming the labor market, rather than abandon its supervision.
The law we have just passed respects the legacy of the Portuguese Socialist Party in all previous struggles for workers’ rights. It is not actually a radical law, but a law that helps us take another step in the direction of development. Portugal As a more decent and equal society.
