Trade unions and Telework

Report produced for the International Trade Secretariat FIET, Autumn 1996

A. Teleworking: definitions and context

* In Italy, Telecom staff at seven directory enquiry service offices have been given the opportunity to work from home, equipped by the company with a computer, modem, fax machine and telephone.

* In Germany, the pay-TV company Premiere has installed data lines to the homes of staff living close to its telephone call centre in Hamburg. These home-based staff can be called on as needed to answer calls at busy times.

* In Sweden, calls from people wanting taxis who dial Taxi Stockholm are handled by a small team of workers based on the island of Ingmarsö, far out in the Stockholm archipelago.

* In England in 1994, Digital Equipment closed down its regional office in Newmarket, replacing it with a very small 'telecentre' for secretarial staff only. The remaining 90+ staff have become 'flexible workers', working from home or whilst on the move.

* In the Philippines, data entry workers have been inputting text and compiling the catalogue for the new National Library in Paris.

* In Barbados, staff (almost all women) handle insurance claims from policy-holders with the Canadian insurance company ManuLife (previously Confederation Life)

* In Ireland, staff at a hotel reservation agency in Cork take calls in seven European languages from about sixteen countries. Callers dial toll-free numbers in their own countries and their calls are automatically routed to Ireland.

Defining teleworking

The problem in any report which includes 'teleworking' in its title is that is that the term is a slippery one, hard to pin down with a firm definition. Whilst this hasn't prevented a large number of research documents on the subject being produced in recent years, from international agencies, government bodies, academics, businesses and others, it has led to confusion especially when discussing the number of people currently engaged in teleworking and, more generally, the significance or otherwise of the issue.

Most attention has up to now been given to the phenomenon of relocated work from conventional offices to the home.

However, there is the beginnings of a consensus that telework needs a new, broader, definition. This report intends, for the sake of convenience, to use a definition recently drawn up for a study on teleworking undertaken for the European Commission:

"Telework is work performed by a person (employee, self-employed, homeworker) mainly or for an important part at (a) location(s) other than the traditional workplace for an employer or a client, involving the use of telecommunications and advanced information technologies as an essential and central feature of the work."

A more succinct way perhaps of putting this comes from the definition of teleworking used in a 1996 report of the Trades Union Congress (UK):

"Teleworking [is] defined as distance working facilitated by information and communication technologies".

Types of teleworking

An impression of the wide variety of ways in which distance working using information and communication technologies is already occurring can be gained from the examples on this and the last page.

In order to have meaningful discussion on the issues involved, it is clearly appropriate to have some way of distinguishing between different types of teleworking. One useful attempt at categorisation has been carried out by the researcher Ursula Huws in work for a recent European Commission report, Teleworking and Gender. She identifies five types of teleworking:

- Multi-locational teleworking: partly based in the home, partly on employer's premises. Typically involving skilled and trusted professional/executive staff. Many covered by collective agreements.

- Telehomeworking. Based entirely in the home. Typically involving low-skilled repetitive work, paid by results. Workforce almost exclusively female.

- Freelance Teleworking. Wholly based in the home, but carried out on a freelance basis for multiple employers/clients. Extension of traditional forms of freelance work (eg translation, writing, editing, design, computer programming)

- Mobile teleworking. Extension using new technology of traditional forms of mobile work (eg sales representatives, inspectors, maintenance engineers).

- Relocated back offices. Work carried out at a distance, on the premises of an employer, subcontractor or telecottage.

Ursula Huws makes a further distinction between the first four categories, which she describes as 'individualised forms of teleworking' and the last, which involves a collective workplace.

The present report will follow this broad categorisation and will consider the implications of the individualised, primarily home-based, types of teleworking separately from the issues associated with relocated back offices and call centres.

In terms of existing trade union responses to teleworking, most attention has up to now been given to the first of these five categories. The majority of the negotiated collective agreements on teleworking, for example, refer to this way of teleworking. Workers in this situation are also more likely to have proper employee status, together with the protection this implies.

Concerns about teleworking as a form of exploitation are most relevant when looking at the second category, that of telehomeworking. Workers here are less likely to be unionised, and (even if working for one employer) are more likely not to have been given employee status with proper employment rights. They are more likely, too, to suffer from the types of problem (such as low pay and poor conditions of work) associated with traditional forms of homeworking, issues reflected in the 1996 ILO Convention on homeworking. They provide a particularly acute recruitment challenge for unions.

Some trade unions have traditionally viewed the self-employed - in effect, individuals who are running their own small businesses - as outside the scope of union movement. Nevertheless, there is considerable experience in some trade unions (for example, those recruiting in the theatre, media and creative industries) of having self-employed members. Since teleworking is associated among other things with a growth in self-employed sub-contracting and consultation, this experience may be of relevance to other trade unions. The issue will be considered later in this report.

The collective forms of teleworking, as typified by the remote back-office or call centre, might appear to offer fewest difficulties for trade unions. However the new work patterns and methods of management associated with these sort of centres can in practice prove a challenge to union recruitment and organisation. Again, we will return to this issue in some detail below.

Teleworking in context

Teleworking is one part of an increasing trend towards more flexible forms of work.

As such, it offers a challenge to conventional concepts of how work is organised - the assumption, for example, that work naturally takes place in a 'normal' workplace during 'normal' working hours.

Teleworking puts this paradigm under scrutiny: it rewrites the idea of where work takes place, offering instead the possibility of work migrating from the large centralised establishments first created for workers in manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution and later re-created for white-collar staff in mass office complexes. Teleworkers at home or in a dispersed remote offices no longer experience this sort of collectivised work experience.

Teleworking also challenges the idea of the normal working week. Home-based teleworkers may well have more direct control over their working lives, choosing to work for example in the early mornings, during evenings or at weekends, in order to tailor their work lives more closely to their personal lives and family commitments. Teleworkers working in call centres also tend to work a wide variety of shifts, including many part-time or flexible shifts, often without premium payments for overtime or traditional anti-social hours.

Unions in their present form are primarily a creation of the industrial age, when large numbers of people worked together in close proximity to each other and when collective interests and the need for solidarity were easy to perceive. The power and influence of trade unions in the collective bargaining process is very much centred on the traditional work paradigm. Clearly, the development of telework and other forms of flexible working offers a challenge.

On the other hand, it should be acknowledged that the paradigm of the 'normal' workplace and working week does not have worldwide relevance, excluding as it does the work experience of many people in the world, especially those outside the countries of the developed world. It also tends to reflect a traditional male approach to jobs and excludes, even within the developed world, the experience which many women have had of work in which temporary jobs, part-time and casual employment and unpaid labour has always played a much more important role.

So telework, by challenging some of the old certainties of work, may have the advantage of focusing attention on how the basic trade union principles of mutual self-help and solidarity can be developed into a new century.

Teleworking and the Information Age

As already mentioned, teleworking is made possible by the digitisation of information.

An increasing number of jobs are, in the broadest sense, concerned with the manipulation of information. This is true not only of the service sector but also in manufacturing, where less and less of the value of goods and services comes from the material aspects of production.

"Over 50 per cent of the market value of a car is related to its 'information' content - through research, design, production and retail management. Even for a packet of pasta, most of its retail value is information related. In terms of their market value, most products can be substantially dematerialized."

[Sustainability in an information society: view from the European Commission; Robert Pestel and Peter Johnston, World Transport Policy & Practice 2/1,2]

The implications for the move from an industrial age to an information age are currently being widely debated. In the United States, this has been associated with the National Information Infrastructure initiative of President Clinton and Vice-President Gore. In the European context, the focus has been on the term 'Information Society', the theme of a series of high-level discussion paper. The Information Society was also the theme of the Group of 7 (G-7) ministerial conference held in 1995. A follow-up meeting to the G-7 conference held in South Africa in 1996 considered the implications of the Information Society for the needs of the developing world.

More popularly, the talk has been of developing 'information superhighways', of which the present Internet is an early (and compared with forthcoming technologies, very low-tech) precursor.

In much of the debate on the 'Information Society', the idea of teleworking has been given considerable importance, certainly more than the actual present-day examples of telework in operation would merit. Telework is seen as a model of the sort of work organisation which the Information Society would bring about. This context therefore perhaps gives the themes of this report a wider relevance than would otherwise be the case.

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