Julian De Diego
Lawyer. Employment advisor of companies and chambers of business. Academic Counselor for Libertad y Progreso.
CRONISTA – The Teleworking Law 27,555 and its regulatory decree 27/2021 will govern from the 1st. April 2021 according to the Resolution of the Work Minister 54/202, so that the transition towards full implementation of the new legislation is already beginning.
At this time, the labor legislation in general and ILO Convention 177 on home work are still in force, which is based on the home office emerging from the isolation of the ASPO with the declaration of social, health and economic emergency ordered by the Executive Power.
The isolation was transformed into DISPO or distancing in mid-December 2020, and now, a process that must be directed towards the organization that each company will have according to the demands of competitiveness, technology, the situation of the internal and external market is imperative. , and above all, of the projections of the activity for 2021 and 2022.
Now there is a need to build the new model based on which organizations will operate for now during DISPO, and without the pandemic having yet been controlled or widespread vaccination reaching the country.
Only taking into account the new Law 27,555 and Decree 27/2021 are the following obligations imposed, namely:
- It will be necessary to establish how human work will be distributed between face-to-face (within the employer’s establishment) and remote work in any of its modalities, or if it will be full time or part time, or there will be a series of combinations of the same ;
- The organization must consider the current status quo, which remains until the 1st. April and the system that will be adopted with the full application of the Telework Law from that date;
- Each teleworker, partial or total, under a fixed system or a flexible one, or through an ultraflexibility regime in person and remotely, must sign a special contract in writing in accordance with the provisions of the law, the regulatory decree, and the new art. 102 bis of the Labor Contract Law that typifies the bond as a contractual modality;
- Teleworkers are excluded as those when the labor provision is carried out in the establishments, dependencies or branches of the clients to whom the employer provides services on a continuous or regular basis, or in cases in which the work is carried out sporadically and occasionally at the home of the person who works, either at his request or due to some exceptional circumstance;
- It will be necessary to comply with all legal precautions, such as voluntariness (express agreement of the worker and in writing), working hours and the right to disconnect, the organization of the time necessary for the worker to attend to care tasks for family minors or the disabled under their care, new “layout” of the company’s offices or services in order to establish limits to reversibility; determination of the telematic tools (software and hardware) and accessories provided, and the expenses and reimbursements that the employer will assume; and hygiene standards, preventive medicine and safety at work;
- Implementation of employer control systems that respect the right to privacy, intimacy and the inviolability of the home, and the written prohibition signed by the worker that the telematic equipment provided by the employer may not be used in activities beyond his / her responsibility. task and functions, and that the use of tools provided by the employer for private mail, social networks and text messages and any other way that is created regarding private use or family use is prohibited.
- We must not underestimate the construction of the new organization of organizations in light of the high impact generated by teleworking, the home office, and the optimization of the means that continue to operate as a means against the Covid 19 pandemic, which is still far from have been controlled.
Organizations that already had previous experience several months ago that are working with the design of the new model imposed by the circumstances. Those who do not have it, have greatly delayed the analysis of the changes, and surely, will produce significant friction by not having a transition process, having to assume the 1st. April a series of substantive reforms with greater vulnerability.
We have dramatically started a new era in the world of human work at a universal level, where telematic tools (communication + informatics) de-paperization, de-bureaucratization, decentralization and relocation will be the daily rules.
The Labor Contract Law will be a precedent, it will be a precedent, it will inform general rules and principles and technical legal means, but the center of the future of work will be exponential technologies, teleworking, the irruption of artificial intelligence, and a world that every moment we will incorporate innovation and new challenges.
Finally, legal obligations are now a challenge for human resources and labor relations, which must materialize a new work organization under the imprint of new technologies and remote work.