Debate: The right to disconnect
Date: WEDNESDAY, 20 JANUARY 2021
Speaker: Alex Agius Saliba
Country: Malta
Language: EN

Digital tools make it particularly difficult to switch off in our free time. We all know the feeling of always being under constant pressure to check: to check for work-related emails, work-related messages, worried that our immediate attention is required. We all have been in situations where we receive work-related calls, emails, and we feel obligated to reply. More than ever, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the increase of telework and working from home, we have been victims: victims of our phones, of our emails, of our computers. The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the way we work, and we must therefore update our rules. During lockdown, one in three workers started working from home. This has saved countless lives, but many workers suffer and are suffering from harmful side-effects, such as isolation, fatigue, depression, burnout, muscular or eye illnesses. People who regularly work from home are twice as likely to work more than the maximum 48 hours. The boundaries between work and private life have become blurred. The human cost is high, from unpaid overtime to exhaustion, to burnout. It is fundamental that we protect workers from the invasion of their rest time and to ensure that their right to rest and leisure and a maximum limit of the workday are safeguarded. And for this, we need the right to disconnect to become a fundamental right, a fundamental right to each and every worker throughout our Union. Therefore colleagues, I strongly urge you to support this own-initiative report. We are calling on the Commission to propose a European directive on the right to disconnect. The report is putting forward a fully-fledged, developed legislative proposal with the minimum requirements for using digital tools for professional purposes outside our working time. It provides for the right to disconnect for all workers in the EU, and it ensures that digital tools are used as an asset benefiting employers and workers while their adverse effects are mitigated. It provides workers with the right to disconnect, switch off and refrain from engaging in work-related tasks, activities or communication outside the working time. The report is also introducing safeguards to workers against any victimisation or negative repercussion if they use this right. Employers should enforce this right and not require workers to be directly or indirectly available or reachable outside their working time and provide them with sufficient information and methods to support the right to disconnect. The report also recognises the social partners’ pivotal role and tailors its implementation to the specific needs, depending on the different national and regional levels, sectors, and industries. Those are the main elements of the report, providing the right balance. The right balance equally positive for both workers and also employers, and I am counting on your support to show solidarity with European workers, especially during these difficult times of the pandemic. Please let us stay focused on the right to disconnect. The report will help millions of workers in these challenging situations. Nothing in it or in the amendment tabled by me intends to undermine the social partners, neither limit the Commission’s legislative power to propose legislation on the right to disconnect in early course. The report or the amendment in no way can change the Treaties or limit the Commission’s legislative power or veto the European legislation. Social partners in Europe are fully autonomous in what they negotiate. For me it is clear that we, as European Parliament, cannot interfere in this process, and the amendment should not be interpreted as making any legislative proposal contingent on the framework agreement, which, as stated in paragraph 13, addresses some arrangements for connecting and disconnecting and no other aspects of the right to disconnect. I call therefore on the Commission, on the Commissioner for Jobs and Social Rights, Schmit, if the European report is adopted, to act immediately, through consultation with social partners, and put forward a proposal for legislation on the right to disconnect, because only through European legislation we can ensure the real impact on the very-much needed workers’ rights in the digital world. Colleagues, we have a fundamental choice to make tomorrow. We either provide workers with the right to disconnect or turn our backs on them. My choice is clear. I hope you can all support the right to disconnect for all European workers.