Indeed, after the pandemic, teleworking was quickly diluted, and there are some experts who attribute this to the rigidity of the Remote Work Law, which the Government agreed with employers and unions at the end of 2020, and which made it a rigid and costly option.
The unions attribute this to the fact that the legislated measures have not been correctly transferred to collective bargaining, with a very small percentage of sectoral and company agreements that have correctly established the rules for applying teleworking.
On the other hand, the Collective Bargaining Agreement attempts to remedy this deficit with an entire chapter dedicated to teleworking, in which it advocates for the agreements to negotiate key issues such as the minimum in-person working day, the right to digital disconnection, the company's payment of expenses associated with teleworking, or the delivery of work equipment. All these points have caused a high level of conflict and have led many companies to avoid this remote work formula.
This agreement does raise the clear need to adopt flexible formulas for organizing working time, and for this reason it is proposed that the working day be set in the agreements in terms of “annual calculation”, instead of being restricted to weekly or daily limits.
In this way, the doors could be opened to the implementation of the “irregular distribution” of working time, with the corresponding compensation mechanisms, so that it would be compatible with the “rationalization of schedules” to facilitate reconciliation, which would also need to be extended to entry and exit times.