No excuses for delays over remote working Bill

It was early on in what would prove to be the lengthiest period of heightened public health restrictions in January 2021 when the Government first unveiled its national remote working strategy.

Perhaps desperate for a win at a time of extremely low national morale, Minister for Enterprise Leo Varadkar said its purpose was to vouch-save some of the more positive changes many had made in the preceding months, “not so we can go back to the old normal but rather so we can have a new and better normal incorporating all that we have learned from living our lives and doing business in a very different way”.

At the very top of the Department of Enterprise’s list of “headline actions” to be undertaken throughout the course of 2021 was a promise to legislate to give employees a right to request remote working, a right that workers in many other European countries already enjoy in one form or another. It would be another year before the draft legislation would see the light of day in January 2022.

Now, more waiting seem inevitable with the Government’s Right to Request Remote Working Bill having been returned to sender this week. After scrutinising the draft legislation, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment has recommended a number of revisions, noting that much of the public commentary around it “has not been positive”.’

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‘Substantial revisions’

That is putting it mildly. As Prof John Geary and Dr David Mangan wrote in The Irish Times this week, the Bill does little to actually encourage remote working and rather stacks the deck in the employer’s favour.

It is has been plain to all and sundry that the Government is “not on the fence” and “certainly not in the employees’ corner”, they wrote, on issues like a worker’s right to appeal a refused request.

Throughout the pre-legislative process this year, trade unions, businesses and opposition politicians have lined up to poke holes in the draft Bill to the extent that officials in the Department of Enterprise told the committee in May that it was already considering “substantial revisions” before the process had even concluded.

“If we don’t act now to establish remote working as a key pillar of economic and social development in Ireland, we risk losing the momentum gained over the past two years,” said Tracy Keogh, co-founder of Go Remote this week. Patricia King, general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, meanwhile, urged the Government to make the Bill a legislative priority.

But with people continuing to file back into workplaces across the country and new, post-Covid rhythms being established, the question now is whether the moment has been lost. Perhaps that was the idea.