With the pandemic in remission, the Italian world of work began to reorganize to shore up the telework rules. The first attempts, however, are being carried out with not a few controversial and difficulties. The reason is that the experience of teleworking does not seem to have convinced either the State or many companies that have asked their employees to return to work in person, while many workers refuse to do so.
In the case of Public employees, the refusal to all return to face-to-face work has opened a dispute that is now being resolved through a dialogue table which, in its latest draft, proposes that work can also be done from outside Italy. Still, the outcome has yet to be known. In a similar situation, there is also the private sector that, based on the existing law (2017), must sign specific contracts with those who telework. While some companies have already managed to carry out various agreements, others reject them. This was demonstrated this week by the case of the branch of an insurance company that asked all its 4,000 workers to return to face-to-face work, which ended in a strike.
The explanation for these conflicts may perhaps be found in that Italy has no tradition of teleworking. According to him observatorio Smart Working, the country had one of the lowest percentages of teleworkers in the EU in 2019 (4.8%). Then, in 2020, the data rose to 6.5 million and, by 2021, the forecast is that it will be around 5 million, out of 23 million active workers in the country. /IRENE SAVIO
Reference-www.elperiodico.com