With more people working from home during the pandemic, the boundaries between job and life are blurred. Lawmakers in the EU want to give workers the "right to disconnect," whereas Germany is looking at tax breaks.
The coronavirus pandemic has not only upended social life across Europe but dramatically changed the way people work. With ever more people working from home — roughly a third of all employees within the bloc according to the Associated Press (AP) — and needing to be constantly reachable, the boundaries between work and private life have become increasingly hazy.
On Wednesday, EU lawmakers passed a non-binding resolution arguing that individuals have a fundamental "right to disconnect." The European Parliament Employment Committee voted 31-to-6, with 18 abstentions, in favor of allowing people to take time off and urged the European Commission to create rules that "catch up with the new reality" of work, according to Alex Agius Saliba, the Maltese Socialist politician who spearheaded the resolution.
"After months of teleworking, many workers are now suffering from negative side effects such as isolation, fatigue, depression, burnout, muscular or eye illnesses," said Saliba, adding: "The pressure to always be reachable, always available, is mounting, resulting in unpaid overtime and burnout."
The committee measure must now be approved by the full chamber before it can be submitted to the Commission and EU member state governments for a vote.
Lawmakers in favor of the resolution say the need for employees to be available via smartphone or e-mail around the clock is detrimental to mental health and well-being and that workers should be allowed to be offline without suffering employer retribution as a result.
The resolution comes just days after Germany's coalition government announced it is considering across-the-board tax breaks for individuals working from home. The new legislation, which is expected to be passed by Germany's Bundestag parliament, would allow workers to write off €5 ($6) per day to offset extra heating and electricity costs. The maximum amount that can be written off for the year will be capped at €600.
German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz of the coalition Social Democratic Party (SPD) called the proposal, "good for workers," and noted the measure would not present "a big fiscal challenge."
To date, workers in Germany can only write off work costs at home if they can prove they have one room in their household dedicated solely to work.
With the coronavirus forcing a mass exodus out of offices and into improvised work situations at kitchen and dining room tables, the tax proposal provides a "flexible answer" to a new reality, according to parliamentarian Sebastian Brehm, a tax advisor from the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Brehm says existing law, "no longer correlates to today's working world." Though approval of the scheme is expected, it remains to be determined whether this new tax break would come out of, or be on top of Germany's existing €1,000 employee tax deduction for transportation and other necessary work items.
Swollen wrists from repetitive motion and dry, red eyes characteristic of staring at a computer screen are some of the effects listed in the report. Fellowes
Hunched back. Dry, red eyes. Swollen wrists. Hairy noses and ears. Those are just a few of the effects office works of today may experience in the next two decades if current workspace conditions persist.
Meet Emma, a life-sized representation of what the average office worker may look like by 2040. Emma was designed by the UK-based Fellowes, a company that manufactures office supplies and workstation goods, who teamed up with a Behavioral Futurist and panel of experts in ergonomics, occupational health and wellbeing at work to compile a report detailing the future health effects from current working habits in the UK.
If current conditions are left unchecked, their research suggests that inadequately designed workstations exacerbating poor posture will lead to permanently bent backs from sitting hunched over a desk for long periods of time. Workers will also see varicose veins from poor blood flow due to sitting for long periods of time, red and dry eyes from staring at computer screens, swollen wrists from repetitive movement, hairy ears and nose from poor air quality, and irritated, sallow skin riddled with stress-related eczema.
“Unless we make radical changes to our working lives, such as moving more, addressing our posture at our desks, taking regular walking breaks, or considering improving our workstation setup, our offices are going to make us very sick,” said report author William Highman. “As a result, workers in the future could suffer health problems as bad as those we thought we’d left behind in the Industrial Revolution.”
The study authors note that workstation risk assessments are required across Europe but remain largely unaddressed. More than a quarter of requests reportedly go unresolved and one-fifth of workers say their bosses did not take their concerns seriously.
“Over time, sitting at a desk all day is going to have [a] profound effect on office workers’ health, both physically and psychologically,” said ergonomist Stephen Bowden, adding that employers should make “normal everyday movements” a routine part of the job by incorporating workstation additions like sit-stand desks.
The level of associated health problems current workers face has not been seen since the industrial revolution, said Fellowes in a press release. The average Brit will spend an average of six hours a day sitting at a desk, and 9 in 10 office workers report suffering ill health due to their work environment. Poor office environments cost the British economy an estimated £77 billion a year in sick days related to work as more than 90 percent of UK office workers say work-related aches and pains make their job more difficult.
