Teleworking, illustration.

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Stephane ALLAMAN / SIPA

Anything new in the office soon?

Employer and union organizations will start negotiations on Tuesday to further regulate teleworking, to which the French are again forced to resort massively, after Emmanuel Macron called for it to be generalized to contain the epidemic.

This meeting had been fixed on September 22, well before the speech of the President of the Republic of October 28.

It had been torn from the forceps from the employers by the unions, who demand a negotiation for a national inter-professional agreement (ANI) on telework since the spring, when five million employees found themselves working overnight at their home.

The rather cautious employers

The Minister of Labor, Elisabeth Borne, urged the social partners to "move quickly on this agreement" which "may give benchmarks to all companies on telework".

For a long time, the Medef refused any negotiation, considering the "corpus of perfectly applicable legal rules and standards".

And unlike the unions, the employers want the future agreement, if there is one, to be “neither normative”, “nor prescriptive”, that is to say not binding.

Hubert Mongon, the Medef negotiator, explained this position by “the diversity of situations: 5 million employees, 5 million different situations”.

The other employers' organizations are on the same line.

A guide or framework agreement

Negotiations should result in "a guide to good practices, so that each employer can take up teleworking with leeway as close as possible to his situation," suggests Michel Picon (Union des entreprises de proximity, U2P).

Eric Chevée, from CPME, is open to “a guide or a framework agreement”.

Above all, the CPME wants the negotiations to focus on teleworking "in emergency" (health, environmental, industrial accident), "so that companies are not caught off guard like today".

On the other hand, he “does not have the same appetite” for reviewing the rules governing telework in “normal” situations.

Labor unions want a deal

"We are going to negotiations to have a prescriptive and normative agreement", answers Jean-François Foucard (CFE-CGC).

“I don't see why we have to separate teleworking in a crisis situation and traditional teleworking.

We will not sign just any agreement, ”warns Eric Courpotin (CFTC), who considers“ a prescriptive and normative agreement inevitable in the current context ”.

"The CFDT asks (...) that we leave each other when we have completed this negotiation," Laurent Berger (CFDT) insisted on Friday.

"We are not going to take a month and a half or two months in this period of massive teleworking to come to an agreement," he warns.

Right to disconnect, costs related to teleworking ...

Discussions are therefore likely to be tense on Tuesday, where negotiators will meet from 9 a.m. by videoconference, Covid-19 requires.

Among the topics on the table, the unions want to address the workload, the right to disconnect, the coverage of costs related to teleworking, people with disabilities or gender equality.

On the management side, expectations relate to volunteering, the reversibility of teleworking, the anticipation of its implementation, the diversity of workplaces (coworking, third places), the training of managers and managerial practices, the integration of new collaborators.

Consensus on psychosocial risks

A consensus has emerged around one point: the psychosocial risks associated with discontinuous teleworking, as it again promises to be.

“Not everyone is equal when it comes to teleworking.

Some suffer from great loneliness, ”underlines Michel Picon of U2P.

“After the first confinement, employees left completely damaged and weakened.

Not sure they are holding up this time, ”adds François Foucard of the CFE-CGC.

The second meeting is scheduled for November 23, and more may follow.

Currently, the legal framework on teleworking is based in part on the ANI of 2005, which in particular gives it a definition and lays down the principle of volunteering.

It was partially transposed into the simplification law of 2012. The ordinances reforming the Labor Code of 2017 simplify the use of teleworking, but “also go back on certain achievements” of 2005, such as the assumption of costs, according to the unions. .

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