Paris (AFP)

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

In October, before the President of the Republic's request to generalize it, 1.8 million employees were still teleworking, according to the statistics service of the Ministry of Labor (Dares).

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, Medef's 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.

The negotiation must lead to "a guide to good practices, so that each employer can take hold of teleworking with room for maneuver as close as possible to his situation", suggests Michel Picon (U2P).

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

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

- "Weakened" employees -

On the other hand, he “does not have the same appetite” to review the rules governing teleworking in a “normal” situation.

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

"I do not see why it is necessary to dissociate teleworking in crisis situation and traditional teleworking. We will not sign any agreement", warns Eric Courpotin (CFTC), who considers "inevitable a prescriptive and normative agreement in the current context" .

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

"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.

Discussions are therefore likely to be tense on Tuesday, where the negotiators will meet from 9:00 am 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.

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 people suffer from great loneliness," said Mr. Picon.

"After the first confinement, employees came out completely damaged and weakened. Not sure that they are holding up this time," adds Mr. Foucard.

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 has been partially transposed into the simplification law of 2012. The ordinances reforming the Labor Code of 2017 simplify the use of telework, but "also revert to certain achievements" of 2005, such as the assumption of costs, according to the unions .

© 2020 AFP