Labour & Law Issues (Dec 2019)
The right to disconnect. Protection profiles
Abstract
Technological evolution is able to generate irreversible changes in work organization and in the reference paradigms of work performance. On one hand technology has the characteristic of “freeing up time”, on the other hand it may have the opposite effect, causing the phenomenon that has been called “Time porosity”, a metaphorical expression aimed at describing how the "life time" lends itself to being invaded by "work time", due to a society that is vertiginously changing, and in which one can be connected everywhere and everytime. Thus, not only does space becomes more indefinite and nuanced, but also people’s lives become a continuous contamination between what one is and the work one does. This state of interference has led to the emerging of a new collective interest, the one to disconnection, introduced in our system with art. 19 of the l. n. 81/2017, referring therefore only to smart workers. The Legislator, however, does not specifically define the right, this new area of protection, nor does it provide it with a concrete preceptive content, as is the case of France and Spain; instead it is limited to a mere affirmation, which requires an anchorage to other rights to give it effectiveness. The article highlights this aspect also by retracing the experimentation both at corporate and public level, in an analysis in which possible best practices are highlighted. A framework seems to emerge in which disconnection is configured as “symptomatic” case of how technological innovations require an intervention of the collective bargaining beyond the mere adjustment of a case, and how those can contribute to the legal recognition of effective right to disconnection.
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