The scientific and technological development is a reality that affects all levels of life and society, and also of work. It can serve workers or, in the context of its appropriation by capital, be put to serve the objective of worsening exploitation and attacking workers' rights.

We know that today with the increasing automation of the production process, which combines, in particular artificial intelligence and computing, the organisation of work leads, in many situations, to physical separation in several of the components of production units, outside the same space and even from the same country, dissociated from the production unit which finalizes a given product.

And that computing and the digitalization process of many activities dematerialized the information basis for work and opened the possibility of a physical separation, presential, from the place from which this information operates.

The degree of computerization in the production processes, machines and equipment also makes it possible to maintain and even manage them at a distance.

The increasing capacity and speed of communication through electronic networks technically enables, even with physical separation of hundreds or thousands of kilometres, that the conditions of access are not very different from those who have access, through the same type of networks, a few dozens of meters away.

It is in this context that teleworking is referred to. However, in the teleworking concept, very different realities are mixed: remote work in company premises; remote work in a space common to several companies and work from the workers' residence, which is, after all, what is intended to be promoted and deified.

For the PCP it is not at issue to take advantage of new technologies for the development and improvement of working and living conditions, what is at stake, as seen many times, is the use always by the same ones, big capital, to create illusions and fragilize workers. This period of the epidemic favoured a wider use of forms of teleworking from home, which some intend to take advantage of for an uncritical generalization. They promote illusions about advantages for the workers while omitting the negative consequences, which this period clearly evidenced.

The individual consideration of teleworking as an acceptable solution, namely by saving time in commuting, better articulation of personal life, less direct confrontation with the intervention and imposition of superiors, distancing from less favourable work environments, is understandable.
But what is at stake is much more than that. What does big capital truly want? What do you need to be aware of? What do you need to avoid?

They want the worsening of exploitation with intensification of work, in terms of duration and pace, greater pressure to extend the working period, a permanent readiness, with the added difficulty of defining, controlling and inspecting working times.

With this, they aim to cut company costs by transferring the costs of facilities, water, electricity to the worker, as well as pressure to use the worker's own tools at the service of the company.

They intend to impose a qualitative leap in the intrusion in workers' lives. The imposition of the installation and operation of cameras, the use of these cameras by remote control, under the pretext of controlling working time, ensuring the non-visualization of the work or access to information by people unfamiliar to the employer. Except that this invocation to inspect the work environment at home really means the control of the family environment and the attempts at intrusion do not stop there. There are already demands for access to the workers’ residence by companies to check the exercise of work or control of functions and activity.

They want to open the way to end components of workers' remuneration, either immediately or in the long term, namely meal allowance, transportation and other family benefits.

Their purpose is to avoid responsibility for issues of safety and health at work and protection from occupational accidents, establishing a confusion between what is a private sphere or work in conditions of teleworking at home, to avoid the responsibilities that companies have to assume, in a context in which the development and aggravation of occupational diseases resulting from increased isolation and non-differentiation of the work and home environment is enhanced.

All this adds to the objective of physical separation and greater isolation of workers from each other, to their detriment, denying the possibility of sharing experiences and knowledge that favour their professional and personal development, promoting fragility, if not a rupture in the construction of bonds of socialisation and the affirmation of spaces of collective solidarity, with negative impacts on the information, unity, organisation and struggle of workers.

These are concerns that we have, that we share with you, about which we want to hear from you in this initiative, but at the same time we affirm PCP’s willingness to take the initiative and intervene.

We will contribute to clarify the illusions about the widespread use of teleworking at home as an alternative solution of work, we will combat the weakening of workers.

We fight to establish and guarantee the rights of workers covered by teleworking.

We defend a balanced development of the country, we fight the depopulation of the interior, we propose the use of all its resources and potential, in the rural world, in industry, in services. We defend territorial planning and management, in the setting of productive activities and housing as a necessary way to reduce travel, saving time and resources.

This is the meaning of the PCP's intervention in a broader sense and of its initiative in the Assembly of the Republic that we will intensify. Tabling proposals to defend workers in teleworking, in terms of wages and the guarantee of all salary components, scrupulous compliance of work schedules, the right to privacy and trade union rights.

Always with the workers and their rights.