Teleworking threatens social dialogue

Are employees working remotely from their union representatives? Does distance lead to a weakening of social dialogue? Not until the health crisis: According to a survey published in 2017, telecommuters were neither more hostile nor more indifferent to unions than their on-premises counterparts across all sectors. Trade union life: participation in meetings, collective actions, voting in professional elections.

The crisis caused by the Covid-19 epidemic changed the situation. “Teleworking now takes place with fewer contacts with employee representatives”Political scientist Tristan Haut, a lecturer at the University of Lille, notes in a study conducted for the Social Sciences Foundation.

In 2021, all other things being equal (gender, age, degree level, socio-professional category, employment contract, company size, trade union membership), teleworkers are 1.3 times less likely than face-to-face employees to seek advice from a trade union representative in case of a problem.

New teleworkers

For Tristan Haut, this change is due to the profound transformations of remote work during the pandemic. Reserved, until the first lockout of 2020, for executives who are well integrated professionally in the companies that have employed them for a long time, it has spread, during the acceleration of the health crisis, to a large number of employees. However, these new teleworkers were younger and less integrated into work teams than their predecessors: they were therefore further removed from collective representation.

Because these newcomers to telecommuting could not rely on pre-crisis social relationships to connect with unions, they often found it difficult to ask for their staff representatives. “In the years to come, the spread of telecommuting experiences could lead, as during the health crisis, to an already growing distance between employees and unions, Tristan Haute concludes. The challenge for unions is therefore to reinvent ways of dealing with an increasingly dispersed workforce. »