Manila: A proposal protecting the rights and privilege of “telecommuting” workers has been approved at the Senate while a similar measure is being discussed at the House of Representatives.
The Senate, this Monday, approved on third and final reading Senate Bill No. 1363 or the Telecommuting Act of 2017 a measure, while protecting the rights and privilege of home-based workers, also encourages companies to adopt a “work from home programme” for certain employees, whose nature of employment allows them not to be confined at the office.
Senator Joel Villanueva, chair of the Senate Committee on Labour, Employment and Human Resources Development and co-sponsor of the measure, said the bill also aims to protect the rights of the home-based workers by ensuring that they had equal pay, leave benefits and promotion as their counterparts in the office.
Telecommuting is generally defined as a work arrangement where employees do not commute or travel to their workplaces. Telecommuting workers use modern communications technology such as computers, tablets and smartphones to render work.
Aside from making the job less stressful for workers, widespread adoption of the programme would contribute to easing vehicular traffic urban areas of the country.
The state of road traffic in the Philippines, especially in Metro Manila is notorious.
Representative Monsour Del Rosario, who filed a parallel bill in the House of Representatives on telecommuting, said the daily cost of commuting to work in urban areas of the Philippines exact a heavy toll on the quality of life for Filipinos.
He cited studies conducted by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) which said that aside from thousands of man-hours lost to traffic, the clogged roadways also contribute to increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
For his part, Villanueva said that according to the Employers Confederation of the Philippines, there is growing acceptance to telecommuting.
“In 2016, the Department of Labour and Employment also reported that there were 261 companies with employees who were under voluntary flexible arrangements,” he said.
A US study said that those who worked remotely were just as productive as those who worked in an office.
According to Villanueva, the proposed law would not be mandatory and instead give the employers the discretion on whether to offer telecommuting to their workers or not.
“Employers must ensure that measures are taken to prevent the telecommuting employees from being isolated from the rest of the working community in the company,” he said.
“The employers should also be responsible for taking the appropriate measures with regard to software to ensure the protection of data used and processed by the telecommuting employee for professional purposes,” he added.
