Most of Canada to receive emergency alert test today
The federal government will test its capacity to issue emergency alerts today, with the exception of Ontario, where the test will take place on May 15.
Portugal's new law on working from home makes the European Union country sound like a workers' paradise.
Companies can't attempt to contact their staff outside working hours. They must help staff pay for their home gas, electric and internet bills. Bosses are forbidden from using digital software to track what their teleworkers are doing.
There's just one problem: the law might not work. Critics say the new rules are half-baked, short on detail and unfeasible. And they may even backfire by making companies reluctant to allow working from home at all.
"The law is badly written and doesn't meet anybody's needs," says Jose Pedro Anacoreta, an employment attorney at PLMJ, one of Portugal's main law firms. "It's no good for anyone. ... It doesn't make any sense."
In many places around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated a prior trend toward the digitalization of work and more flexible work arrangements.
Amid such a sudden and massive shift in the employment landscape, governments are scrambling to accommodate working from home in their employment laws. Those efforts are largely still in their infancy.
Many Europeans have stopped going into the office regularly since March last year to help curb the spread of COVID-19.
In Europe, unlike in the United States, worker protections are widely regarded as cherished entitlements. Laying off a staff member, for instance, can entail substantial severance pay.
Without a promised European Commission directive on how to legally frame the shift to more extensive working from home, governments' legislative responses have been patchy and piecemeal.
During the pandemic some countries have recommended teleworking. Others -- like Portugal -- have demanded it.
Most EU countries have specific legislation on teleworking, though with different approaches, and others are considering it through amendments, extensions or conventions.
As home working grew in recent years, workers' "right to disconnect" -- allowing staff to ignore work matters outside formal working hours -- was adopted before the pandemic in countries such as Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Belgium. It is now becoming the standard.
But Portugal is taking that concept a step further, by flipping the onus onto companies. "The employer has a duty to refrain from contacting the employee outside working hours, except in situations of force majeure," meaning an unanticipated or uncontrollable event, states the new law.
Also, parents or caregivers with children up to eight years old have the right to work from home if they choose, as long as the type of work they do is compatible with teleworking.
Fines for companies breaking the law go up to almost 10,000 euros (US$11,200) for each infringement.
The Portuguese rules are meant to address the downside of what has become known as WFH.
The technology that enables working from home has also opened the door to abuses, such as drawn-out workdays as staff remain reachable outside their normal eight-hour shift.
The consequences may include attrition between work and private life and a sense of isolation.
But the new law has met with skepticism from those it is intended to protect.
Andreia Sampaio, a 37-year-old who works in communications in Lisbon, the Portuguese capital, agrees with the law's purpose but thinks it is too general and will be "very hard" to enforce.
"We have to have common sense," she says, adding that she doesn't mind being contacted out of hours if it's an urgent matter. "We have to judge each case by its merits."
And she reckons authorities will mostly only act on employees' complaints -- "but people will fear losing their job if they do."
Prompted by the pandemic but designed to apply in the future irrespective of COVID-related measures, the law could come into force as soon as Dec. 1.
It is largely the brainchild of the center-left Socialist Party, which has governed Portugal since 2015. Ahead of an election for a new government on Jan. 30, it is keen to burnish its progressive credentials and hoist a banner about workers' rights.
Nevertheless, practical questions abound: must staff be taken off company email lists when their shift finishes and then put back on when they start work again?
What about Europeans who work in financial markets and need to know what's going on in, say, Hong Kong, and have colleagues working in different time zones?
What if an industrial machine that can't be stopped requires the attention of an engineer who's off? Who is it that can't "contact" the employee -- the department supervisor? The company CEO? What constitutes "contact" -- a phone call, a text message, an email?
"The devil is always in the details ... but also in the implementation," says Jon Messenger, a specialist on working conditions at the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency based in Geneva.
The Portuguese Business Confederation, the country's largest grouping of companies, wasn't involved in drawing up the new law and thinks it is full of holes.
Teleworking rules need to be flexible, tailored to each sector and negotiated between employers and staff, says Luis Henrique of the confederation's legal department.
"We're treating situations that are completely different as if they were all the same. That's not realistic," Henrique said. "(The law) can't be one-size-fits-all."
Policing and enforcing the new rules may also be challenging in what is one of the EU's economically poorest countries.
In Portugal, which is notorious for red tape and slow justice, as well as poorly resourced public services, how long will a complaint take to filter through the system and achieve a result?
Across Europe over the past decade the number of labor inspections has "collapsed," according to data analyzed by the Brussels-based European Trade Union Confederation, which represents 45 million members in 39 European countries.
The country with the biggest drop in the number of inspections since 2010? Portugal, with 55 per cent fewer checks up to 2018.
"Ambitious, progressive laws ... run up against the reality that ways of policing them aren't in place yet," said Henrique of Portugal's business confederation.
The federal government will test its capacity to issue emergency alerts today, with the exception of Ontario, where the test will take place on May 15.
An Ontario woman said it would have been impossible to buy a house without her mother – an anecdote that animates the fact that over 17 per cent of Canadian homeowners born in the ‘90s own their property with their parents, according to a new report.
Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, has made headlines with his recent arrival in the U.K., this time to celebrate all things Invictus. But upon the prince landing in the U.K., we have already had confirmation that King Charles III won't have time to see his youngest son during his brief visit.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
A long-simmering feud between hip-hop superstars Drake and Kendrick Lamar reached a boiling point in recent days as the pair traded increasingly personal insults on a succession of diss tracks. Here’s a quick overview of what’s behind the ongoing beef.
Canadian immigrants threatened by hostile regimes are urging parliamentarians to quickly pass the 'Countering Foreign Interference Act' so they can feel safe living in their adopted home.
An Ontario man found out that a line of credit he thought was insured actually isn't after his wife of 50 years died.
Spanish state prosecutors recommended Wednesday that an investigating judge shelve a probe into another alleged case of tax fraud by pop star Shakira.
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.