Protection of the occupational health and safety of teleworkers

As a rule, labour law protection, including protection of the employee occupational safety and health (OSH), extends to telework. While it is usually the employer's responsibility to ensure OSH, fulfilling this obligation can be complicated in the case of telework. The unconventional workplace, combined with the employees’ constitutional rights, can restrict the employer's possibilities to guarantee the protection of the OSH. Thus, the question of whether the employer OSH obligations should be reduced and the employee responsibilities for their own OSH increased arises. This article examines what the OSH obligations of the employer and employee should be in the case of telework. The article is based on an analysis of European Union (EU), Finnish, and Estonian regulations. While the EU regulation on OSH does not allow for any differential treatment of teleworkers in terms of their OSH protection, in practice, the employer cannot fulfil these duties in the same way as it can in traditional work. Hence, it is reasonable to allow some exceptions. Finnish and Estonian regulations enable the employer to refrain from fulfilling certain OSH obligations, increasing employee responsibility for OSH. In both countries, the employer remains primarily responsible for the protection of OSH, and only the duties that cannot be fulfilled because of the special features of telework are limited. These exceptions must be interpreted restrictively to avoid unnecessarily increasing the employee obligations. In addition, supplementary employee OSH duties must be dependent on and accompanied by significant obligations on the employer ' information and training concerning potential risks and their prevention. The revision of the current EU regulation on OSH also needs to be considered to guarantee that OSH duties are fulfilled as much as possible and to avoid the infringement of the regulation because of objective, practical constraints. Since the employee is more autonomous than usual when organising telework, compliance with OSH rules also requires a relationship of trust rather than control between the parties to the employment contract. If the employer suspects that the employee cannot ensure OSH, the employee must be employed on the employer's premises. However, when placing greater responsibility on the employee, care must also be taken to ensure employers do not force employees to telework.