site.btaAt Least 20% of Jobs in Bulgaria Could Be Organised for Post-pandemic Home Office Work - Expert

Sofia, May 19 (BTA) - Home office work should not be perceived
only as an anti-crisis and anti-epidemic measure: at least 20
per cent of the jobs in Bulgaria could be organized remotely
even after the pandemic, Ivan Neykov, Chairman of the Balkan
Institute for Labour and Social Policy and former labour
minister, commented for BTA.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the advantages of remote work: it
 is exceedingly lucrative economically to enterprises, for it
saves costs to both employers who do not have to open
on-the-spot jobs at the enterprise, and to those who have
already opened jobs but for the home office period do not have
to maintain the equipment and do not have expenses for such
things like electricity, for example, the expert thinks.

Employers' attitudes that workers have to be in situ in order to
 be controlled have changed, too, the expert argued.

According to the latest Eurostat data, Bulgaria ranks last in
the Union by share of home office workers. With its mere 1.2 per
 cent, this country is definitely at the bottom of EU ranking. A
 total of 12.3 per cent of Europeans aged 15-64 worked from home
 in 2020.

According to Neykov, Bulgaria's statistics would be different if
 they included 2021, for remote work began to be introduced in
Bulgaria on a larger scale only in the second half of 2020. This
 has existed in Bulgarian legislation for 11 years, but the
pandemic speeded up the process and changed the attitudes of
both businesses and workers, the expert thinks.

Neykov forecast that in the future companies will operate on two
 regimes: some of the jobs will be for remote work and others -
traditional. Remote work cannot be introduced 100 per cent for
all jobs in an enterprise, nor will 100 per cent traditional
in-office employment for all workers remain, he said.

The former labour minister thinks revisions to labour
legislation should be the subject of intense discussion, as it
was written 40 years ago and is not adequate to the present
labour market.

Official data of the Bulgarian Small and Medium Enterprises
Promotion Agency show that currently over 93 per cent of all
operating enterprises are micro-enterprises with less than 10
employees. "One should be extremely naive to think one such
enterprise would be capable of complying with this enormous
labour legislation consisting of nearly ten laws, dozens of
secondary legislative acts and hundreds of health and safety at
work regulations," Neykov pointed out.

He argued that Bulgaria has to split labour legislation into
such for microenterprises and such for medium and large
enterprises. "Otherwise these thousands of Bulgarian
entrepreneurs in the microenterprises will successfully be
turned into habitual offenders of labour legislation, because
they are incapable of complying with it," Neykov added./NV/BR