HAVING just published a new document, which circulates today among EPO staff, we thought we should take a moment to explain what António Campinos is really doing. I speak a lot from personal experience.

"All in all, the experience can be severely worsened by a pandemic, but the media and corporations (which own much of the media) like to paint home working as a gift and casually frame it as an act of generosity."Perhaps by sheer coincidence, I have a story to tell that's as recent as last night. I went to sleep at 4:50AM instead of 1:30AM, so I'm very tired today, to the point where I ended up taking a short nap on the chair a few hours ago. As explained in the video above, a colleague did not show up (for me to hand over to) and I could not reach the line manager or the CEO, who are in different time zones. With many phones turned off, it's even worse when there's no 9-to-5 window. On top of this, I needed to cope with obnoxious spam callers from the US, dealing with clerical work because there's nobody at the office (we closed it in July last year due to the pandemic). Those calls typically get redirected to lesser-technical or non-technical people who are no longer employed by us. All in all, the experience can be severely worsened by a pandemic, but the media and corporations (which own much of the media) like to paint home working as a gift and casually frame it as an act of generosity. It might, at least at first, seem that way; later on cuts can follow (sick leave, increments, access to meals/canteens, car/petrol allowances), so it's clearly just a passage of capital to the "management class", it's hardly about anyone being generous, except perhaps workers, who are still willing to work without prior benefits.

"ILO-AT will never be able to respond to such abuses in a timely fashion."Weeks ago we published other videos and more lengthy articles about what it means to work from home [1, 2, 3]. It's not a picnic and the management likes to exploit the changes to bypass workers' rights or labour regulations, filling up legal vacuums with abuses that are convenient to the managers (including imposing malicious technology on all staff). ILO-AT will never be able to respond to such abuses in a timely fashion. ⬆