Journalists working from home?
  • Journalists working from home?
  • Table of contents
  • Introduction
  • Part 1 - General principles of home office and telework
    • Labour rights issues with telework/home office
    • Specific challenges for journalists and home office
    • What general protection for teleworkers and home office?
    • “I feel like I live at work”: the right to disconnect
    • Compulsory or voluntary?
  • Part 2 – Main findings of the survey
    • Telework of journalists by country: a majority of journalists (still) work outside the newsroom
    • Telework at company and sector-level: a clear lack of collective agreement at company-level
    • No financial support for journalists working from home
  • Part 3 – Teleworkers’ protection and trade union organising: the future is hybrid!
    • Reaching out to members digitally: e-mails still the most common tool
    • Telework raises many questions from journalists to their union/association
    • An unclear future for journalists’ organisations
  • Conclusions and Recommendations
  • Annexes
    • Annex 1 – Copy of the questionnaire
    • Annex 2 – List of respondents by country
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Part 1 - General principles of home office and telework

PreviousIntroductionNextLabour rights issues with telework/home office

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First of all, it is important to mention the difference between telework, remote working and home office. In a recent study, the Employment Committee of the European Parliament refers to “telework and ICT-based mobile work (TICTM)”[1]. Home office is also called “WFH / working from home” by institutions like the International Labour Organisation[2]. For the purpose of this paper we can refer to the definitions used by the study of the Employment Committee of the European Parliament mentioned above:

  • Remote working: occurs when work is fully or partially carried out outside the normal place of work, not necessarily from home

  • Telework: generally restricted to employees and entails the use of information technology and digital devices

  • Home office/WFH: takes place fully or partly within the worker's own home, can be performed by both dependent and independent workers

Given the mobile nature of journalism, both telework and WFH aspects are taken into consideration here, with a priority to the home office as an organised and daily alternative to a fixed “newsroom office”.

Fig 1. – Home office, telework and remote work Source: “COVID-19: Guidance for labour statistics data collection”, Geneva, ILO, 2020,

[1] “The impact of teleworking and digital work on workers and society”, 2021 [2] “An employers' guide on working from home in response to the outbreak of COVID-19” Geneva, ILO, 2020:

https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---stat/documents/publication/wcms_747075.pdf
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2021/662904/IPOL_STU(2021)662904_EN.pdf
https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_dialogue/---act_emp/documents/publication/wcms_745024.pdf