Nicolas Schmit, the Commissioner for Jobs and Social Rights, launched, on Wednesday 25 October, together with Joaquín Pérez Rey, the Spanish Secretary of State for Employment and the Social Economy, and William Cockburn Salazar, the Executive Director of OSHA (the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work), OSHA’s new campaign, entitled “Safe and Healthy Work in the Digital Age”.
The campaign will focus on five priority areas: - digital platform work; - task automation; - remote work; - managing workers using artificial intelligence; - the use of intelligent digital systems.
“Digital technology is having a monumental impact on our jobs”, commented the Commissioner, pointing out that 93% of workers in large companies and 85% of workers in SMEs use digital devices.
The technology brings many benefits, but can also present “potential pitfalls, such as an increase in workload, the lack of a right to disconnect, missing out on socialising, challenges in terms of data and privacy, ethical considerations, and the fear that masses of jobs could be lost”, explained the Commissioner.
The Commissioner also took the opportunity to outline the aims of the directive currently being negotiated on digital platform workers, which will create a new set of rights on the use of automated systems to manage platform workers.
“We want to increase transparency so that people can understand how tasks are allocated, how prices are set and how they are evaluated. We also want to ensure that personal data that is not work-related cannot be collected. The aim is to guarantee human control of decisions”.
For his part, the director of OSHA insisted that the campaign was entirely appropriate. “We find ourselves at a time when artificial intelligence, big data algorithms, collaborative robots, a whole host of new technologies are altering the labour market, introducing new jobs, and revolutionising the way we work. We know that challenges include a possible increased risk of injury, working with more sophisticated automation, increase in workload, increase in work intensity, leading to stress, working in isolation, musculoskeletal disorders, amongst others”, he added.
Over the past four years, the Agency has compiled a series of data in preparation for this campaign, with a survey of workers on digitalisation showing that “one in three workers say they are already monitored using digital devices or that tasks, teams and jobs are automatically assigned to them digitally”, explained the Director.
And many of the risks “are in the psychosocial field, which could lead to burnout, depression and anxiety”.
The new campaign is expected to raise awareness.
Link to the campaign: https://aeur.eu/f/99c (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)