British computer engineer Tim Berners-Lee In 1989, he promoted a protocol for the transfer of hypertexts between interconnected computers that would democratize communications.
A) Yes, the world Wide Web (content) and Internet (infrastructure) revolutionized access to information and communications. Since then, employers and workers have had new communication channels that have generated an incessant process of change at work.
Digital transition and world of work
Before the expansion of the digital transition, the organization of work maintained patterns that today seem antediluvian. Jobseekers physically went to the employment offices to find out, through their notice boards, the job offers.
In 1994, it was created EURES (EURopean Employment Services), the European cooperation network of employment services, aimed at facilitating the free movement of workers.
This prompted the implementation in Spain of the SISPE project (2003), in order to interconnect the information system of the public employment services to integrate and share information.
Until then, slow procedures were applied to share information that made it impossible to guarantee a true unity of the labor market, in which fax communication became the most widely used technology. Thus, habitually, job offers expired before being managed.
Other communication tools, such as the union representatives’ bulletin board, have been superseded by email or social media. In addition, new forms of teleworking and reordering of processes through digitization have been opening up in companies.
Beyond all this, it is unquestionable that the digital economy has promoted a process of creative destruction of the legal framework of labor relations in order to adapt them to digitization and thus have a socio-technological model in which the new forms of work meet the standards quality of employment achieved to date.
Digital divide and work
The present of the digitization of the labor market is conditioned by three fundamental aspects:
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Eliminate digital divides.
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Improve the skills of citizens.
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Preserve labor rights that could be injured by technology.
The Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) corresponding to the year 2022 allows us to know the digital progress of Spain according to four dimensions:
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The digital skills indicator of human capital.
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digital infrastructures.
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The integration of digital technology.
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digital public services.
Spain obtained in 2022 seventh place in the ranking of EU countries due to its leadership in connectivity (3rd place), to the improvement of public digital services (5th place, with 73% of internet users), to progress in terms of digital skills of its human capital ( tenth place) and progress in the integration of digital technology (eleventh place).
As a starting point, the Digital Compass 2030: Europe’s approach to meeting the objectives of the digital decadea project of the European Commission to face and overcome the different digital divides.
On the one hand, it is a matter of eliminating the gap between well-connected urban areas and more remote rural areas. On the other, to eliminate the existing gap between those who can fully benefit from an enriched, accessible, secure digital space with a wide range of services, and those who cannot. It affects the persistent gap between companies that can take advantage of the full potential of the digital environment and those that are not yet fully digitized. and alert about the digital poverty that affects various vulnerable groups and hinders opportunities for teleworking.
The digitization of workers
Retraining of workers is not an option. It is essential to adapt to the digital reality of business demands. Technologies like the big dataartificial intelligence or cloud computing represent part of the great weaknesses of human capital in Spanish companies.
This is how it follows from DESI index 2022. Facing this challenge is essential so that companies do not risk their competitiveness due to a lack of digital adaptation.
It is worth remembering here the budget commitment that Europe has made through the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism, and especially Spain through the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, which is structured in accordance with European guidelines to obtain financing to this effect.
In both cases, the need to promote alternatives for professional recycling or requalification in digital skills is contemplated, whether they are active workers or job seekers. Or initiatives to learn new skills to obtain better and greater opportunities for access to a job.
The challenge of digitization and the European commitment
According to data from the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism As of September 2022, in Spain there are 2,935,541 SMEs, which employ 64.22% of the active population (10,841,785 people) and 5,183 companies with 250 or more workers, which employ 35.78% of the population active (6,040,308 workers). The challenge will be to equip this human capital with digital skills to face the future.
The report Going Digital, The Challenges Facing European SMEs (2019) reveals that Spanish SMEs are more digitized than those of other countries, they consider digitization a priority and value it positively, even if it entails the disappearance of some jobs. It is the reason why they demand improvements in the digital skills of workers, as well as investment in technology.
On the other hand, in a Europe that has been digitally transformed, the EU has marked as targets to be achieved by 2030 that:
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At least 78% of the population between the ages of 20 and 64 have a job by that date.
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At least 60% of adults participate every year in training activities.
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That at least 80% of people between the ages of 16 and 74 have basic digital skills.
With the fulfillment of these objectives, the aim is to achieve the inclusion and integral participation in society and in the labor market of the citizens of Europe.
It will be necessary to have more and better digital professionals: developers of softwarecreators of digital content, analysts of big dataexperts in digital marketing, youtubers, influencers either streamers, among others. As proof of this, the Spanish Engineering Observatory has made progress in a sector report of the end of 2022 that, during the next ten years, there will be a demand for 200,000 engineers, professionals who would be assigned, for example, to environmental aspects, information security or preventive or corrective or design maintenance. This is an opportunity that Spanish citizens cannot and should not ignore.
Protection of the worker in the face of digital transformation
In Spain, new regulations have been approved aimed at protecting those rights of workers who could be injured by the digital transformation.
This protection goes from the moment of access to employment to the warning that the decision making based on the use of algorithms for automated data processing must not violate the fundamental rights of workers. And this because, sometimes, decision-making related to the selection and hiring of personnel, and working life or the termination of the employment relationship, is relegated to technology.
In this way, the machine or artificial intelligence makes decisions autonomously or semi-autonomously that affect employees. But an algorithm is still a set of operations programmed by human beings using mathematical codes. And that unique language may require the judgment of a human being to avoid discriminatory bias. Consequently, solving problems is not the same as choosing between solutions to a problem.
As a framework for the protection of the digital rights of workers, the Organic Law 3/2018of December 5, Protection of Personal Data and guarantee of digital rights, includes the so-called Digital Bill of Rightswhich recognizes rights in the digital age and the right to universal access to the Internet.
Said document also delves into aspects such as the right to security and digital education, and limits the exercise of the power of business direction and control in the use of digital devices in the workplace, compared to the use of video surveillance and sound recording devices in the workplace, or in the use of geolocation systems. all of it to preserve the right to privacy of the worker according to constitutional doctrine.
It also introduces in Spain the right to digital disconnection in the workplace and gives great prominence to the social partners to articulate digital rights through collective bargaining.
No one disputes that the classic model of industrial relations that inspired the Workers’ Statute will have an increasingly residual character. The philosophy of daily physical presence in the workplace during a more or less rigid working day, or of retirement rewards for those who end their working lives in the same company where they began their professional development has been surpassed by the economy. digitized. Great flexibility in the labor market will be necessary to facilitate mobility between different sectors.
This article was published originally in Telos magazine Telefonica Foundation.
Maria Concepcion Arruga SeguraProfessor of Labor Law and Social Security, University of La Rioja
This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.
