The Catalan government agreed on Monday to activate the teleworking decree to minimize mobility and reinforce all intercity bus lines during the day due to disruptions on the commuter rail network in Catalonia. The measures were agreed upon at a new government monitoring meeting, coinciding with Two new network outages this morning due to IT issues. But many workers, once again, have been unable to get to work or have arrived late. Who pays the price?

"Most people have a very good experience, but the main difficulties are stress and isolation". The doctor in business psychology and professor at the Eada business school Aline Masuda summarises the first year of formalised teleworking in Catalonia. A year ago, Eada led a study which sought to find out how working from home was being implemented; now, it aimed to study how the practice has evolved in the past year. And there have been changes: whereas then the main lesson was that working from home lengthened the working day, now the main problem has shifted to feelings of isolation from colleagues and a significant incidence of stress symptoms.

Procicat has approved this Friday a new resolution that will come into force on Monday and that recommends both public and private companies to adopt measures to progressively return to in-person work. Even so, it also urges them to promote teleworking whenever possible. The obligation to limit job mobility will therefore fall. The Health minister, Josep Maria Argimon, had already advanced this measure early in an interview to RAC1 and explained the intention of the Catalan government "to fix" teleworking. Thus, the Procicat has agreed to extend the bulk of the containment measures against covid-19 in its new resolution at least until 12 July, before the rise in the number of contagions in recent weeks, especially among young people.

In 2015 only a derisory 3.4% of employees in Catalonia worked occasionally or regularly from home. In 2019 the percentage already reached 8.6%, and most were concentrated in four autonomous communities and in this order: Catalonia, Madrid, Andalusia and Valencia. With the pandemic, the most optimistic forecasts were blown out of the water and 2020 closed with 17.2% of employees in Catalonia teleworking, which represents an increase of 119%. The Principality, however, was overtaken by the Community of Madrid, with growth of 200%, while Andalusia retained third place, according to data from a report by the Adecco research centre based on the Labour Force Survey (EPA) for the last quarter of 2020 and published on Thursday.