MADRID — Garbiñe Ochoa gets to shut down her computer at night.
It’s a simple thing, and yet it remains aspirational for many people around the world who have been working from home through the coronavirus pandemic — and saw the last semblance of a division between work and life disappear along with the daily commute.
“I’m trying to have a similar rhythm to what I have in the office,” said Ochoa, 39, an administrator at an art business in Madrid.
The “right to disconnect” predated the pandemic in much of Europe. The concept, first legislated in France in 2017, limits how much employees can be made to answer phone calls and emails outside working hours. But the massive shift to remote work this year — and the recognition that office life may never resume as it was — has Spain, Greece, Ireland and other European countries discussing how they can preserve worker protections when people are working from home.
Worker advocates say the always-on nature of remote work has turned pre-pandemic conversations with employers on their heads.
“Before covid, all of the emphasis of the discussion was to persuade employers that work was capable of being done from home,” said Ireland’s Esther Lynch, deputy general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, an organization that represents labor union interests in Brussels. “Now with covid, we are beginning to see a growing concern among workers that they won’t be able to go back to the workplace, but that the new normal will be that the employer will like the idea of working from home, mostly as a way of saving money.”