When the price of oil soars Because of a war, governments look for ways to reduce their consumption. This is something that already happened with the oil crisis of ’73 and it is being repeated again with the war between Iran, Israel and the US.
One of the quickest is usually that people stop commuting to work. What is happening now leaves us with a certain déjà vu of 2020with the difference that the reason is no longer a virus, but an energy crisis and the objective is save energy.
Asia has already released the 2020 manual. Given its greatest dependence on Iranian crude oilthe first movements have arrived from Southeast Asia. Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim advertisement that officials linked to the Administration will implement teleworking to reduce fuel consumption.
The Philippines chose cut the work week to four days for executive officials, with the same objective. The measure has a preceding in 1990, when the country experienced a situation similar to the current one during the Gulf War. Sri Lanka and Pakistan also implemented the four-day week in their State departments, and countries such as Vietnam and Thailand They explicitly asked teleworking to reduce unnecessary travel.
The International Energy Agency recommends teleworking. The International Energy Agency published a decalogue of measures to reduce the impact of the power surge. Teleworking tops that list due to its direct effect on fuel consumption during daily trips.
The recommendation of the energy agency for reduce the volume of trips is not trivial, the report notes that “three additional days of teleworking, for those who allow it, could reduce automobile oil consumption by 2% to 6%, with average potential reductions of around 20% for individual drivers.”
Spain advances its mobility plans one year. On March 20, the Government approved the Royal Decree-Law that launches the ‘Comprehensive Response Plan to the Crisis in the Middle East’ with a mobilization of 5 billion euros. One of the measures that this plan also includes is to advance the entry into force of the work mobility plans provided for in the Sustainable Mobility Law that was already approved, going from 24 to 12 months.
This Mobility Law included the obligation for companies with work centers with 200 or more workers (or shifts of more than 100 workers) to create sustainable mobility plans that must include concrete measures to reduce travel through active mobility, collective transport and, this is the key, offer teleworking options in positions that allow it.
Teleworking is already in the law, although no one has imposed it. In 2020, teleworking was an emergency measure and without a prior regulatory basis to regulate it. Now, there is a Remote Work Law and is being integrated into sustainable mobility plans, with deadlines and sanctions. Companies are not obliged to offer teleworking in a generalized way to its employees, but to design a strategy to reduce travel, which in many cases involves remote work.
Not having teleworking does not carry a direct sanction. Not having a mobility planyes it does, which makes teleworking an increasingly less discretionary option for certain companies. If the energy crisis continues, the jump from recommendation to obligation now has much less distance than it did five years ago, because the legal basis is already in force.
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Image | Freepik, Unsplash (Jan Baborak)
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