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Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s office is set to be disrupted on Thursday, as employees go on strike against new limits on working from home.
Staff are up in arms over a new order capping the number of days they can work remotely at a maximum of 52 a year — half what has been allowed until now.
Striking employees are complaining of the difficulty of working in government offices, where they say they are distracted by overcrowding, poor maintenance and pest infestations — including pigeons and Asian hornets.
Some 3,500 long-term professional, administrative and clerical staff work for the Italian prime minister’s secretariat, which is dispersed across some 20 buildings in Rome, including historic palazzos dating back to the 16th century.
“The decision to significantly reduce remote work days and reaffirm the importance of being in the office directly affects staff working conditions,” the leftwing USB union said in a statement.
“It fails to account for the difficulties associated with daily commuting [and] limits the tools available for balancing work and personal life.”
In the controversial April directive, Carlo Deodato, Meloni’s administrative chief, said employees of the prime minister’s secretariat need to be in the office more because of “the complexity of the tasks” they carried out.
Governing Italy “requires a management model capable of balancing the need for flexibility and staff wellbeing with the necessity of ensuring a timely response to institutional priorities”, the directive, seen by the FT, said.
But unions complain that requiring staff to come into the office four days a week at fixed hours will lead to a deterioration in work-life balance and hit their finances, forcing them to spend more on commuting.
“In a vast city like Rome, with all the construction sites, traffic and tourists, it’s truly a livability problem,” said one person involved in the protest.
CGIL, Italy’s largest labour union, lamented the “inexplicable crackdown that undoes the positive results achieved over years of remote work”, denying that working from home affected efficiency or productivity.
The prime minister’s press office said the new remote working policy aimed to “overcome ideological divisions on remote working” and build a “modern efficient model” of public administration, striking a balance between “organisational needs” and employee wellbeing.
It said in a statement that “having more employees work on-site enhances the effectiveness, speed and quality of work”.
Employees with young children, pregnant women, and workers with disabilities would still be allowed greater flexibility, and that the impact of the new rules would be “continuously monitored” and revised as needed, it said.
Italy began experimenting with flexible, remote work both in government offices and private companies back in 2017, as the then centre-left government legalised such arrangements to ease pressure on working parents and others with caregiving responsibilities.
Initially, government offices were encouraged to enable at least 10 per cent of their workforce to take advantage of such policies within three years. The conditions were governed by strict individual agreements between employers and employees.
But Italy’s so-called “agile working” culture was embraced more widely when the Covid pandemic hit in 2020 and most professionals were forced to work remotely.
Today, many Italian government ministries and other state entities give their employees considerable leeway to work from home, with remote working allowances ranging from 8 to 12 days per month.
Businesses and governments across Europe and the US have been stepping up return-to-office policies in an effort to go back to pre-pandemic work habits.
Unions called for a one-day strike on Thursday after their appeals to discuss the directive with key members of Meloni’s inner circle failed to yield results.
