HAVANA, Cuba.- Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the Cuban labor authorities have promoted the practice of distance work and teleworking, the latter as a form of it through the use of computer techniques.
If at first the fundamental objective of both work modalities was to keep the staff working at home to protect them from the dangerous disease, these days it is intended to mitigate the serious economic crisis that affects the country.
It has transpired that the Ministry of Labor and Social Security called for the adoption of measures in the state sector of the economy that contribute to reducing electricity consumption, among which is the reduction of the number of workers in the workplace to the essential minimum. However, despite the government’s insistence, neither remote work nor telecommuting are advancing with the speed desired by the government leadership.
In a comment on his Twitter account, and collected in the newspaper Granmathe Minister of Labor and Social Security, Marta Elena Feitó Cabrera, after acknowledging that both types of employment are still a pending issue, “called on administrations and unions to promote this form of work organization, where win-win would be the result”.
After these statements, the minister appeared at a Round Table on Cuban television, where she returned to this issue, and argued that in addition to saving electricity that was produced in the work centers, the non-attendance of workers to the entities It would greatly alleviate the serious public transport situation currently facing the island. During that television space, the official reported that currently only 2% of Cuban state workers are covered by some form of remote work.
Everything indicates that it is the middle managers (directors of entities, heads of departments and others) who are hindering the implementation of remote work and teleworking. Because of the way in which the state economy is designed -in the midst of the misleading concept of social property over the means of production-, being a boss, in addition to the control of certain resources, implies receiving certain benefits, among them the assignment of an entity car, and the more subordinates you have, the more important the boss has. So the bosses prefer that their subordinates are physically in the entities, so that everyone sees that they are real bosses.
This is a phenomenon that would have also had an impact on the inflated templates that we see today in companies and budgeted units throughout the country. Every time a boss knew that he had a vacant position, he ran to fill it. It does not matter whether or not that new worker had true work content. The important thing was to have more subordinates.
The minister, in her statements appearing in the newspaper Granma, also sought the participation of unions in order to promote remote work and teleworking. And here is a kind of contradiction that could arise.
Economic rationality advises the implementation of some of the modalities of remote work, with the consequent saving of energy resources, transportation and others. However, the official unions need the physical presence of the workers to mobilize them and transmit the ideological directives of the machinery of power.
We do not doubt that this will be, in the end, the most immense hurdle that remote work and telework face between us.
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