Remote employment, already on the rise, more than tripled during COVID lockdowns, eventually involving almost 18% of the workforce. Despite the lamentable reason for this shift, the forced large-scale experiment proved that remote work enabled better flexibility, work-life balance, and financial efficiency for both employers and employees.
Women constituted a majority of those moving to remote work. However, they also constituted a majority of the group eventually returning to the office, and data indicate this was often involuntary. A greater percentage of women than men prefer to work from home, and women achieve higher professional positions when they do.
Employers are more likely to allow an employee this freedom if they themselves have more legal freedom in their operations, but regulations sometimes prevent them from engaging in work arrangements both parties find beneficial. Reassessing regulatory barriers benefits women on both sides of a professional relationship.
These frustrating laws abound, but two notable examples involve vague work-from-home Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements and materials reimbursement.
ADA Compliance
Although the ADA aims to ensure employment opportunities for disabled persons, legislators amending it and courts interpreting it must consider possible unintended consequences when making their decisions.
For example, multiple lawsuits revolve around the infamously indistinct undue hardship and reasonable accommodations clauses, and they illustrate risks to employers offering remote positions. Employees bringing these suits were allowed to work from home due to the COVID pandemic, health problems, or other temporary issues, and they requested permission to continue when those problems were resolved. When employers claimed it would constitute an undue hardship for them, the courts found that the previous allowance of remote work proved it was a reasonable accommodation.
Regardless of their opinions on these particular cases, employers will hesitate to create work-from-home positions if they know doing so backs them permanently into a legal corner. Employers currently willing and eager to grant remote requests know that circumstances change, and they put themselves at the mercy of judges unfamiliar with the inner workings of their business once they do.
Mandatory Reimbursements
Different reimbursement structures make sense for different circumstances, and legislatively dictating them to unwilling employers and employees diminishes their ability to reach the ideal payment agreement. Small companies with narrow profit margins may struggle to pay minimum wage, and the insistence that no such business “has any right to continue” has denied innumerable would-be employees job opportunities that provide other advantages.
Remote work exacerbates this dilemma. For instance, federal law requires employers to compensate employees for necessary work equipment if their purchase would lower wages to below federal minimum wage rates. This is simple enough in the case of work uniforms. But implementing it for expensive electronic equipment and services, necessary for most remote work, causes avoidable complications and burdens.
Employees typically already have a computer, a cell phone, and internet and cell services, etc. But the reimbursement requirement still technically renders an employer legally responsible for providing them, and this law may well prevent them from offering remote positions. Again, a rule designed to protect employees instead prevents them from becoming employees at all.
Further Reform
The regulatory landscape for remote employment faces many challenges, and updating it for the digital age needs to occur as quickly as technological advances do. Counterproductive independent contractor rules, baffling interstate income and business tax laws, and legislative resistance to portable benefit expansion are holding back progress.
This failure is disproportionately affecting women, who have made their chosen employment situation clear. They should not accept purportedly helpful government interventions that impede their professional success.