The Virtual Workplace
Public Health, Efficiency, and Opportunity

Explores the emerging issues of virtual work and looks at how employers have turned to technology during the pandemic.

Joseph A. Seiner (Author)

9781108483711, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 June 2021

250 pages
15 x 23 x 1.5 cm, 0.49 kg

The recent pandemic has clarified the overwhelming connection between the workplace and technology. With thousands of employees suddenly forced to work at home, a large segment of the workforce quickly received crash courses in videoconferencing and other technologies, and society as a whole took a step back to redefine what employment actually means. The virtual workplace is the blending of brick-and-mortar physical places of business with the advanced technologies that now make it possible for workers to perform their duties outside of the office. Trying to regulate in this area requires the application of decades old employment laws to a context never even contemplated by the legislatures that wrote those rules. This book explores the emerging issues of virtual work—defining employment, litigating claims, aggregating cases, unionizing workers, and preventing harassment—and provides clarity to these areas, synthesizing the current case law, statutory rules, and academic literature to provide guidance to workers and companies operating in the technology sector.

1. Introduction
2. Who is an employee?
3. Pleading standards and the technology sector
4. Aggregating claims
5. Collective bargaining agreements and unions in the modern economy
6. Harassment and the virtual workplace
7. A few final thoughts.

Subject Areas: Public health & safety law [LNTJ], Employment & labour law [LNH], Labour economics [KCF], History of the Americas [HBJK]